Almost all the global society-altering creations i can think of FROM THE PAST 100 YEARS are from America. I highly doubt that’s true, so I’m looking for counter-examples.
To clarify, I’m looking for items on the level of:
- the internet
- rock music
- nuclear weapons
- ai
airplane flight(older than 100 years)
And clearly I’m not just including things that improved the world.
The best ones i can think of are (I think):
Rocketry (Germany)?- Cheap tech manufacturing (Asian countries)?
EDIT:
Actually rocketry has been around much longer than 100 years. Even the category of “modern rocketry” begins in the late 1800s. Source: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/TRC/Rockets/history_of_rockets.html
EDIT 2:
A further explanation of what level I’m talking about.
There has to be a clear before and after, and it has to directly and quickly effect most of the world. For example the Internet. There’s life before the internet, and there’s life after the internet, which are both very different.
As opposed to for example if someone makes a groundbreaking foundational research discovery that effects the entire realm of their field of study, but doesn’t quickly and directly create a difference in most people’s lives, then it doesn’t fit the category.
Universal free health care.
Absolutely! Fantastic one! Truly a society-altering creation!
Depending on the exact definitions, that’s also more than 100 years old.
The US is just THAT far behind on the topic.
Here are some.
- Antibiotics (Germany)
- Bluetooth (Denmark)
- C++ (Denmark)
- DVD (Japan)
- Electric clock (UK)
- Graphene (Canada)
- Helicopter (Russia)
- Linux (Finland)
- Penicillin (Scotland)
- TNT (Sweden)
- Wegovy (Denmark)
Penicillin IS an antibiotic. They aren’t two different things. But yes, that’s a fantastic one.
Bluetooth, although not quite on the same level as i was asking about, still is a decent one to list.
C++ was created by a dane, but was created by an American company in America - https://techhistorylab.com/complete-history-of-cpp-from-1979-to-today/
Dvd was a multi-national creation - see history section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD
Electric clock is over 100 years
Graphene is a cool material with a lot of potential but so far isn’t close to changing the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene
Helicopter is a good one. Interestingly it was a step-wise multinational evolution, but which doesn’t seem to include the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter
Linux is made by an American as a personal project for himself while he was in Finland for a few years. Definitely not a Finnish creation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
TNT is over 100 years
Wegovy wasn’t created by a Dane, but glp-1 was first discovered by a dane. Discovering it is obviously a crucial first step, but that’s an entirely different thing than turning it into a medication which happened decades later by other people. See history sections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Juul_Holst and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucagon-like_peptide-1 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaglutide
If you nitpick your own suggestions the same way, you’ll find that nuclear weapons were made by Germans in America and that rock music is a rip off of blues which is from Africa, and so on.
All inventions are based on knowledge that comes from somewhere else. It’s the exchange of knowledge that pushes inventions forward. It is very rarely the country of where that person had his or her ass situated at the time of the patent application that caused the invention.
Linux (the Kernel) was started by Linus Torvalds. He is still Finnish citizen and holds the US citizenship since 2010. So I would clearly say it’s a Finnish invention. Or citing your source: “Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel.”
All of them? The fuck is this American exceptionalist bullshit, lol.
I don’t understand how a few of you are so completely misunderstanding this post. I’m literally asking for specific examples that are counter to my current understanding which i assumed was wrong, specifically so that i could learn a LESS biased us-centric view.
But frankly, overall y’all didn’t do a great job, and I’m somewhat disappointed. There were a small number of HUGE ones people listed which were fantastic examples, but a lot of people listed a TON of incorrect items that when i looked it up turned out not to be from the country they claimed, or obviously weren’t on the same world-changing level as the topic was about, or were over 100 years old.
I’m literally asking for information to learn to be LESS us-centric
My b
the weekend, social security and free time for workers.
Origins of the weekend are over 100 years. And the sources I can find place the modern concept of the weekend either as coming from America or as developing concurrently in multiple countries.
https://daysoftheweek.org/history-of-the-weekend
Social security is way older than 100 years.
Sorry but i dont think America has given the world all that much in he grand scheme of things. 100 years seems an arbitrarily short timeline - even my local pub would be a long way from qualifying for that.
Arpanet was American, leveraging a lot of research, particularly from the UK and France. The internet though? you have the thank a Brit for that; Tim Berners-Lee was responsible for the birth of the interconnected hyperlinked network we called the internet.
The US did however invent many other recent and society altering things like enshittification, the rot economy, surveillance capitalism, felony contempt of business model, fake taxis, fake hotels, the billionaire class, and social media, the privatised prison system and its legalised slave labour force, and Epstein island. I’m sure i could think of more if i put my mind to it.
For some things invented elsewhere you could start in Scotland.
Some of these will predate 1926, but pretty much all are still pretty important in daily life.Scots invented television, the telephone, mri machines, refrigerators, mammal cloning, penicillin, disposable contact lenses, ATM machines, colour photography, the flushing toilet and the s-bend that stops it stinking, hypodermic syringes, steam engines, fingerprinting, vacuum flasks, pneumatic tyres, tarmac, and lightbulbs.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the internet.
I think we have a semantic disagreement there. The world wide web was another term for the global interconnected network also know as the internet. Arpanet wasn’t scalable to the internet until Tim’s work.
But if that’s your only point of dispute with my comment i think we think more in common than we disagree.
The World Wide Web is Hypertext and the Hypertext protocol. The Internet is the network it runs on. It’s not just semantics. The WWW is not interchangeable with the Internet.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented TCP/IP, which is the primary protocol of the Internet. And the physical network derives from APRANET, which are all American.
Regarding your last paragraph list, you seem to be under major misapprehensions. I looked through the initial 3 items and none of them were invented by a scot, and so there was no reason to even check the rest.
And of those 3 I looked into, they all either had multiple countries involved in its creation, all of which had Americans as prime participants, and or had Americans as the sole originator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telephone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging
My apprehensions are fine thanks. You’re just not looking very hard.
Inventor of the television - John Logie Baird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird
Inventor of the telephone - Alexander Graham Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
On the MRI - per the wikipedia link you posted but may not have read thoroughly. “During the 1970s, a team led by John Mallard built the first full-body MRI scanner at the University of Aberdeen.” I’ll grant I could have been more specific.
If you want to argue invention exists at the point of theory instead of physical creation, then i suspect you will struggle find much that wasn’t posited, theorised, described or conceived in some way before America was colonised.
American exceptionalism is a thing…
Piggybacking on @GMac’s excellent comment, here’s some additional detail:
Alexander Fleming (Scottish) - penicillin
John Shepherd-Barron (English) - ATM (although this was a synthesis of many previous inventions/ concepts from other countries)
James Clerk Maxwell (Scot) - colour photography
Da Vinci (modern day Italy) - contact lenses
Alexander Cumming (scot) - S-bend
Various nationalities helped develop the internal combustion engine
Robert William Thomson (scot) - pneumatic tyre
Penicillin - fantastic one!
Atm - sure, i suppose it meets the criteria. Its not quite to the same level of societal change i was talking about, but it certainly did significantly change how people go about their day around the world. So it totally counts.
All the rest - are over 100 years old
But the penicillin one is ultra life-changing all around the world
Since many other comments have focused heavily on technological inventions, I think it makes sense to add some notable cultural impacts on society as well. As with most of the technological inventions mentioned, cultural forces also don’t come out of nowhere and arguably have been around for a lot longer than 100 years, but I think it’s pretty obvious that society within the past 100 years has been and still is being massively affected by the following concepts that did not originate in the USA:
- feminism
- civil rights movement (usually seen through a US-focused lens, but is happening everywhere)
- gay rights movement (esp. in the 1990’s and beyond)
- gender-spectrum concepts
- widespread influence of evolutionary theory (even the word “meme” came from a British biologist’s book about evolution)
All extremely important, but are all way older than 100 years, or have no single country that created it
Does the Linux kernel count? The very first versions where released while Linus Torvalds still studied in Finland.
RCDs, the first patents were from the 1900s from Germany and the US, but the first usable designs were build in the 1950s in South Africa and Germany.
Probably the device that has saved the most lives while
workingtinkering on the residential electrical system.I’ve looked into some things I could think of, and alot of them are partially invented by Americans or the first viable design was patented by an American…
For example: The interaction of light hitting something an creating electricity was first observed by someone from France, but the first viable design of a solar panel was patented by an American.
Similar for carbon fibers, or handheld power drills. Computer tomography was first realized by two people, one of them African-American.
Or the things where invented more than 100 years ago. (Cars, for example)
deleted by creator
Capilliary democracy,
or whatever it’s called that Deng Xioaping has introduced.I’m talking about layered elections + civic exams.
Liberal democracy has campaign fraud in it practically by design,
thus the will of the people becomes the will of the oligarchs right after every election,
and not even the will of domestic oligarchs for most countries.Marx’ idea of democracy hardly got off the ground.
Lenin’s idea of democracy had the unintended consequence of turning the General Secretary of the communist party as its most powerful position soon after he died.Gun Powder and Paper were invented/discovered in China.
WAY longer than 100 years ago.
Ahh I missed that identifier.
The wheelie bin
origins of wifi started in australia… the centre differential , black box recorders, cochlear implants, the pacemaker, rotary clotheslines, spray on skin
Invented in Japan in 1999, i-mode is a remarkable technology for connecting mobile devices to a wide range of web services.
It’s well-known in Japan that this invention, not the iPhone, was the first to enable games, email, emojis, and selfies on mobile devices.
I believe that the Japanese girls of the early 2000s who created this culture are the greatest hackers who shaped the smartphone era.
Super Galapagos - Matt Alt’s Pure Invention https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/super-galapagos
