Nearly all important inventions of the 20th century were invented by the U.S. federal government and the British government. The research was paid for by taxpayers, although private industry usually reaped the profits. Federal support for research has been drastically curtailed in recent years, so the march of progress may well ground to halt.
Here is a short but fairly comprehensive list of some of the most important breakthroughs of the 20th century, in chronological order. Some of these items come from:
http://composite.about.com/od/inthenews/l/blnae1.htm
I do not think there are many others that were truly fundamental. Of course there were thousands of incremental breakthroughs and improvements, and many of them were paid for by venture capitalists.
Aviation +
Mass production automobiles
Widespread electrification +
Icemaking, air conditioning
Public health improvements (water, sewage, vaccinations, elimination of smallpox, polio, etc.) *+
Petrochemical technology +
Agricultural modernization; green revolution *+
Radio
Television
Radar *+
Antibiotics *+
Nuclear energy *+
Jet aircraft +
Computers, and early computer languages *+
Spacecraft, satellites, space-based weather forecasting *+
Interstate highways +
Transistors +
DNA +
Integrated circuits
Lasers +
Artificial implants and other health breakthroughs +
Fiber optics +
Internet *+
Human genome project +
* = invented mainly by scientists & engineers on the government payroll, or researchers in publicly funded universities.
+ = paid for mainly or completely by the U.S. federal government and/or British government, often during WWII.
Integrated circuits were discovered and developed without government help at first, but as Mike Carrell has pointed out, rapid progress in the technology in the early 1960s was mainly thanks to NASA and the Pentagon.
There is much to be said for capitalism and the free market, but they have seldom contributed to the truly fundamental breakthroughs, mainly because such breakthroughs are seldom profitable. That is, they are not directly in and of themselves profitable. You cannot patent a force of nature, or something like the discovery of nuclear fusion in the sun, or DNA, or the human genome.
- Jed
