A bit taken aback by this claim, I did some googling, and the best I was able to come up with was that there are a whole bunch of people asking who Robert F. Flemming, Jr. was and how did he come to invent the guitar, or what was it about the guitar that he invented. Speculation about maybe the electric guitar, but was electricity sufficiently available in 1880 to make an electric guitar even feasible? I don't think so. Edison was patenting a lot of stuff about that time, but how many houses were actually wired?

Besides, wasn't the electric guitar invented by one Adolph Rickenbacker in the 1930s, with its popularity being given a great boost by Les Paul, with his development of the solid-body electric in the early 1940s and his and Mary Ford's subsequent recordings in the 40s and 50s?

This claim requires a lot of detailed substantiation.

Some members of various groups, both political and ethnic, like to make the claim that a member of their particular group invented or discovered a whole variety of things first, but because they were an oppressed minority, they were shunted aside and someone else took credit for it. This sorry penchant can verge on the downright silly when it flies in the face of solidly established history.

I knew a young black man at the university who, as the civil rights movement gathered steam, grew increasingly militant, and as time went on, he began to distanced himself from reality. I was in solid sympathy with his cause, but his revisionism started me worrying about him. On one occasion, while having coffee with him in a restaurant near campus, he went off on a toot, explaining to me how "the white man," who writes the history, tries to erase the greatness and the accomplishments of other races, especially his.

His history lesson to me included, among many other things, his taking issue with the movie Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. "Cleopatra," he informed me, "as everyone knows, was a black African ." (She was not; she was Greek.) And, he informed me that Beethoven was black. "You can tell by his features." Really?

I knew better than to argue with him. I just sat there, saying "Hmm!" and "Really!? I didn't know that!" a lot.

What, I wonder, was that instrument that Fernando Sor, (1778 – 1839) was playing and for which he wrote so much music?

And where did the painter Vermeer get his ideas? The Guitar Player (circa 1672).

This sad bit of revisionism is certainly not limited to any particular group. This penchant was spoofed in a couple of episodes of Star Trek, TOS, when Ensign Chekov claimed that something had been invented by Russians, drawing a raised eyebrow or two from other crew members.

That's a really extraordinary list. I was particularly fascinated to learn that a W. A. Lavallette invented the printing press. Eat your heart out, Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468)!!

Don Firth