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Also Brazil has its own father of the radio: Roberto Landell de Moura, which made a transmission two years before of Guglielmo Marconi - although, on the contrary of Santos-Dumont with the aeroplane, most brazilians will say that Marconi actually invented it (and in fact none of them are the actual inventor, but Nikola Tesla).
Are there other national disputes concerning inventions around the world? Are there, for example, other people claiming the invention of, for example, the telephone or the computer?
Also Brazil has its own father of the radio: Roberto Landell de Moura, which made a transmission two years before of Guglielmo Marconi - although, on the contrary of Santos-Dumont with the aeroplane, most brazilians will say that Marconi actually invented it (and in fact none of them are the actual inventor, but Nikola Tesla).
Are there other national disputes concerning inventions around the world? Are there, for example, other people claiming the invention of, for example, the telephone or the computer?
Its pretty sad. If I recall correctly, flight was invented by the French, rock music is British, hamburgers are German, and everything invented by an immigrant in the US belongs to the nation they emigrated from and not the US. Also, we stole the demonym "American" and are all fat.
Fact is: most of human inventions has not a "father", but it's an evoltion, a series of improvements.
I never heard of the Wright brothers until I was 15. Then, a friend of mine which is flight attendant told me that there are a lot of other claims to the inventor of the flight, and I noticed that it was a result of an evolution - all of them deserving some merit due to an important contribution. Same in relation to the radio (no, I never heard about Alexander Popov - but russians still can be credited for inventing the TV). These things serve more to give us a patriotic feeling of "we are great because we are brazilians/americans/russians/put here your nationality" than for practical purposes.
Fact is: most of human inventions has not a "father", but it's an evoltion, a series of improvements.
I never heard of the Wright brothers until I was 15. Then, a friend of mine which is flight attendant told me that there are a lot of other claims to the inventor of the flight, and I noticed that it was a result of an evolution - all of them deserving some merit due to an important contribution. Same in relation to the radio (no, I never heard about Alexander Popov - but russians still can be credited for inventing the TV). These things serve more to give us a patriotic feeling of "we are great because we are brazilians/americans/russians/put here your nationality" than for practical purposes.
I totally agree on the bold sentence.
So take what I'm going to write as an experiment, I'm just curious to know how many of these inventions are attributed to someone else in other countries.
Generally speaking, we tend to attribute a lot (really a lot) of inventions to our compatriots. After food and art, inventions are another of the few categories we are proud of.
So, here in Italy we claim to have invented:
- Anemometer (Leon Battista Alberti in 1450)
- Banks (in the modern sense)
- Barometer (Evangelista Torricelli in 1643. Torricelli also gave the name to a unit of measurement for pressure, the "Torr")
- Batteries by Alessandro Volta in 1800. The unit of measurement "Volt" derives from his name.
- Eyeglasses in 1286, unknown inventor
- Newspapers, Venice in 1563
- Nitroglycerin by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847
- regular Polypropylene web (which is the only one useful for making plastics) by Giulio Natta
- piano and violin
Here the one that to me seem the most arguable:
- The personal computer, with the machine Programma 101 released in 1965 by the Olivetti company
- The Radio, by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 (in Italy Tesla is mostly know because his name is the unit of measurement for magnetic fields, T).
- The Telephone, the most famous name in here is Antonio Meucci, but there is also Innocenzo Manzetti who worked on the project even earlier.
- internal combustion engines by Barsanti-Matteucci
- The helicopter, because of Da Vinci's drawings.
-The first (working) nuclear reactor, by Enrico Fermi
So take what I'm going to write as an experiment, I'm just curious to know how many of these inventions are attributed to someone else in other countries.
Generally speaking, we tend to attribute a lot (really a lot) of inventions to our compatriots. After food and art, inventions are another of the few categories we are proud of.
So, here in Italy we claim to have invented:
- Anemometer (Leon Battista Alberti in 1450)
- Banks (in the modern sense)
- Barometer (Evangelista Torricelli in 1643. Torricelli also gave the name to a unit of measurement for pressure, the "Torr")
- Batteries by Alessandro Volta in 1800. The unit of measurement "Volt" derives from his name.
- Eyeglasses in 1286, unknown inventor
- Newspapers, Venice in 1563
- Nitroglycerin by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847
- regular Polypropylene web (which is the only one useful for making plastics) by Giulio Natta
- piano and violin
Violin is disputed, as it is an improvement on ancient fiddles.
But piano, yes, you italians can be proud of having invented it. Bartolomeo Cristofori is its inventor.
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