Nuclear Weapons, Telly, Internet are all major ones...
Coke would be another - kinda changed the world, lol.
Not sure who discovered electricity and who invented the phone, so can't attribute them to the Yanks (altho they did change America).
I'd also suggest radar and penicillin...but I think they were British inventions, hehehe. :wink:
Franklin got the credit for realising that electricity and lightning were the same thing, but the word electric was coined by an English scientist, Gilbert, in 1600. The guy who really did the serious investigation of it was Volta, who discovered that chemical reactions could produce electricity and the result of that was batteries. It's argued that the Parthians might have done that a few centuries before him based on the discovery of the Baghdad Battery in 1936, but no-one's quite sure yet what they were used for and whether or not they were electrical. They just have a similar structure to galvanic cells.
Alexander Graham Bell from Edinburgh was the first to patent a working telephone, but there were quite a few other contenders around the same time who were slightly put out that he got there first.
The precursor to radar was developed by Christian Hülsmeyer, but the first practical system was produced by the Brits.
Penicillin was down to another Scottish scientist, Alexander Fleming. Just think, if he had been a better microbiologist and had used proper sterile technique, medicine would have been very different over the last 80 odd years.
And back in the old days, Coke contained coke, so you can take that how you will.