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Ferise1"Multi-billion dollar" countries can only exist in the USA because the Dollar is the USA's currency, but many of them are as large as they are by buying and either absorbing or destroying, foreign companies.
America really
invented very little until well into the 20C, and then mainly in electronics and Space work. Otherwise she adopted and developed inventions from elsewhere.
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Photography: in different ways, from France and Britain, as were the first "moving pictures" and indeed recorded sound.
Television: invented by a Scot, John Logie Baird, although using partly-mechanical scanner and display. I think the USA can rightly claim inventing the Cathode-Ray Tube, but that
developed television,
not invent it.
Wireless transmission ("radio") had already been invented by Marconi, an Italian but working in the UK.
Computers: British inventions, pioneered mechanically by Babbage and Lovelace in the 19C, and electronically by the Bletchley Park team in WW2.
The Internet: invented by a Briton, Sir Tim Bernard-Lee...
... and neither could not exist were it not for harnessing electrical energy thanks to the work of Michael Faraday (English) and European physicists including Ohm, Ampere and Volta.
The unit of energy, the Joule, is named after the Frenchman who first established the nature of energy. The Joule's accompanying unit of power, the Watt, honours James Watt, the Scot who did not invent the steam-engine but developed its first reasonably efficient form from the earlier "atmospheric engine" of the Cornishman, Newcomen. He also invented the Horsepower power-unit, to give commercial customers an estimate of the abilities of the engines Boulton and Watt were manufacturing. The Watt, of course, works for any form of energy-conversion.
Systéme Internationale, the modern, world-wide units of measure: Using the French-invented the Metric System, it was devised and ratified by the International Standards Organisation
including the USA.
The SI's Metre, Gramme and Litre (the correct spellings!) are French words but many of its units are named after pioneering European scientists - Volt[a], Ampere, Newton, Farad[ay], Ohm, Pascal, Kelvin, Watt, Joule, Celsius.
No Americans, because the USA was still being made when the sciences were developing; and the settlers could only adopt inventions, and for years only import manufactured goods, from their home lands.
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The Industrial Revolution: started in Britain while other countries were playing with political revolutions. By harnessing first water then steam-power, industrially.
Iron and Steel: Britain, Germany and Sweden pioneered making good-quality Iron, then Steel (from, but different to, iron). Stainless-Steel: invented in Sheffield, England. However, early-20C US iron-refiners joined their Swedish and German brethren in using electric-arc furnaces rather than pure blast-furnaces to reduce the ore - a method subsequently lost.
Iron / Steel structures; The world's first iron bridge: the "Iron Bridge" in the English Midlands, iron-making village named after it. It is made of cast-iron not steel, still exists, now for pedestrians only.
Railways: The world's first public passenger and goods railways were in England, but using trucks on rails had already long been common in mines and quarries in Europe generally.
Motor-vehicles: France and Germany pioneered using the internal-combustion engine; the UK and other European contries were already building steam-powered road-vehicles. France was actually first away with Cugnot's experimental, steam-powered wagon.
Battery-electric Road Vehicles: here, we
can credit the USA alongside France, Germany and Britain in developing pirvate and commercial EVs, using existing materials and knowledge;
over 100 years ago! (Electric cars were allowed in London's Royal Parks closed to the noisy, smelly petrol car.)
Tarmac: orig, Scottish. The word is short for "Tar-bound Macadam Surface". MacAdam was the 18C Scot who showed how to build reasonably robust, stone road-surfaces for the first time since the end of the Roman Empire. Binding the surface with asphalt or coal-tar was a later development.
Electric lighting: Another British first - Joseph Swan invented the incandescent filament-lamp. Thomas Edison, in America,
developed it by replacing Swan's short-lived carbon filament with much more durable wire. The two did collaborate.
Large-scale Mass-Production: of complex items like cars. We can fairly credit that to the USA, especially Henry Ford, but the principle sprang from the textiles, armaments and clock-making industries already in many countries.
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America pioneered electrical music recording: Western Electric, in the 1920s; allowing recording quiet musical instruments and the singing style called "crooning", as well as more natural styles.
The development of animated films was American although there had already been simple toys like the 'Zooeotrope'.
The USA's more serious inventions include steel-framed buildings many stories high, otherwise are mainly in electronics (e.g. the transistor), rocketry and ultimately Space travel, including the Moon landings some
Americans bizarrely try to deny happened. Even in rocketry the pioneers included immigrant Germans who had first developed the Nazis' ballistic missile, the V2 weapon.
The heavier-than-air aeroplane's history is murky, with a possible English claim; but even if the first manned, powered flight was in America it might
not have been by the Wright Brothers. The Balloon was a French invention; its dirigible (airship) offspring, German. The first international aeroplane flight was by the Frenchman, Bleriot, across the English Channel. The jet aeroplane engine, distinct from rockets: English (Frank Whittle).
The nuclear bomb: An American invention we can all wish had never been invented; but its development team included British and German scientists, and Nuclear Physics generally was pioneered in France, Germany and Britain.
The world's first nuclear-power station was in the UK; the UK and France were leaders in developing such power.
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Regarding taxes, yes, undeniably most European nations have high tax rates but that is due in a large part to having large-scale health and welfare, and other, public systems; anathema in the USA with her social and financial "sink-or-swim" attitude towards her citizens.
