Georgia: Top Inventions
Georgia was the 13th and final British colony in America, chartered in 1732 by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for England's debtors.
The last of the 13
Georgia was the 13th and final British colony in America, chartered in 1732 by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state against Spanish Florida and a fresh start for England's debtors. Two hundred ninety years later, its airport moves more people than any other on the planet and its port runs the largest single container terminal in North America.
Most states are known for one thing, but not Georgia. Here’s what 300 years of building looks like...
Atlanta
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International has been the busiest airport in the world for most of the last two decades, moving roughly 96M passengers a year through a single facility. It's the reason Delta headquarters sits fifteen minutes away and the reason Atlanta became a logistics hub in the first place.
Almost 70% of every card transaction in the country routes through the metro area's payments companies, a corridor locals nicknamed Transaction Alley. Eighteen Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here, more than every state except a handful of the largest in the country. The airport came first. Everything else followed.
Savannah
Oglethorpe landed his first colonists on a bluff above the Savannah River in 1733 and laid the city out in a grid of public squares that's still there today, one of the earliest planned cities in America. Today the Port of Savannah runs Garden City Terminal, the third-busiest container facility in the United States and the largest single container terminal in North America. Georgia's ports support more than 605,000 jobs and generate $181 billion in annual revenue. A city Oglethorpe designed for debtors and defense now moves a meaningful share of everything America imports.
Athens
Athens never produced any gods, but it did produce two of the most influential bands of the '80s.
A University of Georgia art school party in a church in 1977 turned into the B-52s. A few years later, four University of Georgia students formed a band in a converted church of their own and called it R.E.M. Both bands came out of the same few blocks of a small college town, at nearly the same time, without any music industry infrastructure to explain why.
Athens never stopped being a college town. It just proved that a college town with enough weird, bored, talented people in one place can export culture the same way Atlanta exports payments infrastructure.
Inventions
In 1980, Ted Turner launched CNN out of Atlanta as the first 24-hour television news network. The industry called it a gamble. Within a decade it was the channel the world turned to when something big happened, and every news network since has been built on the model it proved.
Coca-Cola came out of a Columbus pharmacy in 1886 and became the most recognized brand on the planet. Delta grew out of a crop-dusting operation founded in Macon in 1925 to fight the boll weevil, and became the largest airline in the world by revenue. Waffle House opened its first location in Avondale Estates in 1955, built by two neighbors, Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner, who wanted a restaurant that never closed. It's now open 24 hours a day at more than 1,900 locations and has become the informal barometer FEMA uses to gauge storm damage. Seriously, it’s called The Waffle House Index, look it up.
Four completely different inventions, a century and a half apart, and every one of them changed how the rest of the country lives.
A colony built for debtors turned into a state that moves more air passengers, more cargo containers, and more card transactions than almost anywhere else in the country. Three hundred years later, Georgia is still building whatever comes next. If you're building too, Roots is where founders, investors, and talent find each other.
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