WHEN we were in high school, our teachers told us great stories of Filipino inventors like Agapito Flores and Roberto del Rosario, the inventors who purportedly gave us the fluorescent light bulb and the Karaoke machine.
However, the truth of the matter is that when Agapito Flores introduced the fluorescent lamp to the Philippines, the General Electric Company already had fluorescent lamps being used on a commercial level throughout the United States. Furthermore, some Filipinos believe that the word “fluorescent” comes from Flores’s name, but this is absolutely wrong, since etymologically, the prefix “fluor” comes from the Latin “fluere” which means “to flow through.
As for the Karaoke machine, many Filipinos argue that it was Roberto del Rosario who first came up with the idea of a “sing along machine.” This is debatable, since del Rosario’s sing along machine came out in1974, three years after a certain Japanese inventor by the name of Daisuke Inoue released his invention called the Karaoke machine. The name Karaoke itself is a Japanese portmanteau (Kara = empty, Okestura = orchestra), and the only reason why Filipinos believe that del Rosario invented the Karaoke is because he filed a patent for his invention in the 1980s – along with several other people who wanted to cash in on the idea of a sing-along machine. Inoue, the actual inventor, never attempted to file a patent for his machine, and thus lost out on millions.
Another invention that is falsely attributed to the Filipino people is the yo-yo. While the name of the toy really does come from the Ilokano word “yoyo," we were not the first to come up with the idea. The popular story was that during the pre-colonial times, Filipino hunters would use retractable spiked balls attached to strings to hunt, but these are more like retractable flails than toys. The first actual
yo-yos, which are not unlike the modern variety, were found in ancient Greece in the year 500 BC.
However not all the stories of Filipino inventions are wrongly accredited – there are a few things that Filipinos came up with that have helped shape the world, one of which is the single chip 16 bit microprocessor-based calculator, invented by the engineer Diosdado Banatao. The Stanford-educated engineer is also known for creating the first Windows Graphics Accelerator for PCs. The minor caveat is that these things were not totally new ideas when Banatao “invented” them.
The reality is that 16 bit processing existed in the early 50s, and Banatao’s invention coincided with HP’s 16 bit processor. As for the Graphics Accelerator, standalone devices dedicated to the sole purpose of computer gaming were already using graphics chips long before Banatao decided to create versions of them for the PC. But still, he achieved great things with technology.
We Filipinos frequently give credit to ourselves for even the smallest achievements that were done by someone with Filipino blood or Filipino ancestry. It’s almost as if we want to reassure ourselves that “yes, we’re relevant to this world.” Admittedly, most of the things that were said to be invented in the Philippines were in fact discovered someplace else, and a particularly patriotic school teacher began twisting facts to make it look like it came from us. We don’t need to distort history to make ourselves look more important than what we really are.
We should be striving to become great by ourselves in the present.