What do these inventions and innovations have in common?

* The electric pacemaker (for cardiac patients)

* Caller ID

* Laser cataract removal

* Closed-circuit television security system

* IBM Personal Computer

* Separation and storage for later use of blood plasma

* CM-2 supercomputer

* Refrigerated trucks and trailers

* The gas mask

* The traffic light

* Macromedia Director (which led to hundreds of online Shockwave games)

* Electret microphone (used in phones and small devices with recording capability)

Here's a hint -- a photo of the inventor of the gas mask and traffic signal:

If you are suggesting they were all invented/developed by coloured folks...you are wrong...

the pace maker for instance.....

The first artificial pacemaker was invented by Australian anaesthesiologist Dr Mark C Lidwell, and was used by him to resuscitate a newborn baby at the Crown Street Women's Hospital, Sydney, in 1926. However it was Hyman who used and popularised the term "artificial pacemaker", which remains in use to this day.[2][3]

and

John Alexander "Jack" Hopps, OC (May 21, 1919 – November 24, 1998) was one of the pioneers of the artificial pacemaker and the founder of the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society (CMBES) who have called him the "Father of biomedical engineering in Canada".[1]

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he received a B.Sc.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1941. He joined the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in 1942.

Beginning in 1949, he worked with Dr. Wilfred Bigelow and Dr. John Callaghan at the Banting Institute in the University of Toronto, developing the world's first external artificial pacemaker in 1951. (The first internal pacemaker was implanted in a human body by a Swedish team in 1958.)


both from wiki

They weren't all invented or invented exclusively by black people, but black people made major contributions to each of them in their modern as-we-know-them incarnations.

Caller ID

In 1968, Theodore George “Ted” Paraskevakos, while working in Athens, Greece as a communications engineer for SITA,[2] began developing a system to automatically identify a telephone caller to a call recipient. After several attempts and experiments, he developed the method in which the caller's number is transmitted to the called receiver's device. This method was the basis for modern-day Caller ID technology.

From 1969 through 1975, Paraskevakos was issued 20 separate patents related to automatic telephone line identification,[3] and since they significantly predated all other similar patents, they appear as prior art in later United States Patents issued to Kazuo Hashimoto[4] and Carolyn A. Doughty.[5]
The first caller identification receiver

In 1971, Paraskevakos, working with Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, constructed and reduced to practice a transmitter and receiver, representing the world's first prototypes of caller-identification devices. They were installed at Peoples' Telephone Company in Leesburg, Alabama and were demonstrated to several telephone companies with great success. These original and historic working models are still in the possession of Paraskevakos.

In the patents related to these devices, Paraskevakos also proposed to send alphanumeric information to the receiving apparatus, such as the caller's name, and also to make feasible banking by telephone. He also proposed to identify the calling telephone by special code (e.g., "PF" for public phone, "HO" for home phone, "OF" for office phone, "PL" for police).

In May 1976, Kazuo Hashimoto, a prolific Japanese inventor with over 1000 patents worldwide,[6] first built a prototype of a caller ID display device that could receive caller ID information. His work on caller ID devices and early prototypes was received in the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History in 2000.[7] U.S. patent 4,242,539, filed originally on May 8, 1976, and a resulting patent re-examined at the patent office by AT&T, was successfully licensed to most of the major telecommunications and computer companies in the world.[8]


follwed by a couple of brazilians

yeah...and the point is ???

lots of inventions /developments have been made/assisted by/contributed to by people from all over



whatever point you are trying to make is lost on me....perhaps I'm not racist enough????

Did we find out yet?

Laser eye surgery was first perfected in Russia, after initial research in India...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6249164

It was researchers in the USA who adapted and patented the use of commercial excimer laser apparatus to the procedures :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LASIK

This operation was allowed in Canada in 1990, and in the USA in 1995..

http://www.lasik.com/articles/laser-vision-correction-history/

So, the person Ben is referring to was probably at Columbia University, in my second reference above -- where his contribution was in improving and commercializing the procedures, and allowing its spread to a wider world ?

I think the answer to what they all have in common, is diversity.
Both the inventions and the inventors.