I’m talking about paradigm-shifting conventions. Microprocessors. LLMs. The Internet. Lithium-ion batteries. Our institutions reliably did the basic research to bias us (and the USSR) towards discovering their underlying phenomena and then maturing that into technology. Today, the only real player in that space is China.
- Basic oxygen steelmaking
- Float glass
- Orbital satellite
- High speed railway
- Public key cryptography
- Orbital space station
- DNA/RNA/sequencing
- Self-driving car
- Cellular phone service
- CD-ROM
- Direct satellite television
- Laptop
- (Also some other stuff after 1985...)
JumpCrisscross said "half century"; while I would doubt the "practically every" part of their claim and like you would instead reduce that to somewhere between "lots" and "most", your list has a lot of stuff from before 1975.
You can definitely have CD-ROMs and I think it's fair to give you DNA sequencing (though that's not really one single thing), but everything else is questionable or just not correct when I look up the history of those exact things on the same source you link to above — their own wikipedia pages.
As for "questionable":
- Cellular phone service: depends what you count as such, given people have been working on the predecessors to what's now called 1G since about the invention of the radio; but 1G itself would be Japan in 1979, so if that's your cut-off-point, then you could have it I guess.
- Laptop: only if you're counting the Portal R2E CCMC, because the first clamshell laptop was the Grid Compass. While the founder of the company and designer of the laptop were British, they were doing the work in the USA.
As for "just no":
- Basic oxygen steelmaking: 1856 for the first demonstration in the UK, 1940s for industrialisation in Austria
- Float glass: 1950s
- Orbital satellite: 1957
- High speed railway: depends what you mean by "high speed", but you could easily claim 1938 or several different points in the 1950s
- Public key cryptography: 1973 in secret in the UK, but they were classified for ages and only the US invention of the same a few years later made it commercially available, so the "lab" part in the lab-to-home path was definitely American.
- Orbital space station: 1971 (I'd count this as a paradigm shift even if there's no living rooms anywhere in sight here)
- Direct satellite television: why did you put this in your list? Not only is the first ever satellite TV broadcast the USA's Telstar in 1962, the first direct broadcast satellite was ATS-6 in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-6
- Self-driving car: Even the SOTA in self driving cars is not "paradigm-shifting", so it's not really been invented yet at the level required to be on this list
Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible.
On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.