Guns Germs And Steel By Jared Diamond Thesis

Jared Diamond’s thesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel is erroneous because it was mainly the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, specifically the light bulb and railway train, that really separated the European West from the rest of the world and enabled European global domination. The inventions of both the railway train and light bulb had profound impacts on improving manufacturing and transportation efficiency in European countries at different times throughout the nineteenth century. Jared Diamond explains why the Americas or in Africa did not surpass and become global dominants: “Diffusion was slower in Africa and especially in the Americas, because of those continents’ north-south major axes and geographic and ecological barriers”(Diamond

He blames it on a combination of geographic connectedness and politics: “One decision stopped fleets over the whole of China” because the “entire region was politically unified”(Diamond 396). He goes on to say that he has “emphasized the diffusion of technology that takes place in the absence of formidable barriers” but provides an exception to this when he states; “China’s connectedness eventually became a disadvantage…”(Diamond 398). This exception of China weakens his thesis and leads to another weakness later on when he does not give a complete answer to his thesis when he shows that comparisons made between European societies and China “suggest that geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the

Although Thomas Edison is most often accredited with the invention of the electric light bulb, he did not actually invent it. More precisely, he invented the “first commercially practical incandescent light”(Boundless). Edison and his team at Menlo Park, his laboratory located in New Jersey produced a light bulb with a carbon filament by October of 1879 that lasted over fourteen hours. After years of working, Edison unveiled his light bulb at Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve of 1879(Lighting a Revolution). However, Edison was not the only person working on an incandescent light bulb at the time. So was British chemist, Joseph Swan. Although he is not as famous as Edison in the invention of the light bulb, Swan won many patent suits over other lamp makers in Britain. Rather than lose a lawsuit to Swan over patents. Edison “decided to negotiate rather than risk losing a suit of [his] own”(Lighting a Revolution). The Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company was established in 1883 and was commonly referred to as