In the early decades of its history, the United States was relatively isolated from Europe and also rather poor. Nonetheless, it was a good place for science. American science was closely linked with the needs of the people, and it was free from European preconceptions.

 

Two of America's founding fathers were scientists of some repute. Benjamin Franklin conducted a series of experiments that deepened human understanding of electricity. Among other things, he proved what had been suspected but never before shown: that lightning is a form of electricity. Franklin also invented such conveniences as bifocal eyeglasses and a stove that bears his name. (The Franklin stove fits into a fireplace and circulates heat into the adjacent room.)

 

Thomas Jefferson was a student of agriculture who introduced various types of rice, olive trees, and grasses into the New World. He stressed the scientific aspect of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06), which explored the Pacific Northwest, and detailed, systematic information on the region's plants and animals was one of that expedition's legacies.

 

Like Franklin and Jefferson, most American scientists of the late 18th century were involved in the struggle to win American independence and forge a new nation. These scientists included the astronomer David Rittenhouse, the medical scientist Benjamin Rush, and the natural historian Charles Willson Peale.

 

During the American Revolution, Rittenhouse helped design the defenses of Philadelphia and built telescopes and navigation instruments for the United States' military services. After the war, Rittenhouse designed road and canal systems for the state of Pennsylvania. He later returned to studying the stars and planets and gained a worldwide reputation in that field.

 

As surgeon general, Benjamin Rush saved countless lives of soldiers during the Revolutionary War by promoting hygiene and public health practices. By introducing new medical treatments, he made the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia an example of medical enlightenment, and after his military service, Rush established the first free clinic in the United States.

 

Charles Willson Peale is best remembered as an artist, but he also was a natural historian, inventor, educator, and politician. He created the first major museum in the United States, the Peale Museum in Philadelphia, which housed the young nation's only collection of North American natural history specimens. Peale excavated the bones of an ancient mastodon near West Point, New York; he spent three months assembling the skeleton, and then displayed it in his museum. The Peale Museum started an American tradition of making the knowledge of science interesting and available to the general public.

 

American political leaders' enthusiasm for knowledge also helped ensure a warm welcome for scientists from other countries. A notable early immigrant was the British chemist Joseph Priestley, who was driven from his homeland because of his dissenting politics. Priestley, who came to the United States in 1794, was the first of thousands of talented scientists who emigrated in search of a free, creative environment. Others who came more recently have included the German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, who arrived in 1933; Enrico Fermi, who came from Italy in 1938 and who produced the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; and Vladimir K. Zworykin, who left Russia in 1919 and later invented the television camera.

 

Other scientists had come to the United States to take part in the nation's rapid growth. Alexander Graham Bell, who arrived from Scotland by way of Canada in 1872, developed and patented the telephone and related inventions. Charles P. Steinmetz, who came from Germany in 1889, developed new alternating-current electrical systems at General Electric Company. Later, other scientists were drawn by America's state-of-the-art research facilities. By the early decades of the 20th century, scientists working in the United States could hope for considerable material, as well as intellectual, rewards.