From: Jim Webster (james.webster@iomartdsl.com)
Date: Sun Apr 10 2005 - 16:53:19 PDT
Jim Breneman wrote:
> I'll mention a couple American inventions. How about
> electricity, the telephone, The assembly line, Nuclear
> power, Nuclear powered naval ships, the space shuttle,
> Global Positioning System, Computers, but the point
> being is for a country that is only about 230 years
> old the US has just as many inventions, if not more,
> as the British. (age doesnt really matter)
er excuse me...
Michael Farady [english] built the first electrical generator 8 months
before Bishop [american] and forget franklin - all he did was mess
around with kites.
admitadly Elisha Grey [american] invented the phone [not Bell] so now
you know why once a month when fathers open their [daughters] telephone
bill they all hate americans :-)
The assembly line? sorry but the romans had them 2000 years ago though
they weren't exactly producing cars just mundane things like armour,
weapons and chariots. All Ford, who stole the idea from Ransome Eli Olds
who first used it for assembly line production in 1901, did was update
the idea from throwing an item from one person to another to having it
moving on a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt, incidentally, was a french
invention but we won't mention that :-)
As for nuclear power all the americans did was invent another way of
heating steam to power an engine.. a process originally invented by a
scotsman named murdock.
Global Positioning system? Radio based positioning systems have been
around for years it took satelites to make them global and we all know
who originally conceived of satellites... Arther C Clark [english] in 1945
Computers??? The first computer was the Charles Babbage's [english]
mechanical computer way back in the 19th century -you can see a replica
in the Science Museum London and the first programable computer was
invented by a german called Konrad Zuse in the 1930s. First computer
'programmer' was Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace 1815 -1852 [english]
and she is acknowledge as the founder of scientific computing BTW she
also produced the design for a flying machine in 1838 - a truly
remarkable lady.
TTFN
Jim
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