So the Chinese invented the electrical system? Steam power? Internal combustion? Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, nuclear power, the radio tube, transistor, computer, cell phone? The telescope, microscope? They discovered bacteria, viruses, penicillin? The airplane?
Many centuries ago Chinese invented gun powder, but there is no evidence Europeans learned from them. Roger Bacon in England discovered it independently. Arabs invented the abacus. But that is about is. You can point to a few other things. Both cultures went stagnant many centuries ago, while the west has remade the world, and continues to do so.
The reason people like you are so dangerous is that, being totally ignorant of the accomplishments of our culture you will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I do not predict a Dark Age without good reason.
You've got a lot of this wrong, but it is fun for everyone to see where your head is.
The reason that white males invented many things is not superiority in intellect or ability. It is cultural opportunity and economics.
In the pre-renaissance, the Catholic Church and the Arabic world saved much of the ancient learning including medicine, botany, astronomy, geometry, chemistry, etc. The Dark Ages, which only lasted for about 1000 years, largely came about because of the suppression of learning by the Christian Church, run by...you guessed it...a lot of white men.
It was the trips to the orient and the dawning of the age of humanism that unlocked many of the 'secrets' of the East, including gunpowder. Your supposition is silly that Bacon did this independently of knowledge of eastern gun powder chemistry. Your assertion by the way is a lie.
One theory of how gunpowder came to Europe is that it made its way along the Silk Road through the Middle East; another is that it was brought to Europe during the Mongol invasion in the first half of the 13th century,[41][42] or during the subsequent diplomatic and military contacts (see Franco-Mongol alliance). William of Rubruck, an ambassador to the Mongols in 1254–1255 and a personal friend of Roger Bacon, is also often designated as a possible intermediary in the transmission of gunpowder know-how between the East and the West.[42][43]
For instance, a 'white' man could have invented the astrolabe. But the Arabs already had. With this device, sea navigation became a science and the entire world opened up. Along with the compass, invented by the Chinese.
By the way, it was actually the Chinese who invented the abacus in 3000BC which ultimately became the model for computational thinking.
But science was at odds with the late medieval Church thinking. So the church actively suppressed all science that would challenge the foundations of the medieval church through excommunication and even torture.
So what was the catalyst for the explosion of technology in the west?
The Reformation. The Age of Reason. The ability to use the collected science of the East and the middle east to lay the foundations for the rise of the western european industrial age. Without the Church to hold them back, and with the riches of the New World to finance the endeavour, England, Scotland, Holland and the other protestant countries became home to the scholars and scientists...beyond the reach of the medieval church.
Quite simply it was the opportunity to exploit the learning and the ability to more easily communicate with the other scholars in the west and east that changed the world...not some kind of genetic or intellectual superiority.
This accelerates as education, including sciences, becomes more common and available, mostly in the protestant universities.
Internal Combustion
Prior to 1860
Model of the Barsanti-Matteucci engine (1853) in the Osservatorio Ximeniano in Florence
5th century: Roman engineers documented several crankshaft-connecting rod machines used for their sawmills.
17th century: Christiaan Huygens designs gunpowder to drive water pumps, to supply 3000 cubic meters of water/day for the Versailles palace gardens, essentially creating the first idea of a rudimentary internal combustion piston engine.
1780s: Alessandro Volta built a toy electric pistol[1] in which an electric spark exploded a mixture of air and hydrogen, firing a cork from the end of the gun.
1791: John Barber receives British patent #1833 for A Method for Rising Inflammable Air for the Purposes of Producing Motion and Facilitating Metallurgical Operations. In it he describes a turbine.
1794: Robert Street built a compressionless engine whose principle of operation would dominate for nearly a century.
1798: Tippu Sultan, the ruler of the city-state of Mysore in India, uses the first iron rockets against the British Army.
1807: Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fueled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saône in France. A patent was subsequently granted by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on 20 July 1807.
1807: Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built an internal combustion engine powered by a hydrogen and oxygen mixture, and ignited by electric spark. (See 1780s: Alessandro Volta above.) [2]
1823: Samuel Brown patented the first internal combustion engine to be applied industrially. It was compressionless and based on what Hardenberg calls the "Leonardo cycle," which, as the name implies, was already out of date at that time.
1824: French physicist Sadi Carnot established the thermodynamic theory of idealized heat engines. This scientifically established the need for compression to increase the difference between the upper and lower working temperatures.
1826 April 1: American Samuel Morey received a patent for a compressionless "Gas or Vapor Engine."
1833: Lemuel Wellman Wright, UK patent 6525, table-type gas engine. Double acting gas engine, first record of water jacketed cylinder.[3]
1838: A patent was granted to William Barnett (English). According to Dugald Clerk, this was the first recorded use of in-cylinder compression.[4]
1854-57: Eugenio Barsanti & Felice Matteucci invented an engine that was possibly the first 4-cycle engine, but the patent was lost.[note 1]
Early internal combustion engines were used to power farm equipment similar to these models.
This internal combustion engine was an integral aspect of the patent for the first patented automobile, made by Karl Benz on January 29, 1886
Karl Benz
1856: in Florence at Fonderia del Pignone (now Nuovo Pignone, later a subsidiary of General Electric), Pietro Benini realized a working prototype of the Italian engine supplying 5 HP. In subsequent years he developed more powerful engines—with one or two pistons—which served as steady power sources, replacing steam engines.
1857: Eugenio Barsanti & Felice Matteucci describe the principles of the free piston engine where the vacuum after the explosion allows atmospheric pressure to deliver the power stroke (British patent No 1625). Otto and Langen were the first to make a marketable engine based on this concept 10 years later.
Television?
In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 23-year-old university student in Germany,[4] patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization. The holes were spaced at equal angular intervals such that in a single rotation the disk would allow light to pass through each hole and onto a light-sensitive selenium sensor which produced the electrical pulses. As an image was focused on the rotating disk, each hole captured a horizontal "slice" of the whole image.[5]
Nipkow's design would not be practical until advances in amplifier tube technology became available. Later designs would use a rotating mirror-drum scanner to capture the image and a cathode ray tube (CRT) as a display device, but moving images were still not possible, due to the poor sensitivity of the selenium sensors. In 1907 Russian scientist Boris Rosing became the first inventor to use a CRT in the receiver of an experimental television system. He used mirror-drum scanning to transmit simple geometric shapes to the CRT.[6]
Electricity?
Possibly the earliest and nearest approach to the discovery of the identity of lightning, and electricity from any other source, is to be attributed to the Arabs, who before the 15th century had the Arabic word for lightning (raad) applied to the electric ray.[5]
Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletos made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BC, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[6][7]
So it was through the re-introduction of the classic treatises on science that Gilbert, Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay as well as Benjamin Franklin, Volta, Farrady, Ampere and finally, Tesla, Edison, Westinghouse, Von Siemens and Kelvin put all the different pieces into practise.
Transistor Technology?
The first patent[1] for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry.
The world’s first transistor computer was built at the University of Manchester in November 1953. The computer was built by Dick Grimsdale, then a research student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and later a Professor of Electronic Engineering at Sussex University.
We can thank world War II for pushing forward transistor and semi-conductor technology.
Bacteria?
Bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a single-lens microscope of his own design.[170] He called them "animalcules" and published his observations in a series of letters to the Royal Society.
The Microscope?
It was the Arabic studies on optics that allowed Bacon to construct the first magnifying lens used in Western science, although the Chinese invented eyeglasses around 1000 BC, which were noted by Marco Polo and brought back to Europe. It was Galileo who also used the science of the Arabs to create his first telescope. It was a Dutch guy who built the first modern microscope as we know it.
Paper?
Could have been invented by a white guy, but it wasn't. It was the Chinese.
Movable type Printing?
Oh right. Not a white guy. The Chinese.
Steam Engines?
The history of the steam engine stretches back as far as the first century AD; the first recorded rudimentary steam engine being the aeolipile described by Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria.[6] In the following centuries, the few steam-powered "engines" known were, like the aeolipile,[7] essentially experimental devices used by inventors to demonstrate the properties of steam. A rudimentary steam turbine device was described by Taqi al-Din[8] in 1551 and by Giovanni Branca[9] in 1629.[10] Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont received patents in 1606 for fifty steam powered inventions, including a water pump for draining inundated mines.[11] Denis Papin, a Huguenot refugee, did some useful work on the steam digester in 1679, and first used a piston to raise weights in 1690.[12]
Porcelain and ceramics??
The Chinese.
Paper money?
The Chinese.
The worlds' first seismometer?
The Chinese.
The Microchip?
Early developments of the integrated circuit go back to 1949, when the German engineer Werner Jacobi (de) (Siemens AG)[4] filed a patent for an integrated-circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device[5] showing five transistors on a common substrate in a 3-stage amplifier arrangement. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent. An immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported.
The idea of the integrated circuit was conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer (1909–2002). Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. on 7 May 1952.[6] He gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956.
A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each one containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which looked very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, and led to the short-lived Micromodule Program (similar to 1951's Project Tinkertoy).[7] However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC.
The Spanish, by the way, may not have invented the airplane, but they invented the auto-gyro.
The Metric System, ie....the measurement system for science?
The French.
Radium?
Madame Curie.
Nuclear power?
Albert Einstein.
The rocket?
The Germans.
Viruses?
Pasteur, Martinus Willem Beijerinck and Dmitri Ivanovsky. Using the science and the equipment created because of the Greeks and Arabs.
The helicopter?
Just look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter
The physics of flight?
The Chinese.
the first flight?
Richard Pearse in New Zealand.
The hot air balloon?
The Chinese. And then the French. And then the Germans.
The Crossbow?
The Chinese.
The repeating crossbow?
The Chinese.
Most seige weapons?
The Arabs.
The invention of the gun?
The Mughals.
The computer?
The history of the modern computer begins with two separate technologies, automated calculation and programmability. However no single device can be identified as the earliest computer, partly because of the inconsistent application of that term. A few devices are worth mentioning though, like some mechanical aids to computing, which were very successful and survived for centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator, like the Sumerian abacus, designed around 2500 BC[4] of which a descendant won a speed competition against a modern desk calculating machine in Japan in 1946,[5] the slide rules, invented in the 1620s, which were carried on five Apollo space missions, including to the moon[6] and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BC.[7] The Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) built a mechanical theater which performed a play lasting 10 minutes and was operated by a complex system of ropes and drums that might be considered to be a means of deciding which parts of the mechanism performed which actions and when.[8] This is the essence of programmability.
Around the end of the 10th century, the French monk Gerbert d'Aurillac brought back from Spain the drawings of a machine invented by the Moors that answered either Yes or No to the questions it was asked.[9] Again in the 13th century, the monks Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon built talking androids without any further development (Albertus Magnus complained that he had wasted forty years of his life when Thomas Aquinas, terrified by his machine, destroyed it).[10]
In 1642, the Renaissance saw the invention of the mechanical calculator,[11] a device that could perform all four arithmetic operations without relying on human intelligence.[12] The mechanical calculator was at the root of the development of computers in two separate ways. Initially, it was in trying to develop more powerful and more flexible calculators[13] that the computer was first theorized by Charles Babbage[14][15] and then developed.[16] Secondly, development of a low-cost electronic calculator, successor to the mechanical calculator, resulted in the development by Intel[17] of the first commercially available microprocessor integrated circuit.
So you see, your knowledge of where things come from is so ridiculously limited and incorrect in so many instances that you ought to be utterly embarrassed, not by the depth and breadth of your limited education, but by the fact that you don't even have the intellectual curiosity to do even the barest research before you claim superiority.
You have this rather bizarre idea that many of these inventions are somehow connected with the unfettered capitalism you crave. Sometimes they have been. And at times...to drive the whole engine forward, they have relied on the shameless and shocking exploitation of children, women and near slave...and even slave labour. Your idea of the US slipping back into some terrible dark age is offensive and absurd. There is no question that as the world has become one single giant multi-national corporation that many things will now be invented and exploited wherever the owners of the technology see the opportunity to maximize their return on it. This may ultimately lead to a US where illiterate peasants in backward southern states will be forced to work for a dollar an hour. One would hope not.
I hope though that the other thing that strikes you though is that the world of technology relies on education and that it is an international endeavour. You really should see what a university campus looks like these days in Europe or the coasts of the US or Canada. It is the multi-cultural exchange of knowledge and creativity that will drive technology forward. Your prediction of a 'Dark Age' seems to miss the fact that almost all the things you mentioned and I have presented are not American or certainly not solely US inventions. But the US exploited them and found ways to improve and market them. So did the Europeans. So did the Japanese. So are the Chinese. So are the Indians. So are the Russians.
And when you talk about innovation. I suspect that it won't be a US auto company that breaks through the electric car and energy storage challenge now...as long as they are all in the thrall of petroleum.
btw I've used only wiki for the references. You can look up the source articles or take more time than I did on my lunch hour and look up other sources too. I swear, I don't know why any of us bother. I think my cat knows more than you do.
