Joseph B. Reid wrote: >I was a regular reader >of Popular Science. I learned that the inventions that have >transformed the world were American. When I went to England I found >that no, they were made by Britons. I then visited the Deutsches >Museum in M�nchen and learned that most of the modern inventions had >been made by Germans. In Paris I found in the Palais de la >D�couverte, on the contrary, that the inventions had been made by >Frenchmen. I have not visited Russia.
Yes I worked for a French firm and there was a big international meeting where we were told that they were responsible for the invention of the CD and the colour TV. It turned out that the French firm had merely bought the Dutch firm Phillips (CD) and the US firm RCA (colour TV). Technically they were correct but the spin on the comment offended the Americans and Dutch present. This was just the fault of a chauvinist senior individual; the French firm itself was good to work for. >It was commonly said in England in the 1930 "The Japanese are good >copiers, but they have no originality". In my younger days, I commonly heard it said that one of the great British features is 'native inventiveness'. Now that I have spent quite a bit of time in other countries, I find that many things appear quite different when explained by people in a different culture.
