Before the food was grown that became sperms that become brothers Wright, there was Alexander Mozhaisky. A distinguished Russian aviation pioneer spent much of his life in Russian Navy. He had extensively studied aerodynamics of birds, wing span to weight ratios, kites and propellers. This was the time when cameras were not exactly common to document this military research. What is known though, is that he had built at least several versions of the airplane that had all the parts present on today's flying machines, including controls. The plane was powered by steam engines, since gasoline engines were just getting invented and built. That was some pretty hard core act! In any case, the manned plane flew and crashed. Mozhaisky patented plane in 1881 and died not too long later. Unfortunately, until much better engines became common, the planes would have to wait.
Assault Rifle was designed to solve a specific problem of providing accurate and rapid semi/full auto power for fairly close ranges (up to 400 yards) Unlike sub-machine guns, assault rifles have more powerful ammo and may be used with far greater accuracy. Regardless of the definition, like the Da Vinci's paper helicopter, Italian made Cei-Rigotti was developed in 1990s, but actually never entered service. On the other hand, Automat Fedorova came to be in 1916 and by some accounts is considered to be one of the best rifles of the WWI. All side experimented with assault rifles since then. While this is not related, I must note that AK-47 was inspired by German STG 44 Sturmgewhr.
Baseball is probably the most American past-time in the US. It definitely holds a very special place in hearts of Americans. ... and you guessed it, Russians have invented it! There are many games that resemble baseball: Cricket to name just one, however not one of them comes even close in strikingly resembling baseball as does Lapta. Lapta is an ancient Russian sport - wooden bats and leather balls dating back to the 14th century have been discovered in Veliky Novgorod. The theory is that the Russian immigrants coming to the new world, brought with them this piece of old mother Russia. Concepts like tagging runners out, hitting and catching fly balls are some examples of inherited rules.
Sure, some propaganda tells you that the game of chess was invented in India. There are plenty of games that closely resemble chess and are played in China and Japan. However, the kind of chess that was played by Attila the Hun is quite different from the kind of game we play today. For example pieces could only move one square and Queen had less power than King (naturally.) The modern Chess used to be called Queen's chess, because Queen was emancipated to become the most powerful piece on the board. Also, moves for other pieces were standardized and enabled to move several squares making the game truly dynamic and fun to play.
Photography was around for many years, before the practical concept became the reality of taking color pictures. The idea seems really simple, yet advanced for it's time: combine three parts of spectrum: Red, Green and Blue and combine them into one image. Chemicals of that time could not handle the task, so Prokudin-Gorskii came up with a very ingenious idea to take three pictures of the same scene through three filters. Later a special projector would combine three slides into one image. Look at some of his work here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ where pictures from 1909 come alive in full color.
Helicopter was invented by Igor. ... not Dr. Frankenstein's assistant, but by Igor Sikorsky. Igor was born in Kiev, Ukraine (which was part of evil Russia) where he was educated and started his work on flying machines with vertical take-off. This was way before the first World War, when the primitive, underpowered cloth covered airplanes were taking to the sky competing with Zeppelins. Before that time, Igor already was thinking ten moves ahead, developing flying machines that would revolutionize combat. In fact, after leaving St. Petersburg and coming to the Land of Opportunity, he had delivered first combat helicopter to the US Army. The rest is history: helicopters were cranked out from Igor's shop as well as from other companies that copied the principle. Sure, Da Vinci drew some designs on paper, but building the real, functional thing is more difficult them tripping on 'shrooms.
Well, I was not sure where to put it and also if this would qualify to be here at all. The latest King Arthur movie makes some pretty wild statements as far as origin of King Arthur. If we are to believe the film producers, he and his troops were Sarmatians or plainly speaking Ukrainians. Since Ukrainians gave rise to Russian civilization, it follows that Brits have much more in common with Russians then we previously thought ; )
Great British scientist Humphry Davy (no doubt of Russian descent) was the first man who actually obtained light from electricity. Much like when you produce sparks from changing your car battery, he used large battery hooked up to two carbon rods close by. The electric arc between the rods was so brilliant that there was no doubt what it can be used for. In 1802 he presented the lamp and then the race to improve it began. The biggest problem is that two rods were continuously burning out and someone had to move them closer to maintain the light. There were numerous inventions to keep the rods at some distance from each other: ingenious mechanical feed mechanisms. The legend says that Pasha Jablochkoff, a Russian man, went to a restaurant to have a meal. After a few shots of vodka to promote appetite he have noticed how garcon put the fork and knife before him. They were parallel to each other!!! That was the most ingenious and brilliant solution. Instead of moving rods mechanically, you had to position them parallel to each other and place special compound that would evaporate as the "candle" would burn. This was the first successful solution to generate light with electricity. The lamps consumed far less electricity than any other lamps of that time. In 1887 80 arc-lamps of Jablochkoff were installed at Grands Magazins du Louvre in Paris.
While Margarete Steiff is credited with creating the first stuffed bear toy in 1880, I'm sure that a great deal of people would contest the claim of creating this kind of staffed animal. I'm sure that many centuries before, there were staffed bears, hedgehogs and turds created by creative people with needle and thread. The actual, the real deal - Teddy Bear came as the result of the famous incident with Theodore Roosevelt and a bear cub. Hence the name - Teddy's Bear. Russian immigrants: Morris and Rose Michton came up with an idea to sell staffed bears and specifically named them "Teddy Bear" with permission from the president Roosevelt.
I need to do more research here. There are quite a few articles on this, but none in the internet. Apparently one of the Russian monks have created a first functioning vehicle that was propelled by a horse. The vehicle was an armored wagon of sort with horse as propulsion system and a human operator inside. The operator would steer the tank and ultimately would dispense some punishment on enemy outside. The problem was that Orthodox church did not like to sponsor killing machines and burned down the prototype after claiming it to be devil's invention. If anyone has more info on this, please send it to me.
I think that is the only self-evident invention from Russia. Just to add to it, 'samogon' - or self-made vodka is usually closer to grain alcohol than vodka. Production of Vodka was regulated by Russian government for many, many centuries. It can be made from practically anything that has sugar: apricots, wheat and even watermelons. The good stuph is made out of wheat, not potatoes like many people think. Another good point of info on the subject of drinking, western shot-glasses are maximum 2 oz or 60ml of girliness. Most of the Russians would drink 100ml shots.