Chattanooga got a shout out of the highest kind last week. We’ve received a very public at-a-boy from none other than the President Barack Obama.
Just as we were praised in the late 1990s for transforming the city from the nation’s “dirtiest” to one of the cleanest air cities, we now are being praised again for pioneering our way to building America’s first citywide, high-speed fiber network with gigabit-per-second Internet speed.
“It’s unleashing a tornado of innovation — the city is even testing out futuristic technologies like 3-D holograms,” the president said Wednesday in a Cedar Falls, Iowa, speech previewing this week’s State of the Union address. “And here’s what [Chattanooga’s] former mayor said ‘It’s like being the first city to have fire. We don’t know all of the things we can do with it yet.'”
It’s not just words. It’s the future. We just have to look to history to remind us how innovation changes things: In the 1920s and the 1930s, plenty of folks — leaders included — questioned why we were wasting time and money to build dams and power lines for the “luxury” of electricity. And then, as now, we didn’t know all the things we would do with electricity either.
For two days last week (and probably a few more days this week as the president stumps his broadband Internet expansion piece during his State of Union address Tuesday), President Obama lifted up Chattanooga as a model for the country. In a White House video, Obama holds up his iPad to show a graph with Chattanooga and two other cities towering above all other U.S. cities in broadband speed and innovation.