“You look out of the window at the waves of dark and light clouds looking like ocean shorelines,” he wrote about the trip, “and you feel as if you are floating away in this pleasantly moving room, like the basket hanging from the balloon you saw with a visiting circus when you were a boy.” Sandburg was born in 1878, when crossing the country took almost a week.

Recognizing the threat from this technological gap, a small group of American scientists and government officials began an urgent effort to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to support an investment program larger than anything before.

While there were multiple causes — including the country’s large consumer market and a vibrant private sector shaped by a national ethos that celebrates risk-taking — the postwar investment boom was vital.

But IBM’s top executives, then focused on a mundane punch-card system that helped other companies keep track of their operations, were so unimpressed that they allowed Aiken to take the computer to a laboratory at Harvard University.

“We used to shake every time that darn thing rang,” recalled Grace Hopper, a former math professor at Vassar College who worked in the lab as a Navy officer and would become a pioneering computer scientist.

The economists and other experts who advise politicians have increasingly come to this conclusion, which explains why President Biden has made investment the centerpiece of his economic strategy — even if that isn’t always obvious to outsiders.

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