this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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What are world-changing creations made by a country other than the US? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Glowstick@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[โ€“] GMac@feddit.org 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] executivechimp@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the internet.

[โ€“] GMac@feddit.org -4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] treadful@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago

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.