mong the many shaping factors, I would single out the country’s excellent elementary schools; a labor force that ed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal, “spatial” thinking about things technological.Р Why mention the elementary schools? Because thanks to these schools our early mechanics, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry.Р Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a mission visiting here in 1853 reported, “With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidly into the skilled workman.”
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