On Star Trek Ensign Checkov liked to claim well-known things were invented in Russia. Where did this come from? I have a vague memory of hearing something about the Soviet Union claiming to have invented the Douglas DC-3, or something like that. But what was or were the specific occurrence or occurrences that caused the joke to come about?
Previous discussion "Red Nightmare" Claims--Question #2 - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
It’s just making fun of a particular manifestation of national pride wherein patriots claim inventions for their own country. It’s nothing specific to the Soviet Union. Heck, Britons, Americans, and Germans have been fighting for decades over who first invented the computer. Britons, Americans, and Indians routinely fight over who invented the airplane.
As well as the Brazilians.
but we all know it was the Kiwis…
While there are often competing claims for inventions from different nations, the Soviet Union took it to new heights. They claimed that Russians invented radio, television, the airplane, the light bulb, and many others attributed elsewhere to other inventors. Some claims had more justification than others.
By the 1960s this was a standing joke. I remember this practice mentioned in Mad magazine from this era. Chekov’s claims were just a riff on this.
And what we Americans learn in school isn’t necessarily true either. For example, Edison did not invent the light bulb and Morse invented neither the telegraph nor Morse code.
One of the more far-fetched of Stalin’s claims was that Russians had invented baseball.Romania has a claim too.
I can confirm this. It was a common meme long before Star Trek, and pretty much everyone viewing then got Gerrold’s joke.
It is my understanding that Morse (and Gall and Vail) invented a much different telegraph than the one that Cooke and Wheatstone invented in Britain, and it was certainly the one used throughout the U.S. The British one worked more like a typewriter and printed the characters. I suspect that made it slower and it was never commercially adopted.
He also invented a Morse code that was all numbers and required a code book. Vail expanded this to include letters similar to but not identical to the International Morse Code now used. One difference I recall was that were pauses in some letters and O was: dot pause dot making SOS dot dot dot (long pause) dot (short pause) dot (long pause) dot dot dot. Though I don’t know if SOS was adopted before the modern code came into play.
It has been a long time since I read a biography of Morse, but my recollection was that his invention was not the telegraph, but a particularly complex multi-wire version of the electrical telegraph. There were many prior inventions, including a binary-coded system invented by none other than Gauss. Morse’s invention was impractical and it was his employee Vail who developed this into a more practical and much simplified design, which was commercially successful. To use it required a coding scheme. The biography I read gave the credit for the Morse code to Vail; but I just read the Wikipedia article on Vail and apparently, how much credit he deserves for the Morse Code is debated by scholars.
In Russia inventions invent…
… never mind.
Goodness Gracious Me, a British sketch comedy show series about Indian Brits, had an “ultra-patriotic uncle” character who kept claiming that all sort of things were invented in India.
I myself heard a lot of such claims travelling through Iran about a decade ago. Everything from air conditioning to human rights to Tom & Jerry (yes, really!) and Harry Potter (yes, really!!).
This was (in part) the subject of one of Alistair Cooke’s columns way back when, entitled Bezbol, but I can’t find it or a description of it online.
In the previously cited thread, I wrote about actually hearing this on Radio Moscow on shortwave radio way back when.
Nowadays I presume people hear this from planted stories on Facebook.
I don’t believe that. I can believe they invented the designated hitter. Godless commies.
And, it’s “inwented”.
Relevant TV Tropes page. As the title of that page implies, it’s been done (for a long time) for origins other than Russian, but it seems that Russian is the old standby (in US cultural circles, anyway).
“The Garden of Eden was just outside Moscow.”
“Scotch was invented by a little old lady outside of Leningrad.”
I have the column, which is from 1952, in his book Fun & Games with Alistair Cooke.
The rest of the article itself mocks the Russians in hideous phonetics (“A bol is heet by a better who then ron aronn tree becks of send or bessiz”) and silly cliches. It may have wowed them in 1952 but it don’t reed nun gud in 2018.
The Wikipedia article on laptashows that it was indeed a pitch and hit game that seems much like a forerunner of baseball, which, as everybody should know, Americans adaptedrather than invented.
Yeah, Russia did a lot of bragging about its inventions. They were in competition with us and good at propaganda. But Americans were really and truly obnoxious in their uneducated and ahistoric bragging and deserved whatever they got in return.