United States | Good News For Humankind

Thomas Davenport invents what is perhaps the world’s first electric vehicle

By Peter Schulte / May 1, 1834 / Archive of Human Genius

As early as 1834, he and his wife Emily Davenport developed a battery-powered electric motor. They used it to operate a small model car on a short section of track, paving the way for the later electrification of streetcars. It was the first-ever attempt to apply electrification to locomotion. With his wife Emily and colleague Orange Smalley, Davenport received the first American patent on an electric machine in 1837, U. S. Patent No. 132.

U.S. Congress abolishes the African slave trade

By Peter Schulte / March 3, 1807 / Archive of Human Genius

The U.S. Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.”

Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin, revolutionizing the production of cotton

By Peter Schulte / July 28, 1794 / Archive of Human Genius

In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.

U.S. Bill of Rights ratified, become first 10 amendments of the U.S. Constitution

By Peter Schulte / December 15, 1791 / Archive of Human Genius

The Bill of Rights amendments add specific guarantees of personal freedoms and rights, clear limitations on the government’s power in judicial and other proceedings, and explicit declarations that all powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.

Thomas Paine publishes Rights of Man

By Peter Schulte / March 31, 1791 / Archive of Human Genius

Rights of Man (1791), a book by Thomas Paine, including 31 articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people

The school lunch movement begins in Europe

By Peter Schulte / June 14, 1790 / Good news links

The first school lunches were thought to be served in 1790 in Munich, Germany, by an American-born physicist, Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford. In Munich, Thompson founded the Poor People’s Institute, which employed both adults and children to make uniforms for the German Army. They were fed and clothed for their work, and the children were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. Years later, Thompson would feed 60,000 people a day from his soup kitchen in London.