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.
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