Bunch Of Amateurs

It's practically an American tradition. From time to time--often during an economic downturn--the nation finds itself teeming with self-styled backyard inventors and cranks--amateurs. Sometimes they even get asked to help out. When the Defense Department could not get a working robotic car from the proving grounds of Pratt-Whitney and Boeing, their research team developed the Grand Challenge, a prize award given to the first set of inventors who could win a race with an unpiloted vehicle. Two years later, the Pentagon had their robot car.

That success has led to dozens of similar competitions. NASA is offering millions of dollars in prize money for amateur inventors to get us back to the moon. The X Prize awards money to anyone who can design a plane that can get us into space. Al Gore has a prize for carbon reduction. Google has another one encouraging further moon exploration. These competitions all harken back to the famous Raymond Orteig $25,000 prize of 1919 for the first person who could jimmy his way across the Atlantic in an airplane. It took almost a decade and a series of ideas from a mail pilot, Charles Lindbergh, who fiddled with ways to lighten the load. Some were risky (a single engine instead of three) and some rather homey (a wicker chair instead of heavy pilot's seat). The success of the Spirit of St. Louis launched the American airline industry.

America's amateurs are back at it and back in their metaphorical garages--tinkering with everything from solar powered cars to space elevators, from new races of people to creating novel ways to contact space aliens hundreds of light-centuries off. In Jack Hitt's new book, he visits a number of different garages and has written a series of reported essays that look at America's current batch of amateurs and their pursuits. From a heavily tattoo'd girl in the Bay Area trying to splice a fish's glow in the dark gene into common yogurt to create a phenomenal snack for rave parties (all done in her kitchen using salad spinners) to a space obsessive on the brink of developing the next generation of telescopes from his mobile home park, From Ben Franklin's kite to Charles Lindbergh to the current TV hit "American Idol," the nation's love of self-invented geeks has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream and the real meaning of freedom.

To walk out of the dreary domestic sphere of the house and into the vacant garage is an act of faith that there lies the next big thing, the new energy source, the better car, the view of a habitable planet, a new species, the origin of life. Hitt argues that the American character is defined by this freedom, at times revealed as genius and at others as foolishness. And he argues that the cassandras in the media now who are predicting the decline and fall of the American enterprise miss the point. Amateur pursuits are always lamented as a world that just passed--our grandfather's America--until a Sergey Brin or Jesse Eisenberg step out of their garage (or dorm room) with the rare but crucial success story. The surge of amateurs is not a lost American past but a cycle that always manages to return, tearing down old fortresses of expertise and erecting new worlds and economies out of the rubble. Hitt argues that America is now in the grip of a new amateur cycle, poised to pioneer at the boundary of a new frontier that will lead, one more time, to the newest version of the American dream.