Ten Big Accomplishments in Less Than Ten Years

Tell a liberal that you think there should be drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and you can expect to hear that it will take 10 years to get that oil out of the ground. TEN years! Which is far too long of course, because in ten years, crude oil will be useless to the world. Right?

That’s the mantra from the left, though. Ten years will pass before we see anything from ANWR. It’s hard to believe when you consider the following ten things were done in less than ten years:

1. A group of colonists organized and defeated the British Empire.

The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), also known as the American War of Independence,[3] began as a civil war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies on the North American continent. Foreign nations allied with the American colonists and later declared war on Britain, making the conflict international. The war was the culmination of the political American Revolution, whereby the colonists overthrew British rule. In 1775, Revolutionaries seized control of each of the thirteen colonial governments, set up the Second Continental Congress, and formed a Continental Army. The following year, they formally declared their independence as a new nation, the United States of America.

Throughout the war, the British were able to use their naval superiority to capture and occupy coastal cities, but control of the countryside (where 90% of the population lived) largely eluded them due to their relatively small land army. In early 1778, shortly after an American victory at Saratoga resulting in the surrender of an entire British army, France signed treaties of alliance with the new nation, and declared war on Britain that summer; Spain and the Dutch Republic also went to war with Britain over the next two years. French involvement proved decisive, with a French naval victory in the Chesapeake leading to the surrender of a second British army at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris ended the war and recognized the sovereignty of the United States over the territory bounded by what is now Canada to the north, Florida to the south, and the Mississippi River to the west.

2. Built the Transcontinental Railroad

Six years after the groundbreaking, laborers of the Central Pacific Railroad from the west and the Union Pacific Railroad from the east met at Promontory Summit, Utah. It was here on May 10, 1869 that Stanford drove the Golden Spike or The Last Spike, which is now located at Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, that symbolized the completion of the transcontinental railroad. In perhaps the world’s first live mass-media event, the hammers and spike were wired to the telegraph line so that each hammer stroke would be heard as a click at telegraph stations nationwide—the hammer strokes were missed, so the clicks were sent by the telegraph operator. As soon as the ceremonial spike had been replaced by an ordinary iron spike, a message was transmitted to both the East Coast and West Coast that simply read, “DONE.” The country erupted in celebration upon receipt of this message. Complete travel from coast to coast was reduced from six or more months to just one week.

3. Built Hoover Dam.

The dam, located 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Las Vegas, is named after Herbert Hoover, who played an instrumental role in its construction, first as Secretary of Commerce and then later as President of the United States. Construction began in 1931 and was completed in 1935, more than two years ahead of schedule. The dam and the power plant are operated by the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, Hoover Dam was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985.

4. Put a man on the moon.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. A number of political factors affected Kennedy’s decision and the timing of it. In general, Kennedy felt great pressure to have the United States “catch up to and overtake” the Soviet Union in the “space race.” Four years after the Sputnik shock of 1957, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space on April 12, 1961, greatly embarrassing the U.S. While Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, he only flew on a short suborbital flight instead of orbiting the Earth, as Gagarin had done. In addition, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mid-April put unquantifiable pressure on Kennedy. He wanted to announce a program that the U.S. had a strong chance at achieving before the Soviet Union. After consulting with Vice President Johnson, NASA Administrator James Webb, and other officials, he concluded that landing an American on the Moon would be a very challenging technological feat, but an area of space exploration in which the U.S. actually had a potential lead. Thus the cold war is the primary contextual lens through which many historians now view Kennedy’s speech.

The decision involved much consideration before making it public, as well as enormous human efforts and expenditures to make what became Project Apollo a reality by 1969.

5. Learned to fly.

The Wright brothers, Orville (19 August 1871 – 30 January 1948) and Wilbur (16 April 1867 – 30 May 1912), were two Americans who are generally credited[1][2][3] with inventing and building the world’s first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight on 17 December 1903. In the two years afterward, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed wing flight possible.

6. Built the Panama Canal.

The United States formally took control of the French property relating to the canal on May 4, 1904, when Lieutenant Jatara Oneel of the United States Army was presented with the keys; there was a little ceremony.

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On October 10, 1913, the dike at Gamboa, which had kept the Culebra Cut isolated from Gatun Lake, was demolished; the initial detonation was set off telegraphically by President Woodrow Wilson in Washington. On January 7, 1914, the Alexandre La Valley, an old French crane boat, became the first ship to make a complete transit of the Panama Canal under its own steam.

7. Won World War II.

The starting date of the war is generally held to be September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by the United Kingdom, France and the British Dominions;[7][8] some sources use other starting points, including the Mukden Incident (1931), the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (1937), and the Attack on Pearl Harbor (1941). The Allies were victorious, and, as a result, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the world’s leading superpowers.

8. Built the Empire State Building.

Excavation of the site began on January 22, 1930, and construction on the building itself started symbolically on March 17—St.Patrick’s Day—per Al Smith’s influence as Empire State, Inc. president. The project involved 3,400 workers, mostly immigrants from Europe, along with hundreds of Mohawk iron workers, mainly from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. According to official accounts, five workers died during the construction.[12] Governor Smith’s grandchildren cut the ribbon on May 1, 1931.

9. Built the Golden Gate Bridge.

Construction began on January 5, 1933.[4] The project cost over $26 million.[19]

Strauss remained head of the project, overseeing day-to-day construction and making some groundbreaking contributions. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he had placed a brick from his alma mater’s demolished McMicken Hall in the south anchorage before the concrete was poured. He innovated the use of movable safety netting beneath the construction site, which saved the lives of many otherwise unprotected steelworkers. Of eleven men killed from falls during construction, ten were killed (when the bridge was near completion) when the net failed under the stress of a scaffold that had fallen. Nineteen others who were saved by the net over the course of construction became proud members of the (informal) Halfway to Hell Club.[20]

The project was finished by April 1937, $1.3 million under budget.

10. Built both towers of the World Trade Center.

Groundbreaking for the construction of the World Trade Center was on August 5, 1966.[14] The construction was under the auspices of the semiautonomous Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Thirteen square blocks of low rise buildings in Radio Row, some of which predated the American Civil War, were razed to clear the site for construction.

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In 1970, construction was completed on One World Trade Center, with its first tenants moving into the building in December 1970. Tenants first moved into Two World Trade Center in January 1972.[15] When the World Trade Center twin towers were completed, the total costs to the Port Authority had reached $900 million.[16] The ribbon cutting ceremony was on April 4, 1973.

Are we to believe that in the early 1900s, we could move “238,845,587 cubic yards of material” in Panama, creating the canal where the French failed, but we cannot get oil out of the ground in Alaska in the same time?

Are we to believe that we can build a railroad in the 1800s from Omaha to Sacramento in less than ten years, but it will take us longer to drill a hole in the ground and start pumping oil? ANWR is only 50 miles from Prudhoe Bay. Last I checked, Omaha was a little further than that from Sacramento.

It is hard to believe that with the infrastructure already in place, with the technology available to the oil companies allowing them to drill horizontally, that it would take ten years to start seeing any crude from ANWR. There are estimates that say it could take anywhere from 18 months to two years to see results.

We will need oil in two years and we will need oil in ten years. Why are we refusing to use the natural resources here in America while transferring billions and billions of dollars to nations that are our enemies? It defies logic.

Drill here. Drill now. Sign the petition.

UPDATE:

Linked up at Conservative Grapevine. Thanks, John. Welcome Grapeviners!