I recently reviewed a "timeline of technology" and was struck by how the vast majority of the inventions/discoveries listed originated in Europe or North America.

Without wanting to create some value debate, I am curious as to non-Western inventions / discoveries from 1400 to the present.

If anyone has a link or information about non European or American discoveries, I'd appreciate the information.

I have a suspicion that the rise of power and industrialization in the West during that period accounts for much of the inequal distribution of discovery - but I want to discount bias or non-reporting (hence my request for info).

I also have a suspicion that since 1950-1980 we've seen a large increase in inventions / discoveries originating in Asia.

TIA

I suspect Joseph Needham's massive magnum opus, the Science and Civilisation in China series might go some way towards redressing the balance of that western-biased timeline. Needham's work can more or less be summarized as "The Chinese invented it first".
(The books are expensive, but Googling on his name and the title might turn up something useful to you.)

Grant Hutchison

There's some evidence that the refracting telescope was invented in the 1000s in Iraq.

Gutenberg's printing press is preceded by a much older Korean design, which in turn was an innovation on a Chinese design. They didn't really take off, though, because both regions used ideographic languages at the time and the resulting massive character sets severely reduced the relative advantages of movable type for those cultures.

The spinning wheel hails from India, but I believe that was a first millennium invention.

Magnetic compass, paper, gunpowder, cast-iron forging*, mechanical looms*, China. Number system with zero, India. Algebra, Arabia. Internal combustion chamber, Samoa.

* Vital to the industrial revolution.

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You forgot the asterisks after paper, zero, algebra, and internal combustion chamber. And maybe also compass and gunpowder.

Hardly modern, but the wheel was a Sumerian invention; there are no known instances of the wheel's being invented as anything other than a toy independent of that discovery.

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Thanks for the responses - but what I'm looking for are examples from the 1400's to the present.

Most of us recognize that prior to the 1400's, Chinese and Indian and Islamic scholars made numerous discoveries that were eventually adopted and implemented in the West during the European Renaissance and Western Industrial Revolution. The source I cited implies though, that the vast majority of significant discoveries and inventions since the 1400's arose in the West. I'm trying to scratch the surface to see what originated in non-Western areas during the last 600 years.

The source implies the answer is "not much."

If that's true - and my hypothesis that the last 50 years has shown a dramatic reversal - I'd be interested in why - to try to understand the social, economic and other factors behind such a trend and reversal.

You might want to look up Jang_Yeong-sil

Inventor of the world's first water gauge for irrigation systems (1441) and possibly the world's first standardized rain gauge.

The way I see it, most of the advanced inventions started in the East were created by relatively static and unified empires, while Europe was composed of multiple competing kingdoms and city-states. 1400 marks the general beginning of the colonial period in the west, when vast resources and eastern advances just happened to be available to Europe at the same time, especially in the Mediterranian maritime trading hegemonies.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

In (pre-)Soviet Russia, rocket fly you.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

The differential gear as well.

As anyone who lived through the 1950s will tell you, everything invented by glorious Soviet Union, even nuclear vessels.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure Japan had some involvement in the processing of steel way back when. The Samurais swore by the end products.

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Nuclear WESSELS!

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I think the Chinese invented Water based Siesmographs around the 1500's.

Also I think basic algebra was actualy used by the Mayan's fist, as thier numbering system indicate's a knowlege of 0, negatives, and plantary orbit computations, as well as base 20, base 18, and base 13 math systems. *edit ot add* and base 20 fractions.

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http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

By funny coincidence I was just wondering yesterday what English words had arabic origins - I hear of ones that have latin or greek origins all the time, but not arabic. Turns out that we got quite a lot of common words from arabic... including most of the "al-" ones (like alcohol, and alchemy and algebra). Which is screamingly obvious if you think about it for a sec, but I just hadn't made the connection before

A lot of star names come from Arabic, too. Aldebaran, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Deneb, etc.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

What a sec, even more amusing is things Mom Nature beat us to.

We all know the obvious ones like sonar and IR senses, but as our technology advances so it seems, Nature's tech advances in step, funny how that works.

Things like how a shark's rough skin causes micro eddies in the water that permit smoother passage through same. (It took a computer program to show that one. Where did sharks get a computer?) This led to putting a smoke charge on the back of artillery rounds. The smoke causes the same kind of eddies and that simple change gave two to five miles of extra range for the same powder charge depending on wind and weather.

Or that spiney eels (Macrognathus sp) invented the vibrating saw millions of years before we did. Nice defense mechanism BTW. Don't pick one up bare handed, you can't drop it fast enough. (I've raised bunchs, they are intelligent and make excellent pet fish.) I can elaborate if asked.

So if you want true inovation look to the older orders of existing animals. Its amazing what you can find.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Viewpoint.

I'm exhausted and my mind is not working at all, so this might be a bit fuzzy ... well wrong too. But a couple months ago, one of my professors, who has this tendency to go off on tangents, did so on this very subject. (Well, it turned out he had a point to make at the end of it.)

Anyways, Buddhism, I think (that fuzzy brain again), was working against them. Western scientists and experimenters figured out that you could model something by working with a smaller representation. Unfortunately, in China they got stuck in the mindset that if it was not the actual thing in question, then the tests/experiments/tinerkings were meaningless. For example, a westerner studying clouds would, say, make a vacuum jar and create a small vapor cloud in it and use that to work out some of the dynamics of cloud formation. (The talcum power in a cork-sealed jar trick.) Unfortunate for the Chinese, they had the mindset that what was in the jar was not a cloud. To study clouds, you had to go into the sky and study an actual cloud. You could not work on something similar. Apples and oranges to an extreme. Making a model of something completely removed it from the item being modeled. Thus anything done to, or by, the model had no bearing on the actual thing in question.

There's a very good video out on the web that he showed us by a researcher into China's history that very nicely portrays this.

Basically, they got stuck in a box and couldn't think outside of it. In the past 50 years, they've finally gotten out of that rut and are now making the great strides that western researchers have been doing.

He wrapped it up by saying that it'll be interesting to see how advanced China does become now that they're "out of the mental box." More than one Western country could very well be knocked off the technological pedestal in the non-too-distant future. (Actually, his final point was, "try not to get stuck in a 'this is how it's done, and this way only' mindset. Even if it seems impossible, try, you might be surprised.")

If I can remember, I'm meeting with him tomorrow, I'll ask him for the link.

Greek and Arabic passed a lot of words back and forth, so many English words that are considered Greek in origin might actually be from Arabic.

Lots of gemstone/perfume/other trade item names are from Arabic. Carat, amber, jasmine, lilac, cotton, ream, gauze... um, elixir probably... tariff (though my dictionaries disagree on this one). Dictionaries also disagree on satin. Bezoar, which is recognizable to the Harry Potter fans out there.

And one of my favourite words, assassin. There are probably other military words that are also Arabic.

Back to the OP: here's a neat site with some 19th century Japanese inventors. Nothing Earth-shattering, but some neat stuff nonetheless, and still in the recent feudal era.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

but we all know that it didn't exist until a western European made it, so if it was invented in China 1000 years ago, but only found it's way to western Europe last year, it is a "new" invention.
the same goes with the animal kingdom- animals and plants don't exist until they've got a Latin name with far too many syllables.

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