Quote:
Originally Posted by CyberSEO
P.S. The thread title is misleading. Please explain what exactly do you mean when you say "the United States achievements"? It's a country of immigrants. I don't remember any achievements made by native Americans (they were slaughtered by the immigrants). All those so-called US achievements were made by people who've grown up and got the education somewhere else. E.g. Albert Einstein (Germany), Igor Sikorsky (Russia), Nikola Tesla (Serbia), Wernher von Braun (Germany), Nabokov (Russia) etc. Nobody of them had the US education. Nobody of them was born in the USA.
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If they were American citizens when they invented or discovered then they are American achievements. For many of them their accomplishments would not have occurred without the freedom afforded them in America. Meanwhile though there have been many achievements by Americans who were born and raised here.
Herman Hollerith who founded the Tabulating Machine Company (Later IBM) and whose punch card was used as the standard for most of the 20th century for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith
Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American inventor who developed an electromechanical punched card tabulator to assist in summarizing information and, later, accounting. He was the founder of The Tabulating Machine Company that was consolidated in 1911 with three other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed IBM. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing.[3] His invention of the punched card tabulating machine marks the beginning of the era of semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
Or Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who are credited with the modern integrated circuit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares (wafers), each containing a single miniaturized component. Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed 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).[9] However, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design: the IC.
Jack Kilby's original integrated circuit
Newly employed by Texas Instruments, Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12 September 1958.[10] In his patent application of 6 February 1959,[11] Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated." The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force.
Or of course Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates all of whom were instrumental in bringing personal computer technology to the masses.
One of my personal favorite American achievement of this century was SOSUS which I worked with in the Navy. We kept watch on all the Soviet submarines on a routine basis. The Soviets never beat SOSUS in the 50 years or so it was in operation even though they tried and tried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS
SOSUS systems consisted of bottom mounted hydrophone arrays connected by underwater cables to facilities ashore. The individual arrays were installed primarily on continental slopes and seamounts at locations optimized for undistorted long range acoustic propagation. The combination of location within the ocean and the sensitivity of arrays allowed the system to detect acoustic power of less than a watt at ranges of several hundred kilometres (The system is so sensitive that it can even detect the presence of Soviet/Russian Tu-95 Bear 4-engine bombers flying overhead; the tips of the bombers's long propellers exceed the speed of sound, creating sonic booms as they rotate. These sonic booms reach the surface of the ocean below, which then transmits the sonic shocks to the underwater hydrophones.[2]).
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