American Inventions
I asked the question 鈥淲hat has America Ever Invented?鈥?and the answers I got back were interesting but mostly after a little studying I found wrong. Some inventions that were mentioned as American are listed below and their true inventors listed: -
1)Telephone - The Inventor is still in dispute between Antonio Meucci (Italian living in Havanna), Johann Philipp Reis (German), Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish) and Elisha Gray (Illinois).
2)Light Bulb 鈥?Joseph W.Swan (British).
3)Transistor 鈥?John Robinson Pierce (Yes, American).
4)Cotton Gin 鈥?Eli Whitney (American again), more famous for his invention of manufacturing muskets by machine.
5)Space Travel 鈥?Developed in America by many nationalities, the first moon buggy was actually invented by a Filipino and he based it on the Philippines Jeepney.
6)Atom Bomb 鈥?James Franck & Gustav Hertz (Germans)
7)Mashed Potatoes 鈥?Actually American English and a piped version (Pommes Duchesse) is French.
8)French Fries 鈥?French way of cooking the English Chips
9)Mass Production 鈥?The idea came from Venice several hundred years before Henry Ford.
10)Silly Putty 鈥?Scientific Accident made by James Wright (American)
11)Hamburgers 鈥?Dated back to the 12th century. Definatly not an American Invention.
12)Seat Belts 鈥?George Cayley (English).
13)Integrated Circuit or Microchip 鈥?Geoffrey W, A Dummer (English concept).
14)Disc Drive 鈥?David Paul Gregg (American)
15)Henry Ford Model 鈥淭鈥?鈥?See Mass Production
16)Steamboat 鈥?Jonathan Hulls (English)
17)Peanut Butter (Pre-Columbian Mayan & Aztec of Mexico).
18)Post-It Notes 鈥?Accidental Discovery by Spencer Silver & Art Fry (Americans).
19)Liquid Paper 鈥?Bette Nesmith Graham (Texas), Mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees pop group.
20)Coca Cola 鈥?Undisputedly American.
Did you even realise that most of these were not American inventions at all ??????????.. Most of the best known inventions like the light bulb, the telephone, mass production came from ideas that had been around for decades. The light bulb began it's life fifty or more years before Swan or Edison and included trials by English and Canadian inventors (Swan was a Scotsman). What made it possible for Swan and Edison was the invention of a really effective vacuum pump in the 1870s - don't ask me by whom.
The telephone was similar - it was an idea whose time had come. Strictly speaking the Gray and Bell telephones were different inventions because they worked on different principles. I don't know what principles the Meucci telephone used.
In the 1780s the Swiss chemist Ami Argand developed a really effective and trouble free oil lamp to light his brandy distillery in the south of France. It had a cylindrical wick made of relatively thin cloth instead of rope. At the same time other inventors in Sweden and Paris came up with improved oil lamps using flat ribbons of similar cloth. The ideas came about because the discovery of oxygen in about 1774 revolutionised the understanding of combustion after a few years.
Kerosene was invented by Abraham Gesner of Nova Scotia in about 1847 while living in Boston, Ma. and by James Young in England a few months later. Gesner made his kerosene from asphalt, Young distilled oil found seeping into a coal mine. A few years later Ignacy Lukasiewicz in Poland also prepared something very like kerosene from Carpathian Mountains oil. He worked independently of Gesner and Young though he may have read about them.
One of the least known but most prolific inventors of the 19th century was Henry Sutton of Ballarat in Australia. When he read of Bell's telephone he said something like "Why didn't I think of that?" and immediately produced many different telephones working on different principles. Sutton also developed a "telephane" which was the forerunner of the wirephoto, the fax and television. Sutton took few patents and is therefore largely forgotten.
Many important inventions are virtually simultaneous, the best example I know being Elisha Gray and A.G. Bell but another good example is the cinema camera by Edison and the Lumiere Brothers in France. The modern cinema camera and projector is based more on the Lumiere type because they included a slack loop that reduced breakage of the film. The cinema camera came about because of the development of sufficiently sensitive film.
From about 1890 on inventors in France, Germany and England were trying to make a wireless telegraphy system. The most successful was by a young Italian called Marconi. When he arrived in England in 1895 he had to call his system "Improvements in Wireless telegraphy" because other inventors had beaten him to the British Patent Office. the reason americans get credit for these inventions is because they were the first to get the patent on them! some legitimate american inventions:
1) the traffic light - black man but can't remember his name
2) the voting machine
3) the auto load system used in guns that was then applied to business
4) the brake - invented on wagon going west
5) the bicycle
6) the electric clock by henry warren from boston
7) open heart surgery
8) the telegraph
9) the polio vaccine
10) the artificial heart
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