Inventions and Discoveries – John Bull and Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations | Exhibitions (Library of Congress)

During the infancy of the United States, Americans imitated and adopted British inventions and technology. As American political and economic power grew in the mid-nineteenth century, the impact of each country’s technology on the other began to be mutual. After the United States became the dominant world power in the twentieth century, American science and technology deeply affected many areas of British life.

James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in Britain toward the end of the eighteenth century launched the Industrial Revolution; Americans were quick to adopt Watt’s new technology by applying steam power to water transportation and by modifying British steam-powered vehicles like the locomotive to the American environment. During these early years of the American republic, British technology was copied in countless areas: bridge design and building, canal building, and textile manufacturing, to name a few.

American technology established its first foothold in Britain after London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, when the McCormick reaper, the Colt revolver, and Day and Newell’s patent locks found customers in the mother country. It was also during this decade that the Singer sewing machine made major inroads in the British market.

After the American Civil War there was a reciprocal exchange of technology; the United States received from Britain such major innovations as the Bessemer converter, and Britain received from America inventions such as the telephone, courtesy of a transplanted Scot, Alexander Graham Bell.

In the twentieth century American technology became a dominant feature in major sectors of British life: mass production methods pioneered by Henry Ford, manned flight, skyscrapers, and computers, to name a few. In areas such as pure science, a great deal of reciprocity continued, as, for example, in the discovery of DNA by the British-American team of James Watson and Francis Crick.