You can't make a Sprengel pump without distilling your mercury (it doesn't work if the mercury sticks to the walls of the tubes and leaves crap all over them), and you can't make a vacuum tube without some kind of hard vacuum pump, and, as I pointed out above, the Sprengel pump was the only kind of hard vacuum pump available for decades. (I already explained all of this fairly clearly in previous comments, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333304.) In fact, the invention of the Sprengel pump produced an explosion of inventions and discoveries, of which the so-called Edison effect was only one.

I do think that that there is no example of any invention from anywhere that isn't based on existing technology, including specifically existing technology invented on other continents, and my reading of the question was that it was intended to make precisely that point, thus concisely pointing out the ignorant fallacy at the heart of the original racist bullshit comment, "I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions."