0:00

This. Programming is sponsored by the

0:02

Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer

0:04

Care Center at Baylor St.

0:06

Luke's Medical Center offering comprehensive

0:08

cancer care that is compassionate,

0:10

personalized, and driven by clinical

0:12

research. More it S T.

0:14

Luke's health.org/cancer. This. Is

0:16

the engines of our ingenuity made possible

0:19

by the friends of K U H

0:21

of Houston? Today

0:24

America leaves it's Eastern beaches.

0:26

The University of Houston College

0:28

of Engineering presents this serious

0:30

about the machines that make

0:32

our civilization right and the

0:34

people. His ingenuity created them.

0:39

And back from a trip to

0:41

Eastern Massachusetts That virtual newsy I'm

0:43

of early American settlement, a large

0:46

red frame building. and Newburyport has

0:48

the number Sixteen Fifty Four over

0:50

it's door. That's not an address,

0:52

but the year it was built.

0:54

Then I noticed this three hundred

0:56

and fifty year old building is

0:59

no log cabin. It is a

1:01

comfortable European house. A small almost

1:03

hidden sign on Old Route One

1:05

back to Boston says First Falling

1:07

Mill Sixteen Forty Three. Out

1:09

front as a fake water driven

1:11

meal and abandoned tourist attraction bought

1:14

off in the woods. Unmarked is

1:16

the original mill damn built only

1:18

twenty three years after the Pilgrims

1:20

landed. It still divert water from

1:22

a stream into the mill race.

1:24

European water wheels had been used

1:26

for eight hundred years. by sixteen

1:28

forty three. They took on backbreaking

1:30

human tasks grist mill, the ground

1:33

grain saw meals, cut logs and

1:35

of falling mills, pounded wool for

1:37

hours and hot soapy water to

1:39

clean. It remove isles and pre

1:41

shrink it. Mills had to be

1:43

a first order of business. Here

1:45

I'm surrounded by imported technologies and

1:47

institutions in downtown Boston. I find

1:50

another one. It's the Athenaeum, a

1:52

lovely private lending library. built and

1:54

eighteen seven, you can still borrow

1:56

books from it's collection of seven

1:58

hundred and fifty thousand. Volumes for

2:00

an annual fee of one hundred

2:03

dollars. Few Americans today have even

2:05

heard of private lending libraries. These

2:07

technologies and institutions were indeed built

2:09

by people who stepped right off

2:11

the boat just as most machinery

2:14

for those water mills was made

2:16

in England. So to where the

2:18

institutions of the New World, Harvard

2:20

and some of the fine private

2:22

academies worth audacious yet successful attempt

2:25

to recreate English education in the

2:27

new American Outback. What I'm seeing

2:29

is. A beachhead still equipped

2:31

with materiel than ideas from the

2:33

mother country. The machinery of civilization

2:36

would clearly have to mutate into

2:38

something new. Education, technology and government

2:40

would have to adapt to different

2:43

resources, a different climate, and a

2:45

wholly new mix of people. The

2:47

colonists who struck off into the

2:50

West sped that process. They had

2:52

to sever the umbilical cord with

2:54

Europe and recreate earlier and more

2:57

primitive technologies from scratch. They put

2:59

up log cabins, And tense, they

3:01

followed herds like early nomads. They

3:04

use the services of itinerant doctors,

3:06

clergy, even scholars. My mid nineteenth

3:08

century, we created our own unique

3:11

replacements for all that I saw.

3:13

Last week we invented the high

3:16

pressure, none condensing steam engine. light

3:18

and powerful. We built land grant

3:20

public universities in each state. It

3:23

was we who invented the public

3:25

library. In the end, we less

3:28

that Beachhead and we became. America.

3:31

I'm John Lean hard at the

3:33

University of Houston, where we're interested

3:35

in the way in that is

3:37

mine.