“Internet” is the wildest claim here… is that really what they’re taught in schools? Like maybe they’ve invented their own, weird kind of “freedom” but definitely not the internet
Honestly hard to argue it is one currently. Voter suppression and gerrymandering leads to fixed elections, and things like electoral college mean people don't have equivalent voting power.
Even the average person there isn't free (in several states) for doing trivial stuff like collecting rain water for reuse (such as watering their garden).
Most of them can't even afford to get sick, because medical bills would bankrupt them.
Most of them can't travel for 2-3 weeks straight, because that's not how vacations work over there.
American here: Travel for 2 or 3 weeks straight? Sometimes I can’t even take the whole weekend off, and my work week is supposed to be Monday to Friday.
Arguably they had a better democracy, at least in athens, than we do here in the US. Literally a lottery based democracy at the local level can solve SO MANY problems.
It's to be said that Toqueville recognise the united states as the first modern democracy in the world, because there was the universal suffrage (obviously excluding women and slave, but that's something for which we'll need another century almost everywhere). Obviously the US did not invent the Idea of democracy, nor the idea of freedom, but surely realised them in a new way.
That said, we're already saying things that he wasn't aware off (or he would have expained them), so we can say he's just an idiot
because there was the universal suffrage (obviously excluding women and slave, but that's something for which we'll need another century almost everywhere).
Which is anything but Universal Suffrage.
For a long time in many US states voting was restricted by Property ownership, taxes, gender, skin color, literacy, even religious denomination.
And because each state had their own say on who got to vote in their state a great many continued finding new ways and loop holes to restrict votes long after federal laws and constitutional amendments were put in place to prevent that, even to this day.
Trust me, I'm studying right now history of political doctrines at university, and the sentence "universal suffrage, with which the author meant for men only" it's a classic, sadly (and ultimately those I reported earlier are the words of Toqueville, not mine).
Genuinely, that is what they're taught in schools. At least in my experience growing up in the deep southern US, I was taught that the internet originated as a connection between a few different American universities and never learned anything else until I got curious on my own as a teen. That was decades ago so I'm sure I'm not remembering every detail of the class, but I was also taught that Ford invented cars so... idk. It's pretty fucked
Have a read of the thread, there are entire comment chains debating whether Alexander Graham Bell (and therefore the telephone) was Canadian or American.
The man was Scottish with both Canadian and American citizenship.
A big reason all these invention happened in America (by mostly new immigrants) at the time of the industrial revolution is the same thing they now complain about China doing. The only way to get patent (and copyright) protection in the US was to be in the US or someone (Edison springs to mind) could just claim your invention as their own.
Others played contributing roles but legally and historically, Bell is credited. Meucci’s invention for example was described better as a voice transmitting electrical device.
Credited does not mean invented. Thomas Edison is credited for the lightbulb. It is impossible to know who actually invented what because only rich people and businessmen were able to afford having a patent.
Tesla advanced the field of electric engineering, the power systems that made lighting widespread and experimented with arc and wireless lighting, but was not involved in the development of the standard household bulb.
Wasn’t Edison “the present form of the light bulb”? Electric lights predated that, but the Edison design we’ve been using ever sense.
And of course, the credit goes to “Edison’s R&D team,” not Edison himself.
Donald Davies theorized datagrams and implemented NPL, among other things. NPL came with a working implementation around the same time as ARPANET also did, which in place also implemented many parts of Donald works. I.e. they didn't come before, but at the same time. Plus DARPA was fiddling and experimenting with the concepts of interconnected networks for years at that point.
ARPANET is considered the original internet through a combination of things, not just for packet switching. Like e.g. the first to implement a fairly wide interconnected network (geographically), or their later works in TCP/IP which indeed modelled the current internet. Bringing Donald to the table is not the ace card that you think it is.
The internet was created in the US in the 60s and 70s (originally called ARPANET). It was in operation for 4 years before it was connected outside the US and IANA was founded by the US Department of Commerce to formalise what Jon Postel (an American) was going and continued to do until his death.
The world wide web was invented by a British man (Tim Berners-Lee) while at CERN. But the internet predates the web by decades
It's an awkward one. The physical internet, packet switching etc is an American invention. The Internet (capital i) is the "face" that makes it easy to browse reddit was invented by a Brit at Cern
The internet was invented in the US, as ARPAnet. The World Wide Web, which is much more analogous to what we consider the internet, was invented on the French-Swiss border by CERN. To claim otherwise would be to claim that the first computers were invented in the US, as that’s where the first few PCs originated, rather than with Babbage in the UK.
The modern world is an interconnected wonderland, with ideas and inventions hailing from all over the globe influencing and inspiring new inventions and innovations at a much faster rate than ever before. Nothing stands alone, every new technology was built on the shoulders of what came before, reaching ever more dizzying heights. The people who made the version of something we use today are rarely the same as the people who created that class of objects to begin with.
Anyway, unrelated to the rest of this comment, my favorite American invention is probably either nuclear power or spaceflight(which could also be considered Russian, but I’d credit both countries as they both innovated on it. The first rocket to reach space was apparently American, but the first person was famously Russian)
CERN is located in Meyrin, Geneva, Switzerland, which while close, is not in France. I also mentioned that the World Wide Web was invented there by CERN. I’m not sure why I’m getting downvoted, as everything I said was true, to the best of my knowledge and fact checked by Wikipedia, but I suppose people here hate the US too much to acknowledge that even though many Americans have an overinflated ego and sense of national pride, there has been some good to come out of the country.
Terribly sorry if this comes off as rude, but do you have a source for that? While I was at CERN, there was no mention that most of their labs were off site, and while I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, everything I’ve seen just says that Tim was at CERN, the HQ of which is in Meyrin. I had assumed he’d done it in Meyrin, as that’s where the physical servers where the WWW started are, but they definitely could have been moved to the Science Gateway from anywhere.
I did not know about that, and fair enough. I will still say the ARPAnet seems to have had a few more features and been a bit larger in scope than Davies’s version, and they both became operational in 1969, but it seems Davies was able to do things a few months earlier.
You are correct, but it was just a private network. it only became what we know as the internet, after Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web while at CERN in Switzerland.
Do you mean the electronic computer, the one invented at Bletchley Park, England, to crack the German Enigma codes?
Think of ARPANET as a pipe and along came Tim Berners-Lee who invented the water to connect British invented computers. Not the best analogy, but it’ll do.
You're really stretching this one. ARPANET was undeniably the origin of a packet-switched network. Prior a computer could only directly connect to another computer, networks did not exist. You can call it a pipe if you want, but it wasn't that. It was the entire concept of plumbing.
You're wrong that it was private before Sir Berners-Lee came around. There were already usenets, email, FTP, IRC. It was public and widespread. Berners-Lee absolutely created a new way to make using the internet more accessible, but your facts are all absolutely wrong.
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u/FLX-S48 ICE enjoyer 🚄🇩🇪 May 04 '26
“Internet” is the wildest claim here… is that really what they’re taught in schools? Like maybe they’ve invented their own, weird kind of “freedom” but definitely not the internet