What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America -- breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine? Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country's excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal, 'spatial' thinking about things technological. 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.