“Innovation is much more characteristic of America than any other modern society,” Harold Evans said. “It’s not resources or population or land mass. Many societies have those. It’s this particular, almost frontier like quality of adventurousness, mobility, optimism. This eagerness for change.” While Mr. Evans acknowledges that other countries have noteworthy economic histories, he forcefully argues that there is something unique in the American march toward progress.

His boyish enthusiasm for the subject has manifest itself in his recently published book, “They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, Two Centuries of Innovations.” It’s a glossy, but superbly written survey of the most important innovators in this country.

It’s comforting to know that even a writer as seasoned as Sir Harold – he was knighted for his services to journalism and voted the greatest all-time newspaper editor by British journalists- gets a little giddy when talking about the good reviews his book has received.

“One of the motivating forces in writing this book was to bring into the foreground innovators who have been lost to history,” he said. “I hope that these innovators will get the attention they may not have had in their lifetime.”

The story of a New York character like Edwin Howard Armstrong, for example, is one that Mr. Evans champions with intensity. “Armstrong gave us FM radio and basically the technology to speak to the moon, to call on a cell phone. That man took his own life at the River House and provokes almost no name recognition in New York,” he said. “Everybody knows about, or thinks they know, about Ford or Edison. But Armstrong is in their ranks.”

Mr. Evans set out to write “They Made America” after spending 12 years on his previous book “The American Century,” a popular political history of this county from 1889 to 1989. That book was trigger, he says, to take a closer look at the lives of the individuals who contributed to modern society within the commercial, rather than political, sphere.

“No one had done the 200 years of the people who gave us electricity. Going back to its most elemental: life, liberty, and happiness depends on having wheat in the fields,” he said. “The mobility of America depends on John Finch, Robert Fulton, Theodore Judah, and Henry Ford.”

A 1956 program, intended to introduce European journalists stateside, brought Mr. Evans here and sparked his interest in America. “I’d come, basically, out of the air raid shelters of the Battle of Britain, from a country where the meat ration could still be put inside an envelope. I opened a refrigerator on West 23rd street where I was putting up with a friend, and there were tectonic layers of steak. Huge bottles of orange juice. It was an extraordinary shock.”

This sort of wonderment undoubtedly contributed to his energy for writing the history of a country that is not natively his own. Born in Manchester, England, in 1928, Mr. Evans is careful to avoid the self-serving claim that only a Brit could have written a book such as “They Made America.” “Cross-fertilization is a very striking feature of originality. The problems that had escaped somebody as a chemist are revealed to somebody as a doctor,” he says, citing the example of Dr. Raymond Damadian, who invented the MRI scan. “By the same token, somebody coming to a different society may see it differently. I don’t necessarily say that view is superior to anybody else’s.”

But putting nationality aside, it’s fair to believe that a journalist on the order of Mr. Evans would indeed have, if not a superior view, then at least an unusually perceptive view of his subject. From 1967 to 1981, Mr. Evans was the editor of London’s Sunday Times, then the editor of the Times from 1981 to 1982. During those years, he waged an investigative reporting campaign against the birth defect-causing drug thalidomide, for which he earned numerous accolades. From 1990 to 1997, he was president and publisher of Random House trade group. Following that, he was the editorial director and vice chairman of U.S. News & World Report, the New York Daily News, the Atlantic Monthly, and Fast Company until 1999. Mr. Evans is currently the editor-at-large of The Week magazine, and lives with his two children and his wife, Tina Brown, in Manhattan.

With his newspaperman days more or less behind him, Mr. Evans – who still reads six papers a day – confesses that he misses the daily grind on occasion: “I miss being an editor, or even a reporter, when I see something that ought to get attention and doesn’t. Instead I have the solace of the slow burn of history.”

But truth be told there is nothing slow about Mr. Evans. When he pops up from his chair to find a photo of his brother (to whom he dedicated his book) or to grab a book, he explodes like a sprinter at the sound of a gun. He speaks at a steady clip, wasting no words and making points with awesome fluidity.

This ability to synthesis major concepts into digestible bits and to move between them quickly is a gift that makes him a highly sought-after moderator of public discussions. Panels and debates moderated by Mr. Evans come with a near guarantee that they will be worth your time. No self-indulgent speakers. No speechifying questioners. No pit stops in dullsville whatsoever.

What’s his secret? “Two things in me -one a virtue and one a vice – coalesce. The virtue is curiosity, and the vice is impatience.”