this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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Asklemmy
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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