I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of white Americans being blamed for everything. Here’s some good stuff white people should be thanked for! That’s an enormous list. We’re talking about thousands of inventions across medicine, transportation, electricity, communications, agriculture, engineering, computers, aviation, and everyday household products. There’s one important historical distinction: an invention can be credited to a particular inventor, but inventions don’t inherently belong to a race. Many inventions were also developed independently in different civilizations or improved over generations. I can give you a substantial historical list of inventions credited to European and European-descended inventors, including their names, countries, and dates. A literally complete list of everything would be impossible because inventions number in the millions, many have disputed origins, and historical records don’t consistently identify inventors by race. Major inventions credited to European and European-descended inventors Here is a broad historical reference list. Dates are approximate where an invention developed over several years. Electricity and electronics Invention or breakthrough Inventor Date Electric battery Alessandro Volta 1800 Electric motor, early demonstration Michael Faraday 1821 Electromagnet William Sturgeon 1825 Electromagnetic induction Michael Faraday 1831 Practical electric generator Werner von Siemens 1866 Practical incandescent lighting Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison and others 1870s AC induction motor Nikola Tesla 1887–1888 Transformer development Zipernowsky, Déri and Bláthy 1885 Vacuum-tube diode John Ambrose Fleming 1904 Triode amplifier Lee de Forest 1906 Fluorescent lamp development Edmund Germer and others 1920s–1930s Transistor Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley 1947 Integrated circuit Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce 1958–1959 Visible-light LED Nick Holonyak Jr. 1962 Lithium-ion battery foundations Stanley Whittingham and John Goodenough, with later contributions by Akira Yoshino 1970s–1980s Transportation and aviation Invention or breakthrough Inventor Date Steam-powered road vehicle Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot 1769 Hot-air balloon Montgolfier brothers 1783 Early steamboat development John Fitch, Robert Fulton and others 1780s–1800s Practical steam locomotive George Stephenson and others 1810s–1820s Bicycle precursor Karl von Drais 1817 Pneumatic tire Robert William Thomson 1845 Four-stroke engine Nikolaus Otto 1876 Gasoline automobile Karl Benz 1885–1886 Motorcycle, early gasoline design Daimler and Maybach 1885 Diesel engine Rudolf Diesel 1890s Powered airplane Wright brothers 1903 Mass-production moving assembly line for automobiles Henry Ford and his team 1913 Helicopter, early practical designs Igor Sikorsky and others 1930s Turbojet engine Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain, independently 1930s Modern three-point seat belt Nils Bohlin 1959 Communications and computers Invention or breakthrough Inventor Date European movable-metal-type printing system Johannes Gutenberg c. 1450 Mechanical calculator Blaise Pascal 1642 Mechanical calculating engine designs Charles Babbage 1820s–1830s Electric telegraph systems Samuel Morse, Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke 1830s Telephone Alexander Graham Bell, with other important pioneers 1876 Phonograph Thomas Edison 1877 Wireless telegraphy Guglielmo Marconi and other pioneers 1890s Electronic television systems Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin, among others 1920s–1930s General-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert 1940s Computer mouse Douglas Engelbart and Bill English 1960s Ethernet Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs 1970s World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee 1989–1991 Linux kernel Linus Torvalds 1991 Medicine and health Invention or breakthrough Inventor Date Smallpox vaccine Edward Jenner 1796 Stethoscope René Laennec 1816 General anesthesia using ether, major demonstration William T. G. Morton 1846