In writing about the lessons of the founders for today’s technology leaders, I described them as “not technologists, but architects of systems” in my last article. That captures just the surface of it. Going deeper tells a different story, and it is worth telling.

The founders were technologists. Not in the modern sense of writing code or designing networks, but by every meaningful standard of their time they built, deployed, and governed advanced technology. The more carefully you look at Philadelphia in the 1770s, the more clearly you see a generation of leaders who were not borrowing from the technical world. They lived in it.

This article is a closer look at that.

What Technology Meant in the 1770s

At that point in time the word “technology” did not yet carry its modern meaning. The eighteenth century spoke of “the useful arts,” “natural philosophy,” and “mechanics.” But the underlying idea of applying knowledge to extend human capability was very much alive. The 1770s sat at a particular moment: the Industrial Revolution was underway in Britain. The Enlightenment was at its peak. The colonies were both consumers and contributors to that activity.

A thoughtful colonial observer of the time would have seen technology in five broad areas.

Communications. The printing press, two and a half centuries old by then, was still the dominant information technology. Skilled shops could produce a few hundred sheets per hour. Newspapers numbered in the dozens across the colonies. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense moved roughly 120,000 copies in three months, for a population of 2.5 million. Cryptography and ciphers were active disciplines. Sympathetic stains, what we would now call invisible ink, were under development.

Navigation and measurement. John Harrison’s marine chronometer had recently solved the longitude problem. The sextant, refined in the 1750s, made precise celestial navigation possible. Surveying instruments and astronomical telescopes were precision-engineered tools, and the colonies were producing them.

Power and manufacturing. James Watt’s improved steam engine had been patented in 1769 and was entering commercial use in Britain. The Spinning Jenny (1764) and Water Frame (1769) were transforming textile production. The Pennsylvania Long Rifle was a colonial technical achievement, more accurate than the British smoothbore musket.

Medicine and chemistry. Early methods of immunization by infection (variolation) against smallpox were known and, while somewhat controversial, increasingly accepted as the only defense against an often-fatal disease. Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen in 1774, beginning a transformation of chemistry from alchemy into a rigorous discipline.

Electricity. Once a parlor trick of arcing sparks and electrified glass, electricity had by the 1770s become a serious scientific subject, in large part because of work being done in Philadelphia. The Leyden jar, an early capacitor, could store an electrical charge for the first time. Benjamin Franklin’s experiments had demonstrated that lightning was electrical, that charge moved in identifiable directions, and that the phenomenon could be harnessed. The lightning rod, invented in 1752, was one of the first practical applications of electrical knowledge anywhere in the world. Electricity was the frontier science of the era, important and unmistakable, with implications no one yet fully understood.

This was the technological frontier. The leaders we revere were not bystanders to it. Many were right at the forefront.

Franklin’s Philadelphia

The clearest example is Benjamin Franklin, and his city was Philadelphia.

Franklin came up as a printer. By his thirties he was operating one of the largest print shops in the colonies on Market Street, and he had built something more important than a single business. He had built a network. Franklin established a chain of partner printers across the colonies, sharing capital, content, and distribution arrangements. He was running, in effect, a colonial media platform decades before there was a colonial identity to serve.

That print network sat on top of a second infrastructure Franklin also built. As Deputy Postmaster General for the colonies in 1753 and later the first Postmaster General of the United States in 1775, Franklin redesigned mail routes, professionalized the carriers, and dramatically reduced delivery times across the colonies. The American Revolution was logistically possible because Franklin had spent twenty years building the rails. The Committees of Correspondence rode on his roads.

He did not stop there. In 1743 he founded the American Philosophical Society, the first scientific society in the colonies, which still operates from a building on the same square as Independence Hall. He helped establish the Library Company of Philadelphia. His electrical experiments earned him the Copley Medal from the Royal Society and made him one of the most famous scientists in the world. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the flexible urinary catheter, and he famously refused to patent any of them. He believed knowledge should circulate.

Washington and Jefferson

George Washington’s technological work is less obvious and perhaps underappreciated.

Washington’s first profession was surveying. He understood terrain as data. As commander of the Continental Army, he personally directed the Culper Spy Ring, one of the most sophisticated intelligence networks of the eighteenth century. It used dead drops, codenames, a numerical code with several hundred entries, and a sympathetic stain developed by James Jay (brother of John Jay). Washington’s correspondence with his handler, Benjamin Tallmadge, shows a man thinking carefully about source protection, signal integrity, and operational security. The modern CISO would recognize the discipline immediately.

At Mount Vernon, Washington was a relentless experimenter with crop rotation, soil chemistry, plow designs, and threshing equipment. His sixteen-sided treading barn at Dogue Run Farm was an engineered solution to a labor problem. And in 1777 he made one of the most consequential technological decisions of the war. He ordered the entire Continental Army to be inoculated against smallpox. It was one of the first large-scale uses of inoculation in military history, and it preserved an army that was on the edge of collapse.

Thomas Jefferson’s case of being a technologist of the era is the easiest to prove. Monticello was his forty-year engineering project. He designed or refined the dumbwaiter, an automated double-door system, a swivel chair, and a polygraph, a letter-copying machine that allowed him to keep simultaneous copies of his correspondence. He designed the wheel cipher, a cryptographic device so well-conceived that the U.S. Navy independently reinvented and used it as the M-94 into the 1940s. As Secretary of State, Jefferson personally reviewed the first patent applications submitted in the United States. He was, in effect, the country’s first patent examiner.

These were not hobbies. They were the substance of how Jefferson thought about the world.

And David Rittenhouse

The pattern was not limited to Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia astronomer and instrument maker who lived a few blocks from where the CIO Initiative Summit will convene this September, was both a leader of the founding era and one of its working technologists.

Rittenhouse was a self-taught clockmaker by his early twenties, and in his forties he was building astronomical instruments that rivaled those made in Europe. His orreries, mechanical models of the solar system that calculated planetary positions accurately across thousands of years, were considered marvels of the age. Thomas Jefferson called him “second to no astronomer living.” In 1769 he led the colonial observation of the Transit of Venus, contributing measurements that helped scientists calculate the distance from Earth to the Sun.

He was also a public servant in the fullest sense. He served in the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference of 1775, helped draft the Pennsylvania state constitution in 1776, and was Pennsylvania’s State Treasurer through most of the Revolution. He served as Vice President of the state’s Council of Safety. After the war he succeeded Franklin as President of the American Philosophical Society. In 1792, George Washington appointed him the first Director of the U.S. Mint.

Ultimately, Rittenhouse was a leader whose technical work and political work were not separable. We will take a closer look at his life in a future article in this series.

What This Means for the Technology Executive Today

If the founders were technologists, the implications for our time are worth sitting with.

The technology executive in 2026 is not a new kind of figure. The CIO, the CISO, and the CTO are continuations of a tradition that runs through Franklin’s print network, Washington’s intelligence operation, Jefferson’s cipher, and Rittenhouse’s instruments. They are doing recognizable work, not novel work. Building infrastructure. Designing systems. Securing communications. Governing new tools. Bringing technical judgment into the room where decisions are made.

This matters because the modern technology executive is sometimes treated, by themselves or by others, as an adjunct to leadership rather than a form of it. History pushes back on that framing. The founders did not delegate technology to specialists while they got on with the serious work of governance. The technology was the governance. Franklin’s postal reforms made coordinated political resistance possible. Washington’s spy network helped win battles. Jefferson’s patent administration shaped the economic structure of the new country.

The technology executive today carries the same weight, and the same opportunity. The work is the work. It always has been.

A Closing Thought

In September, when C-level technology executives gather in Philadelphia for The CIO Initiative® Summit, they will be a few blocks from Independence Hall, where the political work of the founding got done. They will also be near Rittenhouse Square, named for the astronomer and instrument maker whose work happened in parallel. The walk between the two is short.

Philadelphia made the founding possible because both kinds of work were happening in the same city, often in the same buildings, often inside the same minds. That is worth remembering as we gather there ourselves.

Stay with us for more on Rittenhouse, and on a contemporary of his whose story is less told, in a future piece.