this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Literally the exact point I'm making.
In that statement, he didn't invent the steam engine. He invented an improved form of it. But not the steam engine itself.
At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.
The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.
No one has ever invented anything, since we take concepts were familiar with and mix them
Yeah that's true. We didn't invent TV or anything...
Correct. Tvs are improvements on still images, which themselves are an improvement on pictographs, which are an improvement on transmission of ideas via language.
To be clear, we very much invented all of that.