In honor of the semiquincentennial anniversary of our great nation, we decided to break from our regularly scheduled programming. Since its founding (and, indeed, since well before our formal founding), ingenuity and innovativeness have been pillars of the American character. To highlight the history of this part of the American character, we present 25 Fun Facts About American Innovation.
1) The U.S. Navy had ice cream ships! During World War II, the U.S. Navy commissioned dedicated refrigerated barges, dubbed "ice cream barges" by sailors, capable of producing up to 10 gallons of ice cream every seven minutes. The Navy viewed ice cream not as a luxury but as a strategic tool for troop morale, investing $1 million in one such barge alone. Ice cream was in such high demand onboard Navy ships in the South Pacific that when smaller vessels rescued downed Navy pilots, they would often barter with the pilot’s aircraft carrier. As Lt. Cmdr. Norman P. Stark later recalled: “After disembarking from the canvas bag [used for water rescues], I was greeted like a long lost brother. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that they weren’t seeing me, but what I was worth to them—10 gallons of ice cream.”
2) In the 1960s, the CIA surgically implanted a microphone, antenna, and battery into a live cat to eavesdrop on Soviet officials as part of a program called Acoustic Kitty. The first spy cat was deployed to listen in on two men outside the Soviet embassy in D.C. but was soon hit by a taxi and died. The program was quietly discontinued shortly thereafter.
3) The Toledo War between Michigan and Ohio was caused in-part by poorly-functioning mapping technology that placed the southern tip of Lake Michigan much further north than it actually was, causing Congress to draw overlapping borders for Ohio and Michigan. After months of conflict, Congress finally stepped in to resolve the issue with a compromise that granted Michigan the mineral-rich Upper Peninsula and admittance to the Union as the 26th state. Ohio got Toledo.
4) In 1942, after the large hemp production facilities in the Philippines and East Indies fell to the Japanese, the U.S. Department of Agriculture produced Hemp for Victory. This 14-minute propaganda film urged Kentucky and Wisconsin farmers to swap their maize fields for hemp, a plant the federal government had made illegal just five years earlier and now needed large quantities of to produce rope for the Navy. After the war, Washington not only banned hemp cultivation again but denied the film’s existence entirely until cannabis activists tracked down two VHS copies in 1989 and donated them to the Library of Congress.
5) Abraham Lincoln is the only president to have held a patent. It was granted in 1849 for an inflatable device meant to lift boats over sandbars.
6) In exchange for allowing the Atlantic Telegraph Company to use a US Navy vessel to lay the cable, James Buchanan received the first trans-atlantic telegraph message from Queen Victoria in 1858. The message read, “Her Majesty desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of the great international work, in which the Queen has taken the deepest interest.” It took over 16 hours to transmit this message and, less than a month later, that cable was rendered useless as high-voltage current burned through the poorly designed insulation.
7) Henry Ford was a bit of a soy boy. Because he distrusted the extraction-based industrial economy of mining and drilling, Ford thought agriculture could supply what industry needed instead. To prove his point, he built a car body from soy-based plastic that he’d whack with an axe to demonstrate its strength, and wore a full suit made of soy fiber to public events. He served soybean banquets at the 1934 World’s Fair where every course, including the coffee, was soy.
8) After the Clintons launched whitehouse.gov in 1994, somebody bought whitehouse.com and turned it into a porn site. Congress had to intervene to get him to stop, resulting in the Truth in Domain Names Act.
9) America had a strategic helium reserve buried under the Texas panhandle which was started in the 1920s because the military was convinced helium-filled airships would win future wars. In a controversial move, the federal government sold off the helium reserve in 2024 because it had become a money-losing liability that no longer served a clear strategic purpose.
10) Contrary to what some Europeans may believe, soccer would not exist without the USA. American chemist Charles Goodyear patented the process for vulcanizing rubber in 1836, and he later applied the technology to create the first modern soccer ball in 1855.
11) Always experimenting with electricity, Ben Franklin once killed a turkey for Christmas dinner using two Leyden jars (early capacitors), accidentally shocked himself, and was left traumatized. As he wrote: “I have lately made an Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat. Two nights ago being about to kill a Turkey by the Shock from two large Glass Jarrs containing as much electrical fire as forty common Phials, I inadvertently took the whole thro' my own Arms and Body.”
12) Project Plowshare was an initiative launched by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s to use nuclear explosions for excavation and one idea was to build a new sea-level canal through Nicaragua that would be called the “Pan-Atomic Canal.” Decades later, Newt Gingrich invoked the initiative as a potential solution for conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
13) Thomas Jefferson invented a cylindrical wheel-based encryption device in the 1790s for secret diplomatic correspondence. It was forgotten and independently rediscovered a century later when the US Navy was designing the M-94 cipher device that saw use through WW2.
14) In 1994, a USAF lab at Wright-Patterson formally proposed a non-lethal chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers irresistibly attracted to one another, causing unit cohesion to break down (colloquially known as the “gay bomb”). The $7.5 million proposal was rejected.
15) ENIAC, the world’s first programmable, general-purpose computer which drew power from a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, was so large and powerful that it reportedly made the lights flicker in Philadelphia whenever it was turned on.
16) During WW2, the US strapped tiny incendiary devices to thousands of bats, planning to release them over Japanese cities where they’d roost in wooden eaves before igniting. The program was canceled after the bats accidentally torched a US auxiliary airbase in New Mexico.
17) Everyone knows that Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod and bifocals, but he also invented the flexible urinary catheter. He never patented any of these, believing they should be freely shared.
18) One of the earliest uses of the ARPANET was to coordinate a sale of marijuana and the trade of Grateful Dead set lists between Stanford and MIT students. This is commonly cited as one of the first instances of e-commerce.
19) Thomas Edison’s first patent was for an electric vote-recording machine in 1869. Legislators rejected it because it counted votes too quickly.
20) Clinton’s NetDay Initiative, which sought to “wire the nation's schools for Internet access,” was primarily volunteer-driven. During just the pilot program in California, Silicon Valley companies donated around $27 million in funds and equipment and an estimated 20,000 volunteers connected 2,600 schools to the internet in a single day.
21) “The most beautiful woman in film,” Heddy Lamarr, was also into deep tech. In collaboration with Composer George Antheil, Lamarr developed and patented a radio technique known as frequency hopping that was intended to prevent Allied torpedo guidance signals from being intercepted by rapidly switching the radio frequency between transmitter and receiver. The Navy did not deploy this technology at the time, but it later became a crucial innovation for the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and modern military communications.
22) The term “computer bug” has entomological origins. When attempting to fix an issue with the Harvard Mark II computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1947, researchers reported that a dead moth had been caught between relay contacts, shorting the system.
23) The U.S. Postal Service briefly experimented with rocket mail. In 1936, the Postal Service sent two rockets carrying mail from Greenwood Lake, New York to Hewlitt, New Jersey. When the rockets crashed on a frozen lake well outside of town, the postmaster of Hewlitt stayed true to his postal oath and carried the two bags of letters the rest of the way. Then, in 1959, the Postal Service launched a Regulus cruise missile carrying 3,000 letters from a submarine to a naval station in Florida. The Postmaster General declared: “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles."
24) It is common knowledge that the Department of War deployed multiple mobile Pizza Huts and Burger Kings to the Middle East during the Second Gulf War. What’s less well known is that during WW2, the Army shipped so much Coca-Cola to troops overseas that Eisenhower personally requested 10 portable Coke bottling plants and 6 million bottles of Coke per month for the front lines. In response, Coca-Cola sent 148 employees to Europe to run the operation, affectionately nicknamed the “Coca-Cola Colonels.” By the war's end, military service personnel had consumed over five billion bottles of Coke.
25) Al Gore invented the internet.
Happy semiquincentennial and thanks for reading The Ansible!
