Whatever happened to American inventions?

OPINION:

The Artemis II trip around the moon has generated a lot of enthusiasm in the past few days.

I guess that makes sense. It has been a while since we were there, and the new NASA chief has been talking about moon bases that will, one imagines, be super cool, even if it remains uncertain what they might accomplish.

It all sounds very exciting, but in a larger sense, it’s kind of depressing.

We have already done this. In 1968, Apollo 8 circled the moon on a mission that went through the heart of the Christmas season. On Christmas Eve, the crew read the first 10 verses of Genesis to about 1 billion people, about 1 in 4 people then alive, watching back on Earth.

That sort of attention was not unusual. We all watched the Apollo launches and landings and kept track of NASA’s progress. We were proud when Americans landed men on the moon. We watched and prayed for the Apollo 13 crew.

With that as context, it is a bit discouraging to think that, despite all the hoopla, we are rerunning accomplishments from 60 years ago.

It’s not just NASA. Despite all the noise and enthusiasm for technology in our society, the simple truth is that we are not living through an age of inventions, at least not inventions that materially change our lives.

I can hear the question now: “What about artificial intelligence?” It has been 80 years since the computer was invented at the University of Pennsylvania. Has the computer changed our lives? Absolutely, but not so much in the past 30 years or so.

Have people always cribbed from smarter sources? Yep. Have cars improved? No doubt, but they are still cars, still very much like their predecessors of a century ago. Are cellphones really that big an advance, given that we had walkie-talkies in the 1940s?

In comparison, from 1875 to 1950, the world changed dramatically. Steel. Machine guns. Airplanes. Jets. Rockets. Automobiles. Electricity. Air conditioning. Movies. Oil refining. Vaccines. Penicillin. The assembly line. The list goes on.

What has been invented since 1950? Nuclear power, the pill and the internet (which wasn’t an invention so much as an innovative way to use telephone lines). Not much, really, and certainly nothing that has changed how we have lived our lives as much as the inventions of the previous 75 years.

Are we close to meaningful breakthroughs in robotics, nanotechnology, genetics and a host of other things? Probably, but who can really say?

The Forbes 400 is composed mostly of people who made their fortunes in finance or real estate. Some made fortunes by improving or optimizing others’ inventions. Some inherited their cash. Good for all of them. It’s not a bad thing to be rich, but the absence of inventors on the list suggests that the nation has not produced a bumper crop of Wrights or Edisons or Fords lately.

Is there a reason we have become focused on marginally improving what has been handed down to us — computers, cars, planes, etc. — rather than inventing the next generation of amazing things?

Is too much regulation or too many lawyers to blame? Are schools too focused on paychecks rather than tinkering? Are we victims of our own prosperity, grown rich and indolent and disinterested in the notion of progress? Have we lost the “let her rip” attitude that once characterized this great nation of refugees looking for a better deal?

Have we misplaced our ability to imagine and create?

The only thing one can say with certainty is that it is not a sign of national health that we greet a moonshot rerun from 60 years ago as if it were manna in the desert. The first step is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Then we need to do something about it.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.