Potential.

Revolutionary-period America was hardly a technologically advanced society. Nevertheless, several inventors proposed or produced ingenious innovations that foretold the "know-how" that later became Americans' famous reputation. Just before the Revolutionary War, John Hobday of Virginia designed and built a machine for threshing wheat, ordinarily a laborious and timeconsuming task that separated the kernels from the chaff. A farmer usually beat no more than a few bushels of wheat in a day, Hobday's threshing machine could beat sixty bushels in the same time. What was more, Hobday claimed that his invention would cost only fifteen pounds to duplicate, easily affordable by wealthy planters such as George Washington who had turned from tobacco to wheat agriculture. In Connecticut at about the same time silversmith Abel Buell developed the first type fonts made in America. The colonial printers, who had presses in virtually every major urban...