James B. Hill should be patron saint of Northwest Ohio - or at least patron saint of this story. He invented a machine called the Buckeye Traction Ditcher, and he checks all my boxes. Hill is our hero: His invention drained the swamp in a matter of years, leading to its complete settlement shortly thereafter. He brought the normalcy we see today.
There's no shortage of noise coming out of San Francisco and New York with AI breakthroughs, billion-dollar valuations and the race to back the next big consumer app or fintech darling. With a crowded landscape sometimes influenced by hype, venture capital has developed a kind of tunnel vision. The fixation on what's shiny and fast-scaling has blinded many investors to the country's most foundational industries, which are the ones that really keep America running.
The line is at the top of the page, right under the words Scientific American, declaring the publication's mission: The advocate of industry and enterprise, and journal of mechanical and other improvements. It grabs my attention because it reminds me that the first issue was created in large part to promote manufacturing and trade; it's pro-business, pro-capitalism, pro-wealth in ways that we don't see much in modern science journalism or in science as a whole.