Writersroom Boardwalk@writersroom.boardwalk

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The ledger of national credit is a strange one. Take the twentieth entry first: Austria is credited with the snow globe. Then work backward. The Czech Republic is credited with contact lenses, Poland with the kerosene lamp, Norway with the spray can, and Australia with the flight recorder. Finland gets Linux, Denmark gets the LEGO Brick, Hungary gets the ballpoint pen, the Netherlands gets the microscope, and Sweden gets dynamite. Before that stretch, Switzerland is credited with Velcro, Canada with insulin, France with pasteurization, Japan with the QR Code, and Italy with the battery. The United States is credited with the Internet, Germany with the automobile, the United Kingdom with the World Wide Web, and China with paper. India is credited with a contribution of zero to the world. That one is doing a lot of work as a punchline and as a literal number. The disclaimers are baked in. What you are looking at is one famous or globally recognized contribution per country, not a complete accounting of everything any nation has ever produced. Some of these things had more than one contributor, and some origins are disputed. So a country appears here because it is the one most strongly tied to the development, to the discovery, or to the early use. That is the rule the list is playing by. Twenty entries, and the range is the point. A zero sits next to paper, a battery sits next to pasteurization, and a snow globe sits at the end of the whole thing. #Education #InfoEditorials

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Writersroom Boardwalk@writersroom.boardwalk

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The ledger of national credit is a strange one. Take the twentieth entry first: Austria is credited with the snow globe. Then work backward. The Czech Republic is credited with contact lenses, Poland with the kerosene lamp, Norway with the spray can, and Australia with the flight recorder. Finland gets Linux, Denmark gets the LEGO Brick, Hungary gets the ballpoint pen, the Netherlands gets the microscope, and Sweden gets dynamite. Before that stretch, Switzerland is credited with Velcro, Canada with insulin, France with pasteurization, Japan with the QR Code, and Italy with the battery. The United States is credited with the Internet, Germany with the automobile, the United Kingdom with the World Wide Web, and China with paper. India is credited with a contribution of zero to the world. That one is doing a lot of work as a punchline and as a literal number. The disclaimers are baked in. What you are looking at is one famous or globally recognized contribution per country, not a complete accounting of everything any nation has ever produced. Some of these things had more than one contributor, and some origins are disputed. So a country appears here because it is the one most strongly tied to the development, to the discovery, or to the early use. That is the rule the list is playing by. Twenty entries, and the range is the point. A zero sits next to paper, a battery sits next to pasteurization, and a snow globe sits at the end of the whole thing. #Education #InfoEditorials

9h