Hmmm... yes and no. Although there are quite a few genuine firsts in that list, it also takes the credit for some items that were already in common use but just not patented, or were frankly derivatives or developments from items invented earlier, elsewhere. - Power tools? Water Tower? England, industrial revolution. - Revolver? The Revolving Chambered Pistol was invented in London in the 1670's and featured a flintlock hammer, a single barrel and 4 rotating chambers. The six-shooter was also developed in the UK around 1810, but was still a flintlock and was nowhere near as sophisticated as the first American revolvers of 25 years later. - Human Genome Project? Francis and Crick got there first, in Cambridge, UK (OK, one of them was American). - The hearing aid is just another variation on an existing theme. - Frozen food was widely known amongst the Inuit. - The first Operating System and first computer are dodgy ones too, and could arguably go to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage respectively, in Britain. - The first artificial heart goes to Russia, 1937, sorry (albeit an experimental unit used in dogs). - Steam-Powered Pumping Station? I refer you to Newcomen's or Watts engine, which were used for pumping 40-80 years earlier. - Camera? Eastman was the inventor of photographic film, not of the camera. But the first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back to the Iraqi scientist Ibn al-Haytham in the 11th century. Other less relevant mistakes: Apple did not invent the modern GUI; Xerox PARC did.
I'm pretty sure that he posted the list link b/c he though the other guy was serious in his mockery. Besides, Wikipedia was invented in the US. =P
Very true! A lot of inventions the Americans claim are in fact from other people. Best example IMHO is the telephone which was invented by 4 people, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray which are all credited as inventors, but depending on the country other claims are made. Also the burgler Alarm was invented by a Swede but the invention got stolen (oh the irony). Thats just how it is in a competitive industrial society.
Excuse me? Those mofos stole their data from Rosalind Franklin, she deserves the credit for that. Also that was the discovery of how the DNA molecule was arranged not the makeup of the human genome. Science is cumulative, we build upon the foundations of previous generations and minds. Science knows no borders and owes nothing to nationality.
$39.99. That's awfully expensive. A pistol holster would have been more sensible. A senior wouldn't have much stability when firing a pump-action shotgun in the sitting position on a mattress.
Didn't she just figure out how to find the % water in a cell or somesuch which they used with their x-ray diffraction? And it's Francis Crick and James Watson who found the double helical nature of DNA. The Human Genome Project was a project to completely map the human genome (go figure) not find DNA itself. Maybe Colt got inspiration from such firearms, but then we can trace back every invention to either nature or the neandertals if we really wanted to, everybody gets inspiration from their elders in some way or another. Bit of a difference between artificial freezing of foods and throwing the fish outside and packing snow around it the artificial heart I'll concede, i saw that frankenstein movie. freaky stuff. The steam powered engine's were created earlier, i agree. Except there was one difference...The earlier models Exploded!!!! The first computer was not developed by Babbage, srry. Considering we're nitpicking things The first computer is the abacus, probably the ones the Babylonians created a few thousand years ago. If that doesn't do it for you, how about the Antikythera mechanism from Greece. Hehe this is fun, my wikipedia vs. your encyclopedia Britannica
I stand corrected. I should at least have mentioned Rosie, as she is one of my favorite scientists. Francis and Crick discovered the helix structure, but they could not have done it without her. However they did not actually steal the data from her (contrary to the myth), and she did get acknowledgment of her unpublished data in their paper. The Human Genome project is an inevitable development in the field, not an invention. No, her data actually went quite some way in discovering the DNA structure. Rosie could have got there first, possibly, but she was not given to building theoretical models. She preferred hard evidence to lead theory, rather than to follow it. The principle had already been invented. The rest is just technological development. Not really. An abacus or calculator is not a computer. Remember, a computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions. A calculator is a device for performing calculations. As such an abacus is not a computer. The Antikythera mechanism also does not qualify; it was a calculating device, or technically an elaborate sextant. To consider what an ancient computer would have looked like, A.K. Dewdney once published an article in the Scientific American about the archeological remains of a rope-and-pulley based logic-gate structure discovered in Polynesia (An ancient rope-and-pulley computer is unearthed in the jungle of Apraphul, Computer Recreations, Scientific American, 1988 (April) 118-122). The find was described as wooden boxes each of which contained a variety of simple pulley and lever mechanisms so that pulling on ropes entering a box at one end would result in a pull or lengthening of ropes exiting the box. Depending on the number of ropes entering or leaving the box and the mechanisms therein, logic gate behaviours were recreated (I have the article somewhere, with illustrations of AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates, and an inverter. They are really quite simple and really work). By tying a bunch of boxes together by their ropes, more elaborate functions could be achieved. Now before you get all excited, the article was an April Fool's joke: such a find was never made. However it does describe a feasible, working, programmable computer consisting basically of rope-and-pulley mechanisms. That is a computer. An abacus is a calculator.
your definition proves that calculators are computers and vise versa. A computer takes an input, manipulates the datum, and gives an output. Aka what is 1 + 1? answer 2. oh sure, computers now can do more than just computation, but at the lowest level, a computer is still a calculator. Thats why computer engineering and computer science contains so much math The principle for everything has been created if you really think about it. you can take the most advanced object of our time and trace it back to prehistory; language, fire, toolmaking are probably the three basic things that everything is extrapolated from. so we may as well abolish the patent system, since everything in theory is an infringement on a previous work
Ah, no. First, calculus is only a small subset of math. Second, a computer is a device for performing logical operations on any information that can be expressed in binary values. The operations are fundamentally based in logic --mathematical operations are therefore possible in that they are derivations of logic. Not really. Take the frozen food example. The idea of freezing food to extend its shelf life is an old one, practiced by many tribes living in cold regions. The freezing device (a fridge/freezer) is a relatively new invention. The principle existed, but the technology is new.
On the contrary, Newcomen's steam engines were used to drive pumps in England in the early 1700s. While horribly inefficient (less than 1%), they worked with a noticeable lack of explosions.
You guys know this whole thing is fake, right? Well, they might actually be selling the product, but all of the information on their page is completely wrong. Over 100 million homes in America have a shotgun? About three in four? I don't think so.
Yeah, that number does seem more than a bit high. I would believe that there are over 100 million shotguns owned by private citizens in America, but that's because there are a lot of people who own more than one. For instance, Grandpa (who hunts) owns two shotguns, and three or four rifles, everything from a .22 to a .303 Ross rifle that was used in World War 1.
Yup that is how all of us Americans are. We iz unedumacated hillbillys driven ar big trucs and killin them verman. Is this all you people do all day, try to find stuff to make fun of us about? Oh, and the website is a joke, but that wouldn't matter any ways cause thats how we all are...right?
