redtom
Proudhonist
I need some help to answer this essay A level question, I wouldn't normally find essay difficult to do; But I have no knowledge of this subject.
Plz Help
Redtom Humbled
Plz Help
Redtom Humbled
"War has been the great engine of technological advance"
- Thread starter redtom
- Start date
Well, there are a series of arguments for and against this postulate.
The ones that justify it would be that people have "always" tried to supersede their enemies technologically to win wars. If you remember the Mesopotamian wars during the Antiquity, each empire that invented a new kind of weapon became very quickly the dominant power in the region. Look at the rise of the Hittites after their invention of the chariot ; they even conquered Egypt for a short time when they were no more than a minor tribe.
The Greeks quickly gained authority over their neighbours with their superior hoplites and phalanxs. It culminated in the conquest of the Middle East by Alexander. There is no wonder behind this - a better equipped and organised army has a great advantage over its opponent. Same for the Roman and their legions later. Legions were improved Greek Phalanxs and Hoplites, with greater mobility.
During the end of the Middle Ages, knights improved constantly their armors to increase their change of surviving and winning the battles.
The Europeans invented guns (inspired by Muslim grenades, themselves imported from China) to assure themself military supremacy (locally, inside Europe first, then every parts of Europe copied their neighbours and tried improving their own guns). The race to modern military technology had started ! It continues today with supersonic fighter, furtive bomber, computer commanded missiles, nukes and infra-red vision helmets (but still no Bin-Ladin detectors
[punch] ).
The arguments against are that war didn't create all technologies. It did foster scientific research, but sciences usually preceded applications. A bright mind might come to invent something that will be used much later for military
purposes. Most of the time through the history, inventions were accidental and only found their use after had been invented.
Other inventions had primarily a pacific purpose, but were used for their military potential later on. Want examples ? The flight (first planes), the automobile, computers, bronze/iron/steel working, ships, horse riding... Even gun/blackpowder was first used for fireworks in China before a a clever guy found he could make bombs/grenades with it. Even then, it took several more centuries before canons or harqubuses were first built.
Does it give you some orientation for your essay ?
The ones that justify it would be that people have "always" tried to supersede their enemies technologically to win wars. If you remember the Mesopotamian wars during the Antiquity, each empire that invented a new kind of weapon became very quickly the dominant power in the region. Look at the rise of the Hittites after their invention of the chariot ; they even conquered Egypt for a short time when they were no more than a minor tribe.
The Greeks quickly gained authority over their neighbours with their superior hoplites and phalanxs. It culminated in the conquest of the Middle East by Alexander. There is no wonder behind this - a better equipped and organised army has a great advantage over its opponent. Same for the Roman and their legions later. Legions were improved Greek Phalanxs and Hoplites, with greater mobility.
During the end of the Middle Ages, knights improved constantly their armors to increase their change of surviving and winning the battles.
The Europeans invented guns (inspired by Muslim grenades, themselves imported from China) to assure themself military supremacy (locally, inside Europe first, then every parts of Europe copied their neighbours and tried improving their own guns). The race to modern military technology had started ! It continues today with supersonic fighter, furtive bomber, computer commanded missiles, nukes and infra-red vision helmets (but still no Bin-Ladin detectors
[punch] ). The arguments against are that war didn't create all technologies. It did foster scientific research, but sciences usually preceded applications. A bright mind might come to invent something that will be used much later for military
purposes. Most of the time through the history, inventions were accidental and only found their use after had been invented.
Other inventions had primarily a pacific purpose, but were used for their military potential later on. Want examples ? The flight (first planes), the automobile, computers, bronze/iron/steel working, ships, horse riding... Even gun/blackpowder was first used for fireworks in China before a a clever guy found he could make bombs/grenades with it. Even then, it took several more centuries before canons or harqubuses were first built.
Does it give you some orientation for your essay ?
K
knowltok
Guest
I think that Julien is on the right track, but an arguement can be made that computers really got there start in the codebreaking efforts of WWII.
Modern examples: Jets, Radar, Sonar, Atomic Energy.
Also, while flight came about independant of war, most of the improvement in flight has come about from war or the preparation for war. Without WWI, WWII, or the cold war We might still be flying only propeller driven planes.
Some building technology comes from war as well. Castles, walls, etc.
You might want to look into medical stuff too. I am sure somebody came up with something important from treating the wounded.
Modern examples: Jets, Radar, Sonar, Atomic Energy.
Also, while flight came about independant of war, most of the improvement in flight has come about from war or the preparation for war. Without WWI, WWII, or the cold war We might still be flying only propeller driven planes.
Some building technology comes from war as well. Castles, walls, etc.
You might want to look into medical stuff too. I am sure somebody came up with something important from treating the wounded.
redtom
Proudhonist
I like to say thankyou for all input. If you have any other ideas about the answer to the question, I'll be very happen to listen.
Redtom
Redtom
Case
The horror, the horror
As well as accelerating the development of new technologies, war has played an important role in spreading knowledge of these technologies and increasing the number of people with technical skills.
A few examples:
* Much of math eduction used to be aimed at giving people the knowldge necessary to operated projectile weapons such as catapults and artillery
* As well as developing new kinds of aircraft, World War Two played a vital role in spreading aviation through millions(?) of people traveling on aircraft in relative safety and a world wide network of good quality airports being constructed.
A few examples:
* Much of math eduction used to be aimed at giving people the knowldge necessary to operated projectile weapons such as catapults and artillery
* As well as developing new kinds of aircraft, World War Two played a vital role in spreading aviation through millions(?) of people traveling on aircraft in relative safety and a world wide network of good quality airports being constructed.
Redtom,
For starters, if you're into Science Fiction take a read of Robert Harris' 1992 book *Fatherland*. The story begins in the early 1960s - twenty years after the Nazi's great triumph - and only now is the Third Reich with its aging Führer attempting to re-establish relations with its former defeated foe, the United States. The U.S. was victorious against the Japanese but the invasion at Normandy in 1944 was repelled; Britain was overrun (Churchill just barely escaped to Canada) as was Moscow. The Soviets continue a guerilla war east of the Urals, but this is a minor annoyance. President Joseph Kennedy - I said Joseph, not John - is coming to Berlin for the first visit of an American President since the war to re-establish relations.
I won't spoil the story for you but what's interesting is that because World War II ended earlier and the British were overrun relatively early, technology didn't play as important a role in the world that we know today. Television had been invented but was not widespread in the 1960s yet in the book (vaccuum tubes from planes in WW II solved a size problem on early TV sets that made them widely accessible). Harris describes several consumer and civilian technologies that we know happened in real life but in Harris' world didn't because the war ended so lop-sidedly in a German victory.
Several posters on this thread have already mentioned excellent examples of war-driven technology so I'll give you a synapsis:
With the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1795-1815, the French introduced leveé en masse that brought nearly the entire adult population into the war effort. In that short time armies went from being small professional forces to huge, unwieldy armies. This proved that merely having greater numbers didn't guarantee a victory. In fact, if you had a competent commander, he could usually defeat larger forces with smaller but well-trained and flexible forces. However again, not every commander is a Napoleon; most are average and some much less than that. That left one area to turn to for advantage: technology.
Technology has been used in wars for as long as humans have fought one another, but not until the 19th century did technology achieve such focus and attention. The Industrial Revolution that started in Britain and France spread throughout Europe and North America gradually, and created a powerful impetus for technological change in warfare. In the Crimean War, the British used a kind of pressed rubber and oil to make macintoshes for their freezing troops outside Sevastopol (that ultimately led to the discovery of vulcanization and modern tires), and the loss of a supply ship to a storm forced the British to develop the first comprehensive weather forecast system. The American Civil War saw the introduction of the iron-clad ships, practical submarines, paper-cartridge rifles, effective use of the railroad to quickly transport troops around, and portable cameras. The Austro-Prussian War revealed the progress of artillery that made fortresses obsolete (see Klodzko, Poland) while the Franco-Prussian War saw observation balloons.
The real show began in 1914, however, with both sides racing to invent new technologies that could break the deadlock of the Western front. Canned foods (preserved soldiers' rations), more efficient plane engines, barbed wire, wireless communications (hello radio), popular music (the spread and influence of many popular styles as soldiers from around the world mingled, but especially American "ragtime", that assimilated into proto-jazz, rock, etc.), audio-recording technology, more powerful land vehicle engines, more sophisticated diving technology (to lay/remove mines, recover wrecks), a vastly better understanding of human hygiene (one of the first major conflicts where more men died from enemy bullets than disease in the camps), improved "triage"/trauma medical expertise (I survived an ugly car accident years ago because of that technology; thank you!), HUGE advances in chemistry, astronomy (navigation), mechanical physics and geology - all either invented in or vastly improved upon by the experience of the First World War, and paid for with the blood of 10-12 million soldiers.
World War II brought even more, almost innumerable. The invention of the radial engine, the diving gas tank, mass media, the radio, vaccuum tubes and transistor crystals, radar, rocket & jet technology, and others that have already been mentioned.
As a final example, let me follow a technological string for a moment: In the early 19th century Europe was very into Indian, Persian, Afghan, etc. rugs and blankets; very fashionable. The problem was it took months or even years to complete some of the nicer and more complex designs, so a Scotsman (name forgotten - I apologize) who emigrated to New England got the idea to use punched cards on looms. The loom was rigged to a card with specific holes punched in it, each hole representing a specific color thread. As the loom spun, hooks attached to the advancing loom were dragged across the card, and each time it hit a hole, it added that color thread to the design laid out by the holes in the card. In this way, a very complex and expensive-looking eastern-style rug could be made in days instead of months. Woohoo! The wooden loom was known as Hardware, and the cards became known as software. (Can you see where this is going?) Two generations later, a descendant of the obviously by-then wealthy family of the Scotsman who invented this textile technology was working in a comfortable U.S. government job, collecting the numbers for the 1900 census. He applied the technology he'd learned by using the textile cards with holes punched in them to keep data for the census; hole here meant red hair, hole there meant blonde, hole here meant blue eyes, hole there meant brown, etc. He quit his Government job and used these cards towards two practical office inventions; the typewriter and a primitive kind of calculator. He founded a company, International Business Machine, that I think is still active today... (IBM)
Taking this farther, in World War II the U.S. government needed to be able to colect and store vast quantities of intelligence and information about things going on literally all over the world. IBM used that punch-card technology to invent the first primitive data storage units, that we could call the first real computers. After the war, when the Cold War brought a new threat of world-wide confrontation, the United States needed some way of collecting and storing data about radar sites and spying technologies all over the globe to make the sure the Soviets weren't attempting a sneak-attack; and IBM came back with the answer in teh form of the first primitive networks. The Americans wanted to know in real time what the Soviets were doing all over the world, and the IBM networks were able to do this for them. These networks entered the civilian world through the newly-created airline industry, which needed to keep track of customers booking flighst from all over. That direct network links could facilitate direct communications, not just data transfers, was something the U.S. military hit on the late 1960s though this technology wouldn't catch on in the civilian world until a decade later (e-mail). Thus was born the internet and eventually the "WWW". (Only in the 1970s were the punch cards finally tossed in favor of microchips.)
So there's a story of a technology that was buffeted and developed by the necessity of war and potential war.
Hope this all helps -
For starters, if you're into Science Fiction take a read of Robert Harris' 1992 book *Fatherland*. The story begins in the early 1960s - twenty years after the Nazi's great triumph - and only now is the Third Reich with its aging Führer attempting to re-establish relations with its former defeated foe, the United States. The U.S. was victorious against the Japanese but the invasion at Normandy in 1944 was repelled; Britain was overrun (Churchill just barely escaped to Canada) as was Moscow. The Soviets continue a guerilla war east of the Urals, but this is a minor annoyance. President Joseph Kennedy - I said Joseph, not John - is coming to Berlin for the first visit of an American President since the war to re-establish relations.
I won't spoil the story for you but what's interesting is that because World War II ended earlier and the British were overrun relatively early, technology didn't play as important a role in the world that we know today. Television had been invented but was not widespread in the 1960s yet in the book (vaccuum tubes from planes in WW II solved a size problem on early TV sets that made them widely accessible). Harris describes several consumer and civilian technologies that we know happened in real life but in Harris' world didn't because the war ended so lop-sidedly in a German victory.
Several posters on this thread have already mentioned excellent examples of war-driven technology so I'll give you a synapsis:
With the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1795-1815, the French introduced leveé en masse that brought nearly the entire adult population into the war effort. In that short time armies went from being small professional forces to huge, unwieldy armies. This proved that merely having greater numbers didn't guarantee a victory. In fact, if you had a competent commander, he could usually defeat larger forces with smaller but well-trained and flexible forces. However again, not every commander is a Napoleon; most are average and some much less than that. That left one area to turn to for advantage: technology.
Technology has been used in wars for as long as humans have fought one another, but not until the 19th century did technology achieve such focus and attention. The Industrial Revolution that started in Britain and France spread throughout Europe and North America gradually, and created a powerful impetus for technological change in warfare. In the Crimean War, the British used a kind of pressed rubber and oil to make macintoshes for their freezing troops outside Sevastopol (that ultimately led to the discovery of vulcanization and modern tires), and the loss of a supply ship to a storm forced the British to develop the first comprehensive weather forecast system. The American Civil War saw the introduction of the iron-clad ships, practical submarines, paper-cartridge rifles, effective use of the railroad to quickly transport troops around, and portable cameras. The Austro-Prussian War revealed the progress of artillery that made fortresses obsolete (see Klodzko, Poland) while the Franco-Prussian War saw observation balloons.
The real show began in 1914, however, with both sides racing to invent new technologies that could break the deadlock of the Western front. Canned foods (preserved soldiers' rations), more efficient plane engines, barbed wire, wireless communications (hello radio), popular music (the spread and influence of many popular styles as soldiers from around the world mingled, but especially American "ragtime", that assimilated into proto-jazz, rock, etc.), audio-recording technology, more powerful land vehicle engines, more sophisticated diving technology (to lay/remove mines, recover wrecks), a vastly better understanding of human hygiene (one of the first major conflicts where more men died from enemy bullets than disease in the camps), improved "triage"/trauma medical expertise (I survived an ugly car accident years ago because of that technology; thank you!), HUGE advances in chemistry, astronomy (navigation), mechanical physics and geology - all either invented in or vastly improved upon by the experience of the First World War, and paid for with the blood of 10-12 million soldiers.
World War II brought even more, almost innumerable. The invention of the radial engine, the diving gas tank, mass media, the radio, vaccuum tubes and transistor crystals, radar, rocket & jet technology, and others that have already been mentioned.
As a final example, let me follow a technological string for a moment: In the early 19th century Europe was very into Indian, Persian, Afghan, etc. rugs and blankets; very fashionable. The problem was it took months or even years to complete some of the nicer and more complex designs, so a Scotsman (name forgotten - I apologize) who emigrated to New England got the idea to use punched cards on looms. The loom was rigged to a card with specific holes punched in it, each hole representing a specific color thread. As the loom spun, hooks attached to the advancing loom were dragged across the card, and each time it hit a hole, it added that color thread to the design laid out by the holes in the card. In this way, a very complex and expensive-looking eastern-style rug could be made in days instead of months. Woohoo! The wooden loom was known as Hardware, and the cards became known as software. (Can you see where this is going?) Two generations later, a descendant of the obviously by-then wealthy family of the Scotsman who invented this textile technology was working in a comfortable U.S. government job, collecting the numbers for the 1900 census. He applied the technology he'd learned by using the textile cards with holes punched in them to keep data for the census; hole here meant red hair, hole there meant blonde, hole here meant blue eyes, hole there meant brown, etc. He quit his Government job and used these cards towards two practical office inventions; the typewriter and a primitive kind of calculator. He founded a company, International Business Machine, that I think is still active today... (IBM)
Taking this farther, in World War II the U.S. government needed to be able to colect and store vast quantities of intelligence and information about things going on literally all over the world. IBM used that punch-card technology to invent the first primitive data storage units, that we could call the first real computers. After the war, when the Cold War brought a new threat of world-wide confrontation, the United States needed some way of collecting and storing data about radar sites and spying technologies all over the globe to make the sure the Soviets weren't attempting a sneak-attack; and IBM came back with the answer in teh form of the first primitive networks. The Americans wanted to know in real time what the Soviets were doing all over the world, and the IBM networks were able to do this for them. These networks entered the civilian world through the newly-created airline industry, which needed to keep track of customers booking flighst from all over. That direct network links could facilitate direct communications, not just data transfers, was something the U.S. military hit on the late 1960s though this technology wouldn't catch on in the civilian world until a decade later (e-mail). Thus was born the internet and eventually the "WWW". (Only in the 1970s were the punch cards finally tossed in favor of microchips.)
So there's a story of a technology that was buffeted and developed by the necessity of war and potential war.
Hope this all helps -
redtom
Proudhonist
I don't think a scot invented the punch card operation, as far as I know it was frenchman in the napoleonic period, sadly i don't think I have the info as there in my plan for my essay.
Redtom
Redtom
Vrylakas, this was very intersting indeed. I didn't even know how IBM started and what the initials meant ! 
Do you know a good link where I can learn more about these punch cards : the first one used in the loom or later when IBM started.
Where did you get your information ?
Do you know a good link where I can learn more about these punch cards : the first one used in the loom or later when IBM started.
Where did you get your information ?
redtom
Proudhonist
The automatic loom was invented by Joseph Jacquard in 1801. This might have been copied by the umbiquious Scotsman.
redtom
Proudhonist
Does anyone know when the automobile was really invented? I read that Sir Isaac Newton invented the first self powered toy using a small primitive steam engine. But if this is true why wasn't his invention followed up?
When was the first practicle use of the horse-less carriage in war?
When was the first practicle use of the horse-less carriage in war?
I initially came across this story in military history studies (because of the part about the development of networking for NORAD), but I've seen it in summary form since in a few places. The most recent: the 1978 book *Connections* by the popular TV technology historian, James Burke (pp. 109-114). There's gotta be some links out on the net, especially concerning the history of IBM.
As I check Burke now, yes RedTom you are right; it was a Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard, who actually got the idea for the cards in his looms from an earlier French silk manufacturer, Jacques de Vaucanson, who used a paper cylinder with pegs to make silks. Good shot, RedTom. Scotsmen, Frenchmen - it's all a blur sometimes ...
According to Burke the trail to America was also a bit more diluted than I wrote, going through English engineers who utilized the card-loom idea to automate rivetting machines for work on iron bridges. The man working for the U.S. government census office, John Shaw Billings, actually got the ideas for automating the collection of census data through punched cards from a Baltimore wharf engineer (Herman Hollerith) who'd been using the rivetting machine in shipyards. It was Hollerith, not Billings, who foraged on to found IBM. I did a quick net search and found two pages, here and here too.
