The Limelight Department was one of the world's first film studios, beginning in 1898, operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia.
The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts.
In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time.
The original cut of this silent film ran for more than an hour with a reel length of about 1,200 metres (4,000 ft), making it the longest narrative film yet seen in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limelight_Department
That isn't a result that makes Europe look clever. The major intellectual innovation out of that era was communism. The US approach outperformed Europe's by such a margin that it isn't worth comparing them.
That came out of Europe, and well after the steam engine.
And, I think you mean "Marxism", not "communism"?
Communism in the West predates capitalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_communism lists examples like Tommaso Campanella's 1601 work "The City of the Sun" and Morelly's 1755 work "The Code of Nature" as some of the works which predate Smith's 1776 work "The Wealth of Nations".
You say that the rocket sent to the moon was built by a German, as if that's points against the United States. To many Americans that isn't a bad thing. It is a foundational American value to adopt culture, skill, and ambition from abroad.
The US wasn't disrupted by WWII nearly as much as France. The US also has a larger domestic monolingual market, so there's more potential for network effects.
By the way, this is true even today. The EU is a larger unified market than the US, but linguistic divisions are still a significant barrier.
When pointed out that it wasn't one American but many imported people from around the world then suddenly things shift to "well of course, that's because only the US allows lots of individuals from around the world to work together as a team to do great things".
Which one is it?
In the end it's a definition of how far back you want to look to define "original natives". And the further back you go the more inexact are the "facts". Do we all come from this one place in Africa in the end? Are we 100% Homo sapiens Or How much Neanderthal is in us? Does it depend on which migration wave our ancestors were part of?
Meaning by extension of your logic if I choose the right cutoff Europe is African actually so the Atomic bomb was invented by an African!
Personally I think that the cutoff should be somewhere around second or third generation immigrants. Specifics can depend on how much integration with existing local culture happens or how much individual silo groups cling to their country of origin. And then there's of course the "eradication of previous inhabitants" that sometimes happened. The majority population of the US has roots in Europe, yes. But US culture" is definitely distinct enough now to stand on its own.
It's not as easy as that though on a more philosophical level and from various different angles. E.g. think yourself back to the days those Asian tribes presumably came to America. I read it was three waves. Was the first wave the only true "native Americans" then and the second wave was an immigrant already? That became "native" when and how then? (never mind that there was no such thing as citizenship of a country at that time)
Even an oblique reference deserves the Tom Lehrer reference [0] :-)
Mostly foreign Jewish scientists who were neither taught nor started their research in the USA and came because of the situation in Europe. Even Oppenheimer had to go do his PhD in Germany.
> Hollywood
Both the camera, the first films and the foundation of filming come from the Lumieres and their company based in France and the films they made around the world.
> internet
Packet switching is from Batman in the UK. HTML was from a British engineer in Switzerland.
Even the rocket you sent to the moon was built by a German.