And i just realized i have to remove my item from my own list, because the wright brothers flight was more than 100 years ago

Gun Powder and Paper were invented/discovered in China.

While no one person or entity invented Algebra, the first time it was ever conceived as an independent organized science was in Bagdad, when it was a Persian city.

The battery was invented in Italy.

Again while it evolved over time a scientist in China is credited as discovering the cure for Malaria.

WAY longer than 100 years ago.

Ahh I missed that identifier.

Nokia phones (Finland)

That’s not nearly on the same level. The first commercially successful cell phone was the dynatac 8000, a phone made by an American and in the American market

Have you tried to destroy a Nokia 3310?. Case closed.

Nokia was the first mobile phone manufacturer to include a game (snake) on their phone.

Finland also invented the sport of mobile phone throwing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_throwing

Check mate, USA!

High speed rail is usually credited to Japan.

Even if so, that’s not on the same level. That’s just a continuously advancing technology, not a particular creation. The level I’m talking about would be the creation of rail road technology altogether.

It does begin to feel a bit like you’re moving the goal posts for what you consider “world-changing” as you comment more on this post. If the first man in space and high speed rail are “just incremental progress”, then why do rock music and AI count for you? Everything humans have ever done is accomplished incrementally using the accomplishments of prior human ingenuity.

Sputnik, Vostok, the artificial heart, multi-stage rocketry, and space rovers were all invented by the Soviets.

First satellite! Yes! Great one!

As for the rest, they don’t meet the criteria. I don’t know what vostok is and a web search doesn’t show anything. And the others aren’t on the same level of world-changing, even though they’re extremely important and impressive

Vostok 1 was the capsule that contained Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. All of these were critical advancements in space flight and science. What is the criterion for “world changing” that doesn’t include the numerous critical advancements in space?

Again, first satellite! Great example! And an absolute first achievement in rocketry!

First man in space is close, but it’s not as world changing, more of a synthetic goal post that was reached. There’s no actual border between space vs not space, it’s just a synthetic line we drew arbitrarily at exactly 100 km.

But a satellite is an altogether different thing. That’s the first thing humans ever pushed up that didn’t immediately fall back to earth after it stopped being pushed upward. A true and massive achievement, and that achievement created brand new world-changing technologies in communications, created breakthroughs in almost all branches of sciences, changed how we humans live through gps, and all the zillion other world-changing advanced that flowed as a direct immediate consequence

Surviving in space and successfully returning from orbit is absolutely an incredible achievement that spurred on the space race.

I agree, but it’s not a world-changing breakthrough. There had previously been humans extremely high up, but they just didn’t cross above the synthetic threshold we randomly drew

EDIT

Nope, i was totally wrong. I did some reading and it’s clear that Yuri’s flight was absolutely world-changing

That’s why I am asking what counts as “world-changing,” as most people would consider the first man in space to be world-changing.

Especially considering that Yuri Gagarin’s flight inspired generations of people all over the world after him to a probably immeasurable extent. If the OP wanted “global society-altering”, then that certainly qualifies.

I did some reading and learned a bunch of stuff, and now i see that you’re right and I’m wrong. Yuri’s first spaceflight does in fact totally qualify, completely. I was under the misunderstanding thinking that he was the first to cross the synthetic goal line into space but i assumed that previous attempts were close-ish but not quite to the same altitude. Nope. I just learned that he DEMOLISHED the previous altitude record by an order of magnitude, 32 km vs 320 km, and that all previous flights were using atmosphere conditions to power their flight. You’re totally right, Vostok1 was a totally world-changing achievement

LEDs - Japan

Quantum physics - international but Germany is fair attribution early on

As you indicated, most recent advances in manufacturing - Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea

China’s recent battery tech I think could be amazing, and I wouldn’t lump that under manufacturing. This is the biggest imho.

GLP-1 (we’ll see where this goes) - Denmark but also USA

We’re definitely still missing so many :)

LEDs invented, yeah i think that meets the mark, good one.

There's a Brazilian saying, "Catapulta não é motor" ("catapult isn't an engine"). While the Wright brothers surely contributed with substantial knowledge to the field of aviation, airplanes are a Brazilian invention, invented by Alberto Santos-Dumont.

There's even a joke only Brazilians (or non-Brazilian people very knowledgeable of the cultural uniqueness across Brazilian regions) could readily understand: one of the major proofs that airplanes are Brazilian is the naming "TREM de pouso" (landing gear). For context: Santos-Dumont was born in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a state very known for its unique accent and dialects such as using "trem" (train) for "thing", as in "pode pegá ess-trem fazenfavô?" being "Mineirês" for "Posso pegar essa coisa, por gentileza?" ("can I have this thing, please?"), so whenever something lacks a proper name/definition, Mineiros (those born and/or living in the state of Minas Gerais) are very likely to call it a "trem" (e.g. "eita trem bão", "oh, what a nice/good thing!"). Source: I'm Brazilian and also been residing in the state of Minas Gerais.

!asklemmy@lemmy.ml

The wright brothers absolutely were “standing on the shoulders of giants”, but they were the first to create heavier-than-air flight.

The main contribution of the Wright brothers is the controls used on aviation (pitch, yaw and roll). About being the first, Santos-Dumont is recognized by Fédération Aéronautique Internationale as the first flight with witnesses. Splitting hairs here, the english word “airplane” is less specific than the french word “avion”. All avion are airplanes, but to be an avion the machine needs to be able to take off and land by its own means, and that’s the point where the first flight of the Wright brothers are missing. And as they kept secrecy on what they were doing, we don’t know exactly when they introduced each innovation on their machines. But to me, that doesn’t matter much actually. Heavier-than-air flights are more like a collective effort IMHO with the Wright brothers, Santos-Dumont and many others contributing to create the aviation.

The thing is that we created the UN to stop doing this stupid nationalism thing. We wanted to create an organizational structure to facilitate work with other nations to develop advancements together.

Lol

Somewhat small, but I’d say one of the most useful inventions that is used by literally everyone…the ballpoint pen was invented in Argentina.

Humble invention but i think that counts!

The Web was invented by an Englishman working in Switzerland.

That’s a powerful one. Great example.

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.

daysoftheweek.org/history-of-the-weekend

Social security is way older than 100 years.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_spending

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)

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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telephone

en.wikipedia.org/…/History_of_magnetic_resonance_…

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

My apprehensions are fine thanks. You’re just not looking very hard.

Inventor of the television - John Logie Baird en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird

Inventor of the telephone - Alexander Graham Bell 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…

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.

The wheelie bin

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 working tinkering on the residential electrical system.

origins of wifi started in australia… the centre differential , black box recorders, cochlear implants, the pacemaker, rotary clotheslines, spray on skin

…goon of fortune…

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.

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 blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/super-galapagos

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.

Australia invented WiFi.

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

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 - techhistorylab.com/complete-history-of-cpp-from-1…

Dvd was a multi-national creation - see history section 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 - 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. 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. 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 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Juul_Holst and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucagon-like_peptide-1 and 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.

What? No. Nuclear weapons were made directly by the American government (The Manhattan Project), lead by an American scientist (Oppenheimer), directed by an American general of the US army corps of Engineers (Leslie Groves), and assisted by top level scientists that included some immigrant American citizens (such as Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

And omg, blues is not from Africa. It is FAMOUSLY a creation that originated in America.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues

Obviously everything that’s created builds on things that already exist, but that doesn’t mean nothing is a new creation. That’s a silly argument.

Mexico: first oral contraceptive