The Power of TECHNOLOGY.

Imagine for a moment that in 1900, the United States had disappeared. Simply vanished, along with its people. Gobbled up by a black hole, say, in one of those scenarios that Star Trek scriptwriters love to envision.

What would the world be like a century later?

It might be one without airplanes, invented by the Wright Brothers of Ohio. One without electronic computers, the brainchild of a slew of Americans, from Presper Eckert to Steve Jobs. Without so much as a transistor for the innards of a radio, or the plastic for its shell. Without CAT scans and the polio vaccine. Without photocopiers, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, even paper clips.

In science and technology, in ways big and small, the 20th century was America's century. Without Americans, cars would exist, but a host of improvements, including mundane features like motorized windshield wipers, would not. And rockets would exist, but humans might not have landed on the moon or sent a telescope into orbit capable of seeing the outer reaches of the universe.

But wait, you say, other people could have invented and done all these things, jumped in and filled the void.

Maybe so. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the explosion of science and technology in the United States over the past 100 years is that so often, Americans didn't wait for a void. They just developed things, spurred by prosperity and ingenuity. Necessity wasn't always the mother of invention.

It is no accident that so many American inventors were immigrants; all this technological advancement was in some ways an extension of the dream of a better life. For people who had found that life, one element of the creative spark was the belief that life could be better still.