IMAGINATION MADE AMERICA.

It was only about 500 years ago that Europe began to rate the power of thinking, and especially creative thinking, on a par with the power of brute force. It was this new altitude that gave vitality to the Renaissance.
North America was the lucky beneficiary of the world's creative upsurge. As the New Yorker has said, "Ideas are what the United State are made of." Without doubt, our new heights in standard of living have been reached through creative thinking.
One new idea inherited by America from England was a way to use fire by means of an internal combustion engine. This gave birth to our automotive industry, without which America's standard of living would be for lower. For it, alone, gives gainful occupation to over 7,000,000 of us. Farming employs only 9,875,000, including farm families as well as hired hands.
Agricultural ideas have made for richer the rich soil of our country. The creative genius poured into farm machinery by the McCormicks and the Deeres has enabled each farm land to turn out far more food than formerly. When America was young, it took 19 farmers to feed one city dweller. Today 19 farmers produce enough food for themselves and for 66 other people.
And yet, it is only recently that the value of imagination has been fully recognized even in America. A few years ago, the Chrysler Corporation started to hail imagination as "the directing force" which "lights tomorrow's roads, explores today for clues to tomorrow, hunts better way for you to live and travel." And the Aluminium Company has recently adopted a newly coined word, "Imagineering," which means that "you let your imagination soar and then engineer it down to earth. You think about the things you used to make, and decide that if you don't find out some way to make them immeasurably better, you may never be asked by our customers to make them again."
Thus, competition has forced American business to recognize the importance of conscious creative effort. So much so, that, more and more, the heart and centre of almost every successful manufacturing company is its creative research. Industrial research used to do but little more than take things apart in order to find out what caused what and why. The new research adds to such fact-finding a definite and conscious creative function aimed to discover new facts, arrive at combinations, and find new applications. Thanks to thinkers like Doctor James B. Conant, imagination's importance to science is now recognized as never before.


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