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> despite it leading nowhere worth visiting Really? Every major technological (and cultural) advance since the steam engine has been from the US. Atomic bomb,

• 317070 3y ago
  I mean, it's obvious that this is what you're being told in the US. But trust me, they tell people in the UK or in France the exact same thing. They cherry pick different examples though, but the story is the same. US/English/French-exceptionalism. Not in Belgium though. I figure that in Belgium it would be too obviously false.
  • glenngillen 3y ago
    I couldn’t believe the narrative of WW2 I “learned” when I visited the War Museum in New Orleans. It’s really quite remarkable how countries can simultaneously tell the truth while having widely differing narratives.
    • aziaziazi 3y ago
      Reminds me an Hezbollah war museum in Lebanon. What a surprising history class, keeps me curious of what I ear /read that is produce in “my” western country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Landmark_of_the_Resistance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_Landmark_of_the_Resi...
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • fooblaster 3y ago
      what was incorrect about it?
      • bena 3y ago
        I've been there a couple of times. I wouldn't say it's outright incorrect, but everything is very US-centric. The place is also massive, you do get a sort of mental fatigue going through, reading, and processing all of the stuff. We were there from opening at 9 and I think we left some time around 2 or 3. And while we made it through all of the building and exhibits, we were definitely spending less time on any one thing towards the end. So if there were any real errors, if they came towards the end of the day, I'd have likely just not been paying any real attention by that time. There are little NFC cards you get that you can scan on various stations to hear about the person your card represents. There are various soldiers, leaders, and Bob Hope (not kidding, you get to hear all about his USO tours). But you hear about everything through the lens of its relationship to America.
        • AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
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        • glenngillen 3y ago
          To expand on this US-centricism (and to address the glib reply you got)... if this was your primary source of information for WWII you'd easily come away with the impression the US were the only country fighting the Axis. There's a few exhibits that present the number of US troops/vehicles/ships/etc vs the Axis to try and emphasis the scale of the challenge ahead of them. The contribution of most of the other Allied nations, and the fact they were fighting for years before the US fully entered, is so diminished that it seems irrelevant.
  • agurk 3y ago
    Ah, but don't forget the Saxophone was a Belgian invention! Well the inventor was born in the Netherlands, but Belgium didn't exist then, and that territory is now in modern Belgium. And he did invent it after he permanently relocated to Paris. But still, through and through a Belgian invention!
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      You can have the sax, we'll take superconductivity, the microscope, the telescope, realism in painting, the Mercator projection, concurrent programming, and the capacitor ;)
  • peoplefromibiza 3y ago
    > Not in Belgium though don't forget fentanyl
  • joenot443 3y ago
    When I think of American inventions, my mind goes to the airplane, the transistor, the telephone, and more recently, GPS. When I think of French inventions, the stethoscope, braille, and pasteurization are immediately obvious. Hot air balloons too I believe. I donno, it doesn't seem like much of a competition to me. Hell, I'm a Canadian - we've got the snowmobile and insulin, to reference, not a whole lot else. I don't think it's unreasonable for one to observe that some countries have been more inventive than others.
    • 317070 3y ago
      The French would claim the enlightenment, the republic, Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre. Basically how societies around the world are organized and the modern way of giving meaning to life. You might say those are a different categorie of things, and they would say it is a more important category of things and it therefore demonstrates French exceptionalism. Countries tend to demonstrate their exceptionalism on metrics they are good at. (btw, the French list of inventions is actually quite long too. Bicycles, cars, airplanes, submarines. In fact, many of the things Americans and English also claim to have invented. Like Americans have the atom bomb, the French have radioactivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_inventions_and_discoveries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_inventions_an... )
• RickyS 3y ago
  Quite frankly to list the Atomic bomb, Hollywood and social media among the "advances" is cringe to say the least.
  • defrost 3y ago
    To be fair they did leave out highest per capita consumption and CO2 emissions, freedumb cars for everyone at the expense of public transport, efficiency and equitable urban planning, using guns as can openers and childrens toys, etc.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      >freedumb cars for everyone at the expense of public transport, efficiency and equitable urban planning While America is the poster child for car culture, Europe isn't a panacea either: lots of cities built up post-WWII are car-bound hellscapes too. Lots of other places have bowed to worshiping at the altar of the automobiles too, it's not just the US. As for equitable urban planning, Europe is going through a huge housing crisis now too.
  • ploum 3y ago
    What’s also funny is that between "Internet" and "social media", there’s a huge layer called "World Wide Web". That layer (which is now often confused with Internet itself) is an European invention. (A Brit and a Belgian, sitting in an office on the border between France and Switzerland, could not be more european than that). The point is not to be pro-european, just to say that if you list inventions and remove the components not invented in the US, you will end with a list of inventions from the US.
    • RickyS 3y ago
      I think the point is that defining authorship of intellectual products is a bit like putting authorship on words (even common ones). They are always part of a larger shared discourse. That is not to remove merit from individuals but to acknowledge that merit is not quantitative and could be stretched to fit political motives.
• brmgb 3y ago
  > Atomic bomb Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany. > Hollywood Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world. > internet Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland. Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.
  • defrost 3y ago
    re Hollywood: The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time. Limelight spawned offshoot production efforts from former employees using end of life Limehouse equipment, eg: the 1906 feature length classic The Story of the Kelly Gang The original cut of this silent film ran for more than an hour with a reel length of about 1,200 metres (4,000 ft), making it the longest narrative film yet seen in the world. The first proper 'Hollywood' feature length was the 1915 KKK film The Birth of a Nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Kelly_Gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Kelly_Gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
  • roenxi 3y ago
    Doesn't that reinforce the point though? Europe had all these brilliant, well educated people and didn't manage to rise above shooting each other until the civilisation on the continent was more or less reduced to rubble. That isn't a result that makes Europe look clever. The major intellectual innovation out of that era was communism. The US approach outperformed Europe's by such a margin that it isn't worth comparing them.
• suction 3y ago
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• peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > Every major technological (and cultural) advance since the steam engine has been from the US [citation needed] It's interesting to me how people who talk of advancements of our civilization in such an absolute manner are often the ones who know less about our civilization. I would argue that synthetic bovine insulin is much more important than Hollywood or social media, but YMMV. I would also argue that the telescope, the printing press, the telephone, the cinematograph and the world wide web together had the biggest impact on human culture since the invention of writing and agriculture, they basically boostrapped the modern society as we know it. I would also argue that steam power is known since the ancient Egypt and that the steam engine is from the 16th century, USA wasn't even a thing back then > Atomic bomb, Hollywood, internet, social media, AI accidentally proving that leading nowhere worth visiting
  • reisse 3y ago
    Reinforcing the point, I'd argue the Haber-Bosch process was more important than synthetic insulin.
• MrScruff 3y ago
  The atomic bomb is a good example, a massive endeavour (130,000 people and 2.2 Billion), and some of the initial insights came off the back of the work of the Maud committee in the UK who did some of the early running in this area. The US is exceptional in many ways and can solve problems no other nation could, of that there is no doubt, but I would agree that the exceptionalism does extend to marketing itself as well.
• jrtaml 3y ago
  The atomic bomb was built by Jewish scientists from Europe who fled from the Nazis. Rockets were built by German scientists who were (voluntarily) picked up by the U.S.forces after WW2. Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems. Bechtolsheim is German, Khosla is from India (if I'm not mistaken). The Google founders are children of immigrants. ChatGPT was built by a guy with a Russian name. If Altman takes credit, that's just very American. Most open source contributions come from Asia, Russia and Europe. Americans commercialize them, take credit and start bullying the original contributors. I'll give you Hollywood and Bernays. Americans are great at reality distortion.
  • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    much of Hollywood was made by immigrants of various sorts, which picked up during the 30s when lots of people fled Nazi Germany and settled there and helped make the great movies of the next few decades - case in point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Wilder
• bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I mean you're saying this in a subthread that has mainly focused on Einstein.
• eesmith 3y ago
  Even in the realm of "engines", who invented the four-stoke engine (operating on the Otto cycle)? Who invented the diesel engine? Who developed the compound steam turbine? Who developed penicillin? The "Green Revolution" depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Who developed the Haber process? Hint: none of them were from the US.
• doctor_eval 3y ago
  Let’s not forget fire, the wheel, the printing press - and, of course, the aqueducts.
• antihipocrat 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission History is more complex than what we learned in school. Many of the great advances in technology now attributed to the USA were actually transferred as part of a trade deal in return for support in WW2.
• zpeti 3y ago
  Replying to my own post: Funny how everyone is pointing out all these inventions were by immigrants in the US. And that’s the point. The US takes the best of the world and reaps the rewards of their work. And also makes those people wealthy in the process. Everyone wins except for the countries that lost those genuiuses. And despite my pro US stance, I’m actually from Eastern Europe, and my country lost a lot of talent to the US.