A question for you before we meet today's very interesting guest.

What is the one building the British didn't burn down when they sacked Washington?

You know the White House is white because of the British, right?

It used to be the presidential mansion, and it was this horrid, cadaverous gray color. It was kind of a beige, cinder block

monstrosity. Frankly, I was kind of glad when they burned it down, which the British did during

the war of 1812, when they put much of the capital to the torch. When we Americans took back

Washington, we painted the presidential

mansion white to gloss over its unseemly scorch marks, hence the White House. When I was a staffer in

Congress, one of the stories that we like to tell constituents was that you could still see bullet holes in

the Capitol from when the British sacked Washington, which in retrospect, I think, was probably a lie. Sorry about that, if you were ever on one of my

tours. I say it was probably a lie because the British didn't really invade Washington, D.C.

They just strolled right in after our government fled. There wasn't an armed resistance.

So if they fired shots at the

Capitol, they did it for fun, not because politicians from Kentucky were taking pot shots at them

from the windows or anything like that. But they did burn down Congress and the Treasury. In the War of

1812, the British systematically burned down all of our young

republic's government buildings, save one. They refrained from burning down one government building

in the capital. What was it? The U.S. Patent Office. The first superintendent of the Patent Office was a very smart man, Dr. William Thornton, quite the polymath. He studied medicine and Edinburgh, became an American citizen, and with no formal architectural education, became the designer of the Capitol Building, and he was an inventor, for which he was

appointed the first superintendent of the Patent Office by President Jefferson.

When the British invaded and the Red Coats strutted around the defeated rebel capital

of the so-called United States, lighting fire to any and all significant buildings, this guy,

Dr. William Thornton, stayed behind in the city, and he ran out of the patent office and

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