America cut itself off from this talent for roughly 358 years, and in that span of time she went from a triangular wood fort of 60 starving colonists in the swamps of southeast Virginia to a continental-spanning economic and scientific superpower that had given the world the lightbulb, the airplane, and the telephone…three things which much of this encircled area had not even adopted by the time the Hart-Cellar Act had passed in 1965.