June 18, 2026. Valar Atomics’ Ward 250 became the first DOE-authorized reactor built and operated outside the national laboratory system to achieve criticality. That summer, the reactor generated electricity to power an NVIDIA computer. In the same year, dozens of young entrepreneurial companies are exploding around the country. Some delivering drones, some wringing rain out of stubborn clouds, and some reimagining what human travel could look like, all of them run by men who take their mission and their country seriously. Is this simply a trend? Or is it a feature of the American ethos?
America Runs on a Particular Belief
American industry has always run on a particular belief: that men were made to work, that work has meaning, and anyone willing to do it heartily can change the world. The interesting part is these men are not all cut from the same cloth. Some are graduates from universities. Some are college dropouts. Some have never even finished high school. But all of them want to build a future for this country where America leads in every industry it touches.
Capital, natural resources, and good policy are all necessary, but they aren't enough. Plenty of nations have all three. What turns them into industry is an ethic with three parts. Purpose: work is a calling, not simply the means to a paycheck. Ownership: you control what you build. Opportunity: anyone, from any background, can be the one who builds it.
Plymouth
To understand why these founders exist, you have to go back to 1620, when the ship that would shape the American character came to this land. This was a colony led by a specific set of people whose faith and culture drove them to believe that they needed to build something that would last for their children, and their children's children.
But belief alone did not make Plymouth work. In fact, the people of Plymouth almost didn't make it work at all.
To pay for the voyage, the Pilgrims struck a deal with investors back in London. For seven years, everything the colony produced would go into one common store. Nobody owned their own land or kept what they grew. Everyone worked for the whole, and everyone drew from the whole. On paper, it sounded fair, but in practice it ended like any other attempt at collectivism, bringing them to the brink of starvation.
William Bradford, the colony's governor, wrote down exactly what happened in his journal Of Plymouth Plantation. The young men, the ones most able to work, resented that they should "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense." People began to claim they were too weak or too sick to go into the fields. The harvests came up short and people began to go hungry.
So, in 1623, Bradford made a decision: He gave every family its own parcel of land. What you grew, you were able to keep or share as you pleased. And sure enough, everything changed. In Bradford's words, it "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." Women who had refused to work the common fields before now went out willingly, bringing their children with them to plant corn.
Bradford didn't mince words about the lesson. He called the idea that taking away property would make people "happy and flourishing" a conceit, as if men thought they were "wiser than God."
Plymouth learned this lesson the hard way: People of faith already know how to work hard. But people of faith who own the fruit of their work will build something extraordinary.
That is how American industry began. Faith that gave work meaning, and freedom that let a man profit from what he built and keep building.
Purpose: Work as a Calling
These people believed something that would shock people today: That to spend your life creating, building, toiling was glorious when done for your God, family, and country. To them, God didn't just call pastors and priests to be faithful in their work. He also called the farmer, the carpenter, the blacksmith, and the merchant. They saw work as more than a means to pay the bills. It was a way to glorify God and worship too. A man who plowed his field well was honoring God just as much as a man who preached a sermon.
Two centuries later, in the nation born directly from that extraordinary work ethic, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across America and was struck by something he had never seen in Europe. In America, there was no shame in work. He titled one chapter of his famous book That Amongst the Americans All Honest Callings Are Considered Honourable. In the old world, a gentleman didn't have to work. In America, everybody did, and they even considered it something to be proud of!
Throughout the following centuries, that ethic moved into the workshop, the mill, and the factory. And over and over again, the people who changed everything were not the people anyone expected.
Then came Thomas Edison, a man with barely any formal schooling. In 1876, he built a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and promised "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so." Within a few years, he gave the world the phonograph and a practical electric light. By the end of his life, he held 1,093 American patents. But contrary to popular belief, Edison's greatest invention wasn't the light bulb. It was the idea that invention itself could be a job. The idea that you could show up every day and make a living through building the future on purpose.
It’s this same sense of calling that drives today's builders and inventors. Nobody spends years chasing a working nuclear reactor simply for a paycheck. Without purpose, work is just a job, and rarely will anyone take a career-sized risk on just any job.
Ownership: You Control What You Build
Plymouth proved the second part of the ethic the hard way, but nearly every generation since has proved it again.
In 1789, a 21-year-old apprentice named Samuel Slater left England carrying something the British government did not want leaving the country: the design of the most advanced textile machines in the world. But Slater wanted to go somewhere where he could realize the level of industry he aspired to. So, Slater snuck his plans across the Atlantic by simply carrying them in his head. By 1793, he had built America's first successful water-powered cotton mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Back in England, they called him "Slater the Traitor." Here in the States, he became the father of the American Industrial Revolution.
Henry Ford was a farm boy who left home at 16 to become a machinist in Detroit. In 1908, his Model T sold for $850. In 1913, at his Highland Park plant, Ford introduced the moving assembly line, and a car that took 12 and a half hours to build now took 93 minutes. By 1924, a Model T cost $260. By 1927, Ford had sold more than 15 million of them. A farm boy grew up and put the whole country on wheels.
Today, there's Zane Hengsperger. Zane grew up in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, where his father owned a machine shop. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2022. In 2025, he founded Nox Metals in an old factory in Southwest Detroit. His idea was simple: Factories across America wait days just to get a quote on the raw metal they need. Nox uses software, artificial intelligence, and automated saws to cut aluminum to order and ship it fast. In June 2026, Nox raised $11.5 million from investors including Y Combinator and Palmer Luckey. And what belief drives him? He believes young people should see manufacturing as a way to build both this country and a life for themselves.
Opportunity: Anyone Can Be the One
In 1903, the most celebrated scientist in Washington, Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian, had $50,000 from the War Department to build a flying machine. On December 8th, it collapsed off its launcher and fell into the Potomac River. Nine days later, on a windy beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, did what he couldn't. Neither Wilbur nor Orville Wright had a college degree, and they paid for their work with money from selling bicycles. Orville's first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.
On one side were credentials, the Smithsonian, and government money. On the other were two bicycle mechanics paying their own way.
Here's what ties Slater, Edison, the Wright brothers, and Ford together: None of them believed their station in life was fixed. They held the tried-and-true American belief that if they worked hard enough, they could change the world around them, and for the better.
If you want proof that this belief still works, look at the reactor from the beginning of this story one more time.
Isaiah Taylor was born in 1999. At 16, he left high school to write code. In 2023, he founded Valar Atomics with a simple and outrageous goal: build nuclear reactors in factories, the way Ford built cars. In November 2025, working with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Valar became the first venture-backed company in history to achieve nuclear criticality. Seven months later, its Ward 250 reactor went critical in the Utah desert, one of the first reactors to meet the federal government's July 4th deadline. That summer it powered an NVIDIA computer. In August 2026, Valar raised a billion dollars, and Taylor is now planning on building reactors not by the dozens but by the thousands.
But Doesn't Everyone Work Hard?
A fair critic will push back here. Germany, Japan, and China work hard too, and in many industries, they seem to out-manufacture us. So, what makes the American ethic different? It's what Americans believe about work itself.
That belief is still alive in America, and the numbers prove it. In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked people in 44 countries to rate how important hard work is for getting ahead in life, on a scale of 0 to 10. Seventy-three percent of Americans gave it a 10, "very important." The global median was 50 percent.
A country's industry can only be as bold as its people believe they're allowed to be. If you believe your future was decided on the day you were born, you don't drop out of school and end up building a nuclear reactor. You don't leave to start an entire industry. But if you believe that hard work has purpose, and that anyone willing to do it can build something great, that is when you go out and build it.
That is the American advantage. It doesn't come down to simply our natural resources, or skills, or even our money. It's our heritage that teaches us that with faith, freedom, ownership, and grit, we can be the best at whatever we set our mind to. We can start with nothing and create the greatest businesses, industries, and even nations.
What's at Stake
While that belief is still alive, it's starting to slip. In a 2025 Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, only 25 percent of Americans said they had a good chance of improving their standard of living, a record low in surveys going back to 1987. Nearly 70 percent said the American dream either no longer holds true or never did. If the American work ethic is what American industry requires, then we need to see this as both a cultural problem and an industrial one.
We talk a lot in this country about bringing industry back. We talk about tariffs and tax credits, supply chains, and subsidies. Yes, those things matter and policy can clear many roads. But somebody still must drive down those roads.
Machines cannot build themselves (at least not yet) and money cannot build anything on its own. Every great American industry started with a person who believed their mission mattered and that they would be allowed to spend their life on it. The Pilgrims learned that in 1623. Ford proved it in 1913. And a high school dropout proved it again in the Utah desert in 2026.
That is why American industry requires the American work ethic, not just hard work. It's the belief behind the work: that it has meaning, that you can control what you build, and that anyone, from any background, can be the one who changes the world.
About the author
Asher Dixon is Director of Marketing at RedBalloon.work, a recruiting firm and job board.
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Contributor disclosure: Asher Dixon is Director of Marketing at RedBalloon.work, a recruiting firm and job board. His affiliation is provided for transparency.
This article is independently authored commentary. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute for American Manufacturing & Technology, its board, advisors, or staff. Publication does not constitute an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned.