Mr. Lincoln’s High-Tech War

In 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born into the last generation of Americans who did not expect technology ever to change. Young Abraham lived with the rest of his family in a series of dirt floor cabins in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Those cabins, the farm implements, the guns used for hunting, all the cooking utensils and everything else the family owned, would have seemed quite familiar to Abraham's father, his grandfather, and his father before him. And not all that different from the things that Abraham's great-great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Lincoln might have used at the time he arrived in America from England in 1637. Samuel would have instantly recognized and known how to use nearly all the tools and farm implements that young Abraham would have worked with in the 1810s and 1820s. And the flintlock gun in the Lincoln cabin wouldn't have changed all that much in the last 150 years. But Abraham's own father, Thomas Lincoln, would have been dumbfounded by the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, and the dozens of other inventions that came boiling out of inventor's workshops in the early years of the nineteenth century. By the start of the 1800s, technology had already begun to transform work, transportation, education, and other parts of life for Americans. The Industrial Revolution was well underway in England while Abraham Lincoln was growing up, and it would change the lives of millions of people around the world in the years to come. As a father, Lincoln wanted to show his five-year-old son Robert what technology was bringing to America. One day in 1848, Lincoln, at the time a first-term U.S. congressman from Illinois, walked with Robert up the broad steps of the Patent Office building. In the model room, they saw small-scale versions of ideas. The little machines and gadgets looked like toys to Robert. At that time, inventors had to send the Patent Office models of their inventions. After examiners looked over a model and decided that it demonstrated a new idea, they would give it a patent. This allowed the inventor to be the only person with the right to own and sell that invention. A while after Lincoln and Robert visited the Patent Office, Lincoln was aboard a river steamboat that ran aground and had to struggle to get underway again. The mishap gave him an idea for a device that could be attached to the sides of the ship, filling it with air, would lift the ship and allow it to float over a shallow stretch of water. He began whittling a model that he took to a lawyer who specialized in patents. The lawyer prepared the necessary papers and sent them to Lincoln.