the author sets out on a very difficult exercise, made more so if he does not include the other inventive civilizations. documenting china's inventions, for instance, required more than a lifetime of work by Needham; volumes continued to come out even decades after his death around 1990; some dozens of densely worded volumes comprise his masterwork and it is still thought to be far from complete. some of what the British patent office was approving in the 1800s were already in their modern form in china at the time of Christ. such examples are many, and I expect similarly so for India, the Arabs, the Persians, the Mayans, the Incas, etc.