Alternate tech development without the USA

If the USA doesn't exist and is a Dominion of some super sized BritishWank Empire what happens to some the greatest inventors and scientist of all time who happend to be Americans? How would this affect technological development? My example is this...Alexander Graham Bell was Scottish via Canada. So I would presume he would still exist and invent the telephone
in my super British Empire world. This might give the telecommunications industry to the UK since there would be no AT&T, Bell Labs or Western Electric.
Now then...what about Thomas Edison or Westinghouse or the Wright Brothers would they be butterflied away because the USA doesn't exist? Are there other loyal subjects of the crown that could replace these men in an alternate BritishWank Empire world? How does this affect the world?
Is more industrial capacity and development locked into Great Britain? And does this increase in tech development keep the Empire the only super-power in the world?
Please discuss!!!
 
Assuming they were butterflied away, tech development would be stalled at worst, but not for very long. Very often, what happens with great tech development is that everything necessary for it is figured out a long time previously; the genius is merely the one to put the pieces together. Take away the American geniuses, and the pieces are still there, it's just waiting someone else to develop. Given an extra few years, someone else will put the pieces together.

Now, when thinking about butterflies, other geniuses would pop up. So maybe Edison isn't born, but John Smith comes along three years earlier and does similar work. So, in this case, you'd actually see earlier tech development.

Britain definitely isn't going to have a monopoly. For one thing, Germany and Austria-Hungary had a very strong tradition of producing scientists and engineers. Look at a list of Manhattan Project members, and you'll basically see a list of German, Austrian, and Hungarian refugees. If they stay in Germany and Austria in this time line, due to butterflies, you could see their respective nations be a match for Britain. In addition, technology has a tendency to disperse. A development in one nation will be spread to another, through espionage or reverse engineering. Much of Russia's atomic program was either directly stolen, or used information from America's detonation.
 
Also worth noting most great advances tend to have been worked on by many different people at the same time seperately. Take away one and another gets it.

What would really alter tech here is changing or removing the world wars. So maybe nuclear weapons are delayed. However a globe spanning über British Empire might develop satellite communications at an earlier stage, put a lot of effort into airtravel etc.
 
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