"Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell!" - General William T. Sherman
PISSED sent me a link that, while not disproving General Sherman's quote, certainly sheds a different light on warfare:
Wartime Innovations That Have Shaped Our World
They say necessity is the mother of invention. So you can protest war all you want, but just remember that throughout history the necessities to succeed in battle have led to many inventions that society uses today, inventions that we ironically couldn’t survive without.
They then proceed to list several dozen inventions and innovations that were either directly or tangentially derived from a nation's or nations' needs during wartime. It spans the gamut from information technology (from the concept of postage through the internet) to medicine (penicillin, anti-malarials, and prosthetics) to night vision and GPS technology. One thing that I found interesting in its absense was the development of weapons - how the evolving face of battle necessitated ever-changing armament from the spear to the long bow to the musket to the belt-fed machine gun. One thing we humans are devilishly good at is devising new and more efficient ways with which to dispatch one another...
However, I'll admit that my favorite invention would be Al Gore's internet...
That is all.
7 comments:
Fios..delivering Boobies at the speed of light!!
Thanks Al Gore!! ;)
Have you ever read any Harry Turtledove? His Worldwar series, seems to be an argument that basically all of the development that occurred was the result of warfare. Without the need to innovate to win wars, mankind might not have progressed beyond sticks and stones.
I'm-a-gonna have to go with canning.
Cans: delivering indefinitely shelf-stable SPAM, Vienna sausages, corned beef hash, and Boston brown bread to all the world's good boys and girls.
And don't forget NASA- They brought us Tang :-)
For those womenfolk that say nothing good comes from war:
"Feminine" Pads where invented because of the need for sterile wound dressings. Nurses found they worked great for other uses.
Not to mention CDs, GPS, Modern trauma medicine...list goes on and on.
Trotsky's quote is pretty good, too:
"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you!"
And that's one of the reasons Europe advanced so much faster than the rest of the world.
They were stuck on their little continent in a constant state of war.
Most other places had one preeminent nation-state at a time, Europe had as many as 10 at a time and certainly no fewer than 3 or 4 (except for when Napoleon got rolling) that couldn't really conquer each other in close proximity for over a thousand years.
Necessity might be the mother of invention, but laziness is the father.
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