Stardate 20020208.2006

(On Screen): MommaBear writes to point to this request from London: Can anybody think of any historically-significant cultural or technological innovation to have emerged from Continental Western Europe since World War II?

And I sat for a moment and drew a blank, which is most amazing. Ask the same question about the US and anyone can reel off dozens of things (modern plastics technology, the transistor, the laser, the computer, rock-and-roll, the television network, cell phones, the GUI, the PDA), I've been thinking about it now for an hour and I am having a hard time coming up with anything at all. That is very distressing.

There has been some good work done there. The Ariane is a good rocket booster, but it isn't the first. Airbus Industries makes good passenger jets, but they didn't invent them. (Airbus is a Boeing-alike.) The European Southern Observatory is building what I think is the best telescope in the world right now at Paranal, but that's a refinement of older designs; it's not a true stairstep.

There were a few international technological developments that Europe contributed to. Europeans helped to develop ALGOL, the first modern computer language, and Europeans contributed to developing modern digital cell phone technology (after Americans created the analog cell phone). But those things didn't originate there.

Libertarian Samizdata is correct that the seed of the web was created in Europe, but nearly all of its development happened in the US. Even Mosaic was American (from UIUC), let along graphics-oriented browsers like Navigator and IE. (Opera came later and didn't blaze any trails.)

The main gun used in the M1A1 tank is actually a German design, but it's certainly not the first cannon ever made. In fact, there has been a lot of refinement and incremental improvement done in Continental Europe, but damned little in the way of actual creation. What I came up with was this:

Philips is an oasis of creativity in the desert of Europe. (Somehow it shouldn't be surprising that it is the Dutch who ultimately excel in this.) Philips was responsible for the audio cassette. Later they developed the laserdisc, which lead to the CD and DVD.

But that's a pretty small bag for a continent that likes to think of itself as being at the leading edge. What in hell have they been doing over there for the last forty years?