The Age of Rediscovery

Most people believe that Western genius, for better or for worse, created the humming miracles of modern technology and science. But Moscow tells its children that that is just capitalist propaganda: Mother Russia really did it all. On "Radio Day" last week, Communications Industry Minister Gennady Vasilievich Alexenko patiently repeated that the man who first developed radio (in the year 1895) was Alexander Popov of St. Petersburg. (Popov had thought up radar, too.) And what of the world's acclaim for Italian Inventor Guglielmo Marconi? Said Moscow: "Sham laurels."

Moscow has recently debunked other Western delusions of grandeur. The steam engine, it seems, was not invented by Britain's James Watt, but by Ivan Polzunov. Thomas Edison gets false credit for the light bulb; Alexander Lodygin thought it up first. The first airplane was not constructed by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but by a Russian naval officer, Alexander Mozhaisky. The first jet plane was designed by Nikolai Kibalchich, a terrorist, while he awaited execution, in 1881, for his part in the assassination of Czar Alexander II. It was Vyacheslav Manassein who discovered penicillin, 75 years ahead of Britain's Alexander Fleming, and Leonid Vasilievich Sobolev who discovered insulin, 21 years ahead of Canada's Frederick Banting.

How had it happened that these Russians failed to get general recognition all these years while Western impostors usurped their glory? Moscow had the answer for that, too. It was the fault of the czarist iron curtain, which repressed science and free thought.

Contemporary Russian inventors were not idle. Last week, Tass reported that they had developed a new artificial arm with which disabled veterans could "write, saw and chop wood, strike matches, and operate a machine gun."

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