95% is waaay too high. You had China in the Middle Ages, and the various Semites and Indians before that. Europe and the USA overachieved by a mile for 200 years, no argument, but not 95%.
I remember it being even 98% actually. But it's plausible. Pick any thing that comes to your mind that requires someone to invent it. It was almost certainly some white man. Unless you go as far as "fire" or stone on a stick - then well, who knows.
The history of the invention of the microprocessor is tendentious and controversial;
Intel Engineer, Ted Hoff, is one of the best candidates for the inventor of microprocessors, and he is usually given credit by historians of technology.
So this one is controversial at best.
Algebra is traced back to Babylonians, so it's too ancient to attribute it to anyone. This is like saying breathing was invented by the first entity that could be classified as human. Algebra is something very fundamental to logic - it would have been invented one way or another and lead to the same structure.
But all the inventions listed pale in the face of what they are competing with: Electricity, light bulb, Penicillin, computer, telephone, internet, television, film, radio, mobile phone, flashlight, reinforced concrete, photography, nuclear fission, radioactivity. These are all heavy-weights of modern times, many of which revolutionized society in significant ways. And I am sure there are countless of mundane inventions as well similar to Walkmen and blue LEDs.
Blue LEDs are pretty important (not tier 1 electricity important, but not trivial); without them there are no white LEDs and almost no blue lasers,fyi.
And yeah, the Babylonians count. You set the bar at prehistory and fire, not recorded history and mathematics.
The Chinese deem papermaking, gunpowder, printing and the compass their four greatest inventions.
IMO gunpowder and papermaking are tier 1 inventions; you'd need 38 comparable inventions to get to 95% just from these two.
Printing is obviously tier 1 but IMO the Chinese don't really deserve full credit as they didn't deploy it, so call it block printing and move on. The compass? Arguable tier 1 or tier 2.
95% is waaay too high. You had China in the Middle Ages, and the various Semites and Indians before that. Europe and the USA overachieved by a mile for 200 years, no argument, but not 95%.
I remember it being even 98% actually. But it's plausible. Pick any thing that comes to your mind that requires someone to invent it. It was almost certainly some white man. Unless you go as far as "fire" or stone on a stick - then well, who knows.
Gunpowder, porcelain, paper money, metalwork, horse riding, recurve bows, blast furnaces, silk, granaries, algebra, the modern numeral system, papermaking, the compass, block printing, walkmans, fibre optics, blue LEDs, microprocessors.
So this one is controversial at best.
Algebra is traced back to Babylonians, so it's too ancient to attribute it to anyone. This is like saying breathing was invented by the first entity that could be classified as human. Algebra is something very fundamental to logic - it would have been invented one way or another and lead to the same structure.
But all the inventions listed pale in the face of what they are competing with: Electricity, light bulb, Penicillin, computer, telephone, internet, television, film, radio, mobile phone, flashlight, reinforced concrete, photography, nuclear fission, radioactivity. These are all heavy-weights of modern times, many of which revolutionized society in significant ways. And I am sure there are countless of mundane inventions as well similar to Walkmen and blue LEDs.
Blue LEDs are pretty important (not tier 1 electricity important, but not trivial); without them there are no white LEDs and almost no blue lasers,fyi.
And yeah, the Babylonians count. You set the bar at prehistory and fire, not recorded history and mathematics.
The Chinese deem papermaking, gunpowder, printing and the compass their four greatest inventions.
IMO gunpowder and papermaking are tier 1 inventions; you'd need 38 comparable inventions to get to 95% just from these two.
Printing is obviously tier 1 but IMO the Chinese don't really deserve full credit as they didn't deploy it, so call it block printing and move on. The compass? Arguable tier 1 or tier 2.