The U.S. at 250 (and best tutorials for kids on how integrated circuits are fabricated)

Let’s celebrate America at 250. What have we accomplished as a people, working together, that is great? Let’s leave out our military heroics because those are regularly celebrated in statuary, political speeches, etc. Let’s leave our literature because books are usually written by one person. Same deal with software, much of which is substantially created by small teams. In the comments, please leave what you think we’ve done that has done the most good for humanity overall outside of military.

I’ll go first: integrated circuit fabrication. While the transistor was developed by a small team, including Nobel laureate William Shockley, who later set up Silicon Valley, and the IC itself was invented by Jack Kilby, it literally takes a village to fabricate ICs in significant quantities.

What are some resources that we can use to teach tweens and teens about the miracle of birth (of their smartphones)? Here are some with promise…

From our brothers and sisters in Korea (indirect shout-out to the U.S. military since the South Koreans probably wouldn’t be fabbing chips today if not for our willingless to cooperate and sacrifice as a society in the military domain):

More detailed (from a comprehensive channel):

A high school kid who built a fab in his parents’ garage and, after attending CMU (“the school that actually builds instead of talks”), runs his own semiconductor company (example of American suburban greatness; Europeans don’t have A/C and they don’t have garages so Sam Zeloof’s counterparts in the Old Country wouldn’t have been able to do this):

Happy birthday to us and maybe readers will come up with an even better idea for something that Americans working cooperatively can take pride (not “Pride”) in!

What did I reject? Air conditioning, even though Carrier World HQ is a few minutes’ drive from our house and A/C has enabled people to work hard and achieve in parts of the world where that was never previously possible, because it was mostly achieved by one person. I also rejected aviation, even though the U.S. did a lot at the systems level (airports, radio comms, air traffic control, etc.) because there were contemporaneous efforts in other nations as well. I rejected spaceflight because the Russians started it and the impact on humanity from our headline space achievements has been limited (communications satellites have had a huge impact, of course, but we weren’t the first to put a radio station in orbit). I rejected politics because most countries that have a U.S.-style government, rather than a parliamentary system, have devolved into dictatorships.

(What did our AI Overlords suggest? ChatGPT: “Immigration and assimilation at massive scale”. Gemini: “Eradicating Disease & Public Health Breakthroughs” (absurd; all of medicine relies heavily on European biology, especially German) and “The Interstate Highway System” (guess which German got there first?); Grok: “Genome sequencing and biotech” (how much benefit has humanity actually derived from this? where exactly in America was Francis Crick born?); Claude: “The development of the polio vaccine (Salk and Sabin)” (“American” Albert Sabin was a Polish Jew born “Abram Saperstejn”; Salk was an American Jew, but how many collaborators did either of these guys need? This wasn’t a collective achievement) and “The long, hard-won expansion of civil rights” (absurd, since we’re informed that DEI remains essential due to rampant discrimination and a lack of civil rights, e.g., Republicans preventing nonwhite Americans from voting by requiring ID) and “The Interstate Highway System” (Claude says that it was only “influenced by Hitler” and not “inspired by Hitler” so I guess that’s okay to label as 100% American).)

Related:

• a University of Texas class by Chris Mack (for extremely patient and nerdy teens!)
• this channel from Spain (Barcelona) has good Spanish-language content and some in English
• chip-related, but not exactly American: a tour of Micron’s Taiwan factory
• The New York Times explains computers circa 1967
• Happy July 4: Why doesn’t Congress do anything? (representative of my non-250th July 4th output, from 2018) “We celebrate our traitorous rebellion against a legitimate government so that we could govern ourselves and yet it does not seem that our current government is any more responsive to the people than was King George III and his Parliament. Politicians ask for our votes by saying that the current set of laws and/or implementations of laws is intolerable. Yet once they get elected and the paychecks begin to flow they don’t seem inclined to change anything.”
• How was the mask compliance at July 4 gatherings? (2020)
• Reinterpreting MLK’s ideas of freedom for the Age of COVID (2021)
• What’s great about the United States? (vs. if we’d stayed part of the UK, 2019; Answer: “aviation”, sort of the same answer in 2017 with Harrison Ford on flying and freedom)
• Our first July 4th in Florida

Music for the day, by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (2021 performance). Wokipedia says that Gottschalk was rejected by the Paris Conservatoire not for his Jewish background, but because he was American and “America is a country of steam engines”. (Ironic that in the subsequent the U.S. not only ran away with industry, but also with dominance of the music world. The French turned out to be comparative failures at both industry and culture.)