technology in ww1 essay

Military technology has always shaped and defined how wars were fought. The First World War, however, saw a breadth and scale of technological innovation of unprecedented impact. It was the first modern mechanized industrial war in which material resources and manufacturing capability were as consequential as the skill of the troops on the battlefield.

Heavy artillery, machine guns, tanks, motorized transport vehicles, high explosives, chemical weapons, airplanes, field radios and telephones, aerial reconnaissance cameras, and rapidly advancing medical technology and science were just a few of the areas that reshaped twentieth century warfare. The AEF artists documented the new military technology as thoroughly as every other aspect of the war.

After three years on the sidelines, the United States lagged far behind the latest technology and faced a monumental task equipping hundreds of thousands of new soldiers. U.S. industry was just beginning to gear up for this challenge when the AEF arrived in France. American troops frequently used European produced equipment, as is evident in much of the AEF artwork.

Harlequin Freighters by J. André Smith, Watercolor and charcoal, July 1918

Harlequin Freighters J. André Smith Watercolor and charcoal, July 1918

Two Six-Ton Tanks Climbing a Hill by Harry Everett Townsend, Watercolor and pastel on paper, 1918

Two Six-Ton Tanks Climbing a Hill Harry Everett Townsend Watercolor and pastel on paper, 1918

Left by the Hun, 152 mm Mortar by Harry Everett Townsend, Charcoal on card, 1918

Left by the Hun, 152 mm Mortar Harry Everett Townsend Charcoal on card, 1918

American Artillery and Machine Guns by George Matthews Harding, Charcoal and crayon on paper, July 24, 1918

American Artillery and Machine Guns George Matthews Harding Charcoal and crayon on paper, July 24, 1918

Gas Alert by Harry Everett Townsend, charcoal on paper, 1918

Gas Alert Harry Everett Townsend Charcoal on paper, 1918

Soldiers of the Telephone by Harry Everett Townsend, Charcoal on paper, 1918

Soldiers of the Telephone Harry Everett Townsend Charcoal on paper, 1918

The Flying Field, Issoudun by Ernest Clifford Peixotto, charcoal on board, August 1918

The Flying Field, Issoudun Ernest Clifford Peixotto Charcoal on board, August 1918

Forced Landing Near Neufchateau by Harry Everett Townsend | Charcoal on paper, 1918

Forced Landing Near Neufchateau Harry Everett Townsend Charcoal on paper, 1918

Lame Ducks, Issoudun by J. André Smith, pencil on paper, 1918

Lame Ducks, Issoudun J. André Smith Pencil on paper, 1918

Valley of the Marne at Mont St. Père by George Harding Matthews, charcoal, pastel, and sanguine on paper, July 26, 1918

Valley of the Marne at Mont St. Père George Harding Matthews Charcoal, pastel, and sanguine on paper, July 26, 1918

The Alert Nieuports by Harry Everett Townsend, charcoal on paper, 1918

The Alert Nieuports Harry Everett Townsend Charcoal on paper, 1918

94th Aero Squadron “Hat-in-the-Ring” Insignia

America’s first combat squadron was the 94th. Its famous “Hat-in-the Ring” insignia reflected the phrase used in April 1917 when the United States entered the war and was said to have now “thrown its hat in the ring.”

This example came from the aircraft of Harvey Weir Cook, who shot down 3 enemy aircraft and four observation balloons. The victories are represented with iron crosses inside the brim of the hat.

Gift of Donald Sieurin and D. Peter Sieurin

The AEF WWI war art collection currently is held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Division of Armed Forces History, from which the artworks in this exhibition are on loan.

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Last updated 01 september 2016, science and technology.

Wartime science and technology developed in the context of the Second Industrial Revolution, with far-reaching consequences for national and international scientific institutions and social structures. Trench warfare posed new problems requiring scientific and technical expertise in areas such as artillery, chemical warfare, cartography and reconnaissance, aviation, infantry weapons and body armor, armored vehicles, communications, logistics, and military medicine. Meanwhile, the submarine revolutionized naval warfare. The greater integration of science and warfare set the pattern for modern “total war” by blurring the line between soldiers and civilians, as well as by nullifying pre-war international conventions intended to limit wartime excesses.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 War and the institutional structure of science and technology
• 3.1 The Science and Technology of Trench Warfare and Total War: A War of Innovation?
• 3.2 Artillery, Explosives, and Chemical Warfare: The Chemists’ and Physicists’ War
• 3.3 Cartography and reconnaissance
• 3.4 Birth of the Modern Aircraft as a Tactical and Strategic Weapons System
• 3.5 Infantry Weapons and Body Armor
• 3.6 Armored Vehicles
• 3.7 Communications: Telephone and Wireless
• 3.8 Naval War: Surface Ships and Submarines
• 4 Conclusion: Science, Technology and the Birth of Total War

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was the first European war in a century to reach a scale, length, and character such that technological innovations within the course of the war itself could be of decisive influence. Moreover, it was the first war in history in which both sides mobilized groups of scientifically trained professionals for the purpose of systematically researching and developing technological innovations for military purposes. To understand why this had become possible, the war needs to be viewed in the context of European industrialization. Unlike earlier European wars, the principal opponents in the Great War were fully engaged in the Second Industrial Revolution, which entailed a far more systematic integration of scientific research into the process of industrial innovation in a host of areas related to the physical sciences (chemicals, electric power and communications, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering including internal combustion engines for transportation), with most changes occurring since the 1880s. Although many of these innovations already had their counterparts in military technology, in 1914 the most influential generals and political leaders, whose direct experience of war lay in an earlier era, scarcely appreciated their full implications. Following the initial, bloody failures of the early war plans calling for a quick offensive victory, the prospect of a long war finally forced leaders on all sides to confront the problems and possibilities posed by the new technologies, and to mobilize appropriate expertise to deal with them.

A process of innovation began, often protracted due to resistance in some quarters, combined with the inherent limitations of the innovators or the technologies themselves, and not least the difficulties and risks of field-testing previously untried approaches. Despite the pre-war Hague conventions intended to make war more “civilized,” legal or moral constraints unfortunately did little to retard innovations that made the war both more destructive and more “total” in the sense of blurring pre-war distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. The Armistice of November 1918 prevented an even more drastic technological transformation of the war by canceling the plans of the western allies for such innovations as mass aerial bombing with poison gas. The more recent historiography of the war has begun to stress these “total” aspects as well as its technological dimensions. [1]

Obviously there is considerable overlap between scientific and technological knowledge, but one could argue that the former is concerned primarily with producing knowledge regardless of its practical use, while the latter is fundamentally concerned with techniques for solving practical problems, in this case related directly or indirectly to military purposes. For probably a majority of the most significant innovations of the war, this meant repurposing knowledge or tools that had emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution in peacetime, commercial contexts, but now took on quite different, war-related purposes. Indeed, the Great War led to a far wider recognition of the importance of what are now called “dual-use” products or processes, or in a broader sense the “double-edged sword” of scientific and technological innovation.

It must also be recognized, however, that given the conservative nature of military institutions, the most innovative technologies were not always easily or effectively integrated into military practice. Even so, the war lasted long enough to demonstrate the potential and achieve the integration into warfare of the most significant innovations in the areas of artillery and explosives, chemical warfare , tanks , communications, aviation , and submarines . Indeed, one historian has recently reminded us that the military itself became the major promoter of innovation in many of these areas; but mainly, it should be added, when the innovations occurred in the context of “old,” well-established technologies that were already adapted to existing military forms and priorities, such as artillery. [2]

The following article approaches science and technology in the Great War first by addressing the impact of the war on the international and social-institutional structure of science and technology in general, including the social composition of scientific disciplines (class, gender, and ethnicity). The article then considers the unexpected technical problems that the war presented with the advent of trench warfare, and goes on to examine various solutions to these problems in various disciplines or technical areas from artillery and chemical warfare to communications, with a final section on naval warfare . Except in passing, the article will not discuss several topics that are well-covered in separate articles. [3] It will conclude with some general reflections on the ways in which the increasingly complex interconnection of military and scientific technology has transformed both war and science.

War and the institutional structure of science and technology ↑

Up to 1914, the 20 th century in Europe had been marked by increasing international cooperation in science and technology, as reflected in such institutions as the International Association of Academies, which had first met in Paris in 1900, the Nobel Prizes first awarded in 1901, the first International Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels in 1911, and the International Association of Chemical Societies, founded in 1911. Every field of advanced technology seemed to have regular international conferences that had produced a host of international agreements dealing with the countless adjustments needed to secure the smooth functioning of a modern world economy and civilization shaped by scientific technology, such as agreements on standard time, electrical units, chemical nomenclature, and so on. The European political and cultural imperialism of the preceding generation had disseminated fundamentally European perceptions of science and technology throughout the world, so that anyone with a scientific education shared a similar understanding of the essential nature of mature disciplines such as physics and chemistry – aside, of course, from differences of theoretical opinion, experimental practice, and contextual linkages to academic and industrial institutions. [4] This sort of international consensus did not, however, extend in most cases to the social sciences and humanities, where linguistic, national, and educational differences were far more pronounced.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, the existing international structure of scientific cooperation quickly collapsed. Scheduled conferences were postponed and international organizations were either disbanded or became dormant. After several prominent German scientists appeared among the ninety-three signers of the infamous manifesto “To the Civilized World” (4 October 1914), which (among other assertions) flatly denied the existence of deliberate atrocities by the German military against civilians in Belgium while expressing unreserved solidarity with “our so-called militarism,” scientists in the opposing allied nations angrily demanded to strike these German scientists from the roles of honorary or regular members in academies and scientific societies. This in turn produced similar demands in German academies and societies. Outcomes varied; in Berlin, the internationally-minded chemist Hermann Emil Fischer (1852-1919) , who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902, was able to postpone action until after the war. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) , who hated Prussian militarism , made a futile effort to uphold the banner of scientific internationalism by drafting a counter-manifesto with Georg Friedrich Nicolai (1874-1964) , but it obtained only two other signatures. [5] Ironically perhaps, Einstein’s initial isolation from the distractions of war work may have been just what he needed to produce the general theory of relativity announced in 1915, the most important scientific achievement to emerge from the war years. [6]

The war affected scientific institutions and especially scientific education in all of the contending nations. From the beginning in 1914, young men either volunteered or were inducted in droves, leaving laboratories and lecture halls half-deserted. As a result, many men with potentially brilliant futures in science and technology were to die as ordinary soldiers on the battlefield, including the British physicist Henry G. J. Moseley (1887-1915) , who would surely have won a Nobel Prize for his work establishing atomic numbers in 1913-14, which created the basis for the modern periodic table of the elements. But Moseley volunteered in 1914 and died in the futile British campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 , prompting the British atomic physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) to publicly lament this “striking example of the misuse of scientific talent.” [7] Such losses, combined with the growing recognition of the value of science for war, ultimately prompted the contending nations to develop systems for keeping their most valuable talents at home in war-related work. Recent work on the universities has highlighted ways in which they became integrated into the war effort, particularly among the western allies. [8]

In the meantime, female science or medical students, previously a rarity, had become more prominent in those institutions where they were permitted, and several even became assistants. Many talented female students or graduates also replaced men doing technical jobs in workshops, factories and industrial research laboratories. Although women often encountered considerable resistance in the engineering colleges and universities, they were far more likely to be welcomed by professors on the less-demanding levels of technical education and by employers as technicians, in part because, for social reasons, many employers were more willing to hire women from middle-class backgrounds to replace technicians from the working classes. The result was that these women were more likely to feel frustrated than liberated in technical occupations. A few women scientists did, however, play more significant roles. Most prominent among them was Marie Curie (1867-1934) , already in possession of two Nobel Prizes, who established a military radiological service with eighteen mobile and 200 stationary X-ray units under Red Cross auspices, set up training facilities for women operators, and finally created a military radiotherapy service using radon gas produced in her Radium Institute. [9]

As many scientists and engineers patriotically volunteered their professional services to their respective military authorities, some civilian scientific institutions took up military tasks, and for some purposes new military institutions or organizations were formed or old ones greatly expanded to make use of the professionals’ services. The Germans created the first such organization in August 1914 with the Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (KRA), or War Raw Materials Office, located within the Prussian War Ministry , but headed by the scientifically-trained civilian (and German Jew) Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) of the AEG electrical corporation. A series of “war corporations” and special commissions followed, in which corporate leaders, scientists, military officers and government officials collaborated to regulate the production and supply of critical resources. For the Germans, the British blockade made the effective development of substitute materials and alternative resources a critical priority, and it became the most fruitful field of military-industrial cooperation mediated by academic scientists such as Emil Fischer and Fritz Haber (1868-1934) .

On the Allied side, analogous organizations began to appear in the spring of 1915, when the new circumstances of the war were becoming all too clear: the huge demand for artillery shells forced the creation of the Ministry of Munitions in Britain and a similar organization in France . At almost the same time, a similar shell shortage led the Germans to introduce chemical warfare in the form of chlorine clouds discharged from massed canisters during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. This in turn provoked the French (who had like the Germans already experimented with non-lethal agents in shells) and British to create various organizations to mobilize their chemists and medical personnel to deal with this “unconventional” weapon – which indeed violated the spirit of the Hague Conventions’ prohibitions against the use of poison in war. [10] Both sides proceeded to create large organizations to promote chemical warfare research and testing. Perhaps the most notorious was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, founded in 1911 and directed by Fritz Haber, who first applied his expertise with gas chemistry to the use of chlorine clouds at Ypres. By the end of the war his initially modest, civilian institute had become militarized, temporarily taken over many facilities of the neighboring Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin-Dahlem, and become the principal German center for the technical development of chemical warfare. Later the British organized the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). The Germans responded in late 1916-early 1917 with the Kaiser Wilhelm Foundation for Military Technical Science, which featured several expert committees headed by prominent scientists recruited from the universities to solve technical problems under contract with the military. [11]

As German defeat loomed in 1918, Allied scientists agreed to recreate the international system of science in a form that would carry on a cultural “war after the war.” The result was the International Research Council, to which the National Research Councils of the various Allied and neutral nations were admitted, but not the Germans, Austrians, or Russians. The pre-war international disciplinary associations to which the Germans had belonged were also replaced by several new international scientific unions such as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, or IUPAC. The Germans would not be fully reintegrated into the international structure of science until after the Second World War, by which time English had replaced German as the principal language of science. [12]

A War of Expertise ↑

The science and technology of trench warfare and total war: a war of innovation ↑.

Of course each nation entered the war with arsenals, powder factories, proving grounds, and military testing facilities for weaponry staffed by trained professionals including some scientists and engineers. Although in these secrecy had always reigned, in fact by 1914 the leading experts in all nations understood the same fundamental principles of explosives, propellants, and shell manufacture, which had been established since the 1880s with the obsolescence of black powder, which had powered weapons for centuries, and its replacement by more stable and powerful compounds based on the 19 th -century science of organic chemistry. Similarly, the long-known principles of ballistics had to be updated with the design of far more powerful and accurate firearms and artillery based on the new chemicals. All national armies had modern machine guns and modern artillery. [13] Here the key invention had come in 1897 with the French 75-mm field gun and its hydraulic recoil-damping system, allowing a much higher rate of accurate fire. Despite French efforts to keep this a secret, all other nations had developed comparable and competing systems, in some cases with significant differences, although many armies still retained many older, obsolescent designs not yet fully replaced by the new models. The Germans in particular recognized the need for weapons that could attack fortifications and had developed and built large numbers of modern light and heavy howitzers, as well as even heavier but relatively mobile siege artillery, which could fire high-explosive shells at a steep angle. In this way the Germans entered the war far better prepared for the trench warfare that was to come than were their opponents whose modern artillery primarily consisted of field guns firing shrapnel shells at a relatively flat angle, which was devastating to troops in the open but would be less effective against them when entrenched. [14] All in all, it was not so much scientific or technological factors as the political and institutional contexts in the various countries that accounted for the quantitative and qualitative differences in their military hardware by 1914.

In any case, the first few months of war quickly demonstrated that all the pre-war expectations and mobilization plans were woefully inadequate for the scale of what was rightly being called the “Great War” – a war that consumed human and material resources at a horrendous rate. As the war descended into the mire of static trench warfare toward the end of 1914 (albeit mainly on the Western Front – the Eastern Front was always far more mobile), the military and political leaders in all the major powers were confronted with unexpected problems and challenges for which their previous training had provided little preparation, forcing them to mobilize expertise on an unprecedented level. Each side of the Western Front rapidly became a vast and complex technological system, ultimately incorporating almost all branches of the civilian economy, much of the infrastructure, and significant elements of civilian scientific and technical institutions as well. [15]

The war became notoriously dominated by the power of defensive technology, featuring the machine gun situated in a trench or ultimately a concrete pillbox to protect the gunners from artillery fire, and further protected by coils of barbed wire that could become deathtraps for attacking infantry . Trenches and dugouts themselves became increasingly elaborate, buttressed with sandbags, lumber, metal, and reinforced concrete, and using duckboard flooring in muddy conditions. Mechanical digging machines occasionally supplemented human labor (which often meant non-white or colonial labor among the French and British). Elaborate light-rail networks using small cars and locomotives developed, especially from around 1916, to replace horse or human transportation in supplying the trenches. New weapon systems emerged specifically for the trenches, such as small, short-range trench mortars hurling lightweight shells in a high arc.

Battles now revolved around the problem of breaking through the trench lines, which became an obsession – repeatedly planned, almost never achieved. In the west, mobile warfare would not return until 1918; in the intervening years the lines moved no more than a few miles either way. Hence much of the expertise to be surveyed in the rest of this article was focused on developing technologies that could achieve a breakthrough and restore “normal” warfare, i.e. the attacking style that the generals on each side had learned in their youth and had expected in August 1914, with glorious cavalry charges pursuing a fleeing enemy. [16]

Artillery, Explosives, and Chemical Warfare: The Chemists’ and Physicists’ War ↑

The most effective weapon of the war, in terms of casualties produced, was artillery. [17] The basic types of artillery all existed in 1914, but the war saw both qualitative and quantitative changes. The British and French ultimately had to rely far less on field artillery, like the 75s, firing smaller shrapnel shells (which released myriads of bullets in midair to mow down unprotected infantry). Instead, they followed the Germans in emphasizing higher calibers and pieces (especially howitzers) that could fire much larger high-explosive shells in high arcs. Thus the numbers and scale of such cannon and shells increased exponentially, especially after the expansion of capacities for munitions production from 1916 on. [18] The Germans produced perhaps the two most famous types of artillery used in the war: first, the 420 mm “ Big Bertha ” used effectively to break the resistance of Belgian fortresses around Liège in August 1914, though it proved to be ineffective against the better-designed French fortresses around Verdun in 1916. Second was the ultra-long-range “ Paris gun ” of 1918, which was however neither especially accurate nor effective as a military weapon; its most notorious hit was on a church filled with worshippers. [19] In the final year of the war, with the return to a more mobile style, field artillery again came into its own, though the classic shrapnel shell never again dominated the battlefield (they were perhaps only about ten percent of the total used in 1918).

Heavy artillery and high explosive shells required huge quantities of metal shell-casings and explosives, along with the materials required to produce them. This became a huge problem early in the war, as all the armies encountered shell shortages and had to find or build new productive capacities. The Germans in particular faced serious shortages of nitrates in 1914-15, which became a primary motivation for the establishment of the KRA. [20] Nor were other critical materials such as cellulose, glycerin, and toluene in sufficient supply for a long, large-scale artillery war. This led early on to efforts to find various types of effective substitutes.

From this perspective, as noted in the previous section, the Germans first used poisonous chlorine gas in clouds as a substitute for artillery; this was Fritz Haber’s proposal in December 1914, in response to the request of the Chief of the General Staff and War Minister, Erich von Falkenhayn (1861-1922) , for an agent that would permanently disable Allied soldiers. [21] Moreover, though the French began the shift in 1916 from clouds back to artillery shells as the principal means of delivering gas, the Germans used a considerably higher percentage of gas shells than did the Allies. This was due as much to the continuing shortages of high explosives for shell-filling on the German side, as to the fact that Fritz Haber’s institute in collaboration with the research-intensive dye companies ensured that the Germans maintained the initiative in chemical warfare until late in 1918. Their last critical innovations occurred however in the summer of 1917, with the introduction of so-called mustard gas and arsenicals. The former was an insidious blister agent, very persistent and producing a delayed reaction that could cause temporary blindness or severe burns, more rarely death. Arsenicals were intended to be “mask-breakers,” severe irritants that would cause soldiers to tear off their masks and expose themselves to more toxic agents; but the Germans could not solve the problem of dispersing these agents in fine enough particles to make them effective in combat. [22] In contrast, the problem for the Germans with mustard gas was that it was in a sense too effective. As they never solved the problem of decontamination, they had no defense once the Allies had achieved large-scale production by the late summer of 1918. The Americans in particular were preparing to deluge the Germans not only with mustard gas but also with Lewisite, an agent that combined the properties of both mustard gas and arsenicals. Lewisite never reached the battlefield, as the first shipment was still on its way to France when the Germans signed the Armistice. [23]

Cartography and reconnaissance ↑

Maps were vitally needed for charting the detailed trench networks. Existing pre-war maps were simply not precise enough (1:84000 on the French side, 1:100000 on the German side); they needed to have at least four times the resolution, and in some cases much finer detail. Thus by early 1915 both sides had organized field cartographic sections and both used aerial photography provided by aircraft to enhance their maps. Overall, it appears that the French and British ultimately produced better maps than did the Germans, largely because they had better pre-war maps to work with.

Perhaps the most crucial reason for having detailed maps was to provide better direction to long-range artillery. Yet, locating the enemy’s artillery raised other problems. Initially both sides tried to pinpoint muzzle flashes by sight, but this was not especially effective in most cases. Eventually the alternative of triangulating by sound proved to be far more effective, whereby physicists had to distinguish between the sound of the shell passing and that of the cannon firing. Both sides used somewhat different approaches. The Allies relied on a system developed by the French astrophysicist Lucien Bull (1876-1972) beginning in the fall of 1914, with sets of microphones that could record the amplitudes of sounds on moving strips of paper. Other Allied physicists, particularly Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) and Charles G. Darwin (1887-1962) , made additional improvements to the technique, which the Americans further refined in 1918. By then, under ideal weather conditions, trained observers could use the graphical data to pinpoint the location of German artillery within a couple of minutes. This would make it possible in an offense (as first tried at the battle of Cambrai in November 1917) to direct the initial bombardment not at the German trenches, but to silence their artillery. At Cambrai, of course, the British were relying on another innovation, the tank (see below), to lead the infantry across barb-wire entanglements and trenches. Americans were so impressed that an image of a sound-ranging tape recording the last shots of the war became the frontispiece to the official report on munitions production. [24] On the German side, a group of physicists including Max Born (1882-1970) , Ferdinand Kurlbaum (1857-1927) , and several others also developed a comparable sound-ranging system using oscillographs, but the General Staff considered it too expensive to be deployed. Instead, they relied on trained men with stop-watches, which ultimately proved to be less accurate and much slower. [25]

Birth of the Modern Aircraft as a Tactical and Strategic Weapons System ↑

Despite experiments during the 19 th century, powered flight either with dirigible hydrogen-filled airships or airplanes was essentially born in the first decade of the 20 th century. Yet the airplanes of 1914 were still highly fragile and experimental in nature, despite more than a decade of development. Both sides had military and naval aircraft in 1914, essentially for reconnaissance (see previous section); indeed, without military support it is doubtful whether Germany would have had an aircraft industry at all before the war. [26] Germany’s pre-war efforts largely went toward dirigibles, as pioneered by Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1938-1917) . But the war greatly accelerated the development of the modern airplane, transforming it into a recognizably modern form as compared with the primitive types of the first decade. Most of the wartime developmental work came from inventors and engineers in aviation companies working on a largely trial-and-error basis, with little input from scientific research such as that done on wing design by Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953) at the University of Göttingen Institute for Technical Physics. In any case, he did not publish his experimental and theoretical work on wing design until the end of the war in 1918-1919. In the absence of effective scientific research, a characteristic innovation resulting from empirical methods was a means for pilots to fire machine guns mounted on the front fuselage of an aircraft through a front-mounted propeller, without shooting it off. The first effective solution came in the Fokker E.1 monoplane introduced in mid-1915 with mechanically synchronized propeller and machine gun. The ensuing “Fokker scourge” brought the Germans temporary air supremacy until the French and British responded with even more effective versions in 1916, leading in turn to further German innovations, in a pattern typical of wartime innovation. [27]

The main problem with all early aircraft was the lack of powerful engines, so that only extremely lightweight materials could be used (initially cloth-covered airframes frames of light wood, gradually shifting to light metals such as aluminum). Primarily biplanes were used to maximize lift, but these were relatively slow – not a serious problem for reconnaissance until the development of fighter airplanes in 1915 led to a pattern of steady technical improvements by both sides in an effort to win control of the air. These were of course primarily tactical aircraft, used over the fighting fronts. It might be thought that strategic aerial bombing was impractical with the aircraft then available. Nevertheless, in 1915 both sides inaugurated strategic aerial bombardment of enemy cities, which required aircraft capable of carrying heavy loads of bombs. The Allies used airplanes to attack German industrial cities on the Rhine, while as early as January 1915 the Germans sent naval airships to bomb British coastal towns, followed by unsuccessful efforts to reach London in February and an attack by an army airship on Paris in March; many more followed, but with little military impact. Aside from the poor mechanical reliability of the aircraft and their vulnerability to weather conditions, there were as yet no accurate navigational equipment, precision bombsights, or bomb racks, far less any means of guiding the bombs, so that such bombing had little strategic significance and could serve only as a terror weapon. As the Allies developed more effective anti-aircraft guns and incendiary bullets to use in fighters that could climb high enough to attack them, the airships became too vulnerable and the Germans switched to twin-engine Gotha bombers in 1918. By the end of the war, however, both sides had constructed even “giant” bombers. The British Handley Page V/1500 four-engine bomber was capable of reaching Berlin from airfields in England carrying a 3,000 lb. (1,400 kg) bombload, which could have included gas bombs. Its first bombing mission was delayed several times, then canceled by the Armistice. [28]

Infantry Weapons and Body Armor ↑

The soldiers who went to war in 1914 and those who participated in the great offensives of 1918 carried dramatically different equipment . Aside from the standard rifle, which remained essentially the same, the war saw the development of various types of portable automatic infantry weapons and especially hand grenades , which became crucial offensive weapons for assaulting trenches and machine gun nests. Perhaps the most obvious innovation was the reintroduction of armor in the form of the steel helmet , absent from European battlefields for centuries. The reason was of course that in trench warfare the principal cause of death was by head wounds, often not from bullets but from shell fragments (later inaccurately termed shrapnel, see above). The French were the first to issue such helmets in 1915, but their Adrien model, based on the fireman’s helmet, was not strong enough, so that soldiers still suffered many head wounds from fragments. Nevertheless, even a reduction of 2-5 percent in casualties was enough to persuade others to follow with their own models in 1916, the British “tin hat” (which could be easily mass-produced by cold-pressing circular sheets of manganese-alloy steel, but was uncomfortable and did not offer the best protection for the head) and the German “coal scuttle,” both inspired by different types of medieval helmets. When the Americans entered the war in 1917, their top designers Bashford Dean (1867-1928) and Daniel Tachaux (1857-1928) (experts in medieval armor from the Metropolitan Museum in New York) produced several possible models and concluded that the best variation would be one that was better shaped to protect the soldier’s head; as this looked too similar to the German helmet, which was widely admitted to be the best helmet of the war, it was of course rejected by military authorities. Americans thus wore British-style helmets (albeit with a different type of lining for greater comfort) throughout the war and the 1930s, developed their own characteristic helmet in the Second World War, and finally in the 1980s returned to a modern version of the originally-favored design, but using Kevlar rather than steel. Because some 70 percent of casualties resulted from shell fragments, light-weight steel body armor was another possibility explored by the contending nations, but apparently only the Germans produced sets as standard issue; the weight of some twenty pounds a set restricted their use. [29]

Armored Vehicles ↑

The development of armored vehicles might have seemed a logical consequence of the advent of trench warfare; nevertheless, it was two years before the first British “tanks” appeared on the Somme battlefield in September 1916, and even longer before the French introduced them during the Nivelle offensive of April 1917. In neither case were the initial models especially robust or reliable, with frequent breakdowns and negligible impact, leaving the Germans with the false impression that tanks were not worth developing. In November 1917 British tanks finally demonstrated the possibility of achieving a breakthrough at the battle of Cambrai, but this first qualified success, like so many other innovations during the war, was nullified by other factors. Only in July-August 1918 did French and British tanks, used in large numbers (about 1,500 each) in cooperation with infantry and under conditions conducive to their operations, have a significant impact on turning the tide against the Germans (who developed only a handful of their own tanks and never had much success with them).

The development of the British tank has traditionally (and not entirely incorrectly) been ascribed to the pioneering efforts of engineering officers who received little support from higher authorities until Winston Churchill (1874-1965) took over at the Ministry of Munitions in July 1917. Churchill became a great proponent of mechanized warfare in general, which he saw as an effective alternative to massed infantry assaults following massive (but often ineffective) artillery bombardments. On the French side, the simultaneous development of the char d’assaut , initially promoted by Col. J.B.E. Estienne (1860-1936) , has received less attention from English-language historians, though in fact the French ultimately used more tanks (in part in cooperation with the Americans) than did the British. However, the French tended to favor lighter and smaller but also faster and more maneuverable vehicles, mainly the Renault FT, which could be produced in larger numbers to make up for massive losses due to breakdown and destruction by German artillery and heavy antitank rifles or machine guns. Thus the French were using 2,000 “tanks of victory” by November 1918. These early Allied tanks were mechanically unreliable and often ineffective, with a failure rate of around 50 percent. Yet Churchill later eloquently lamented with some justice that the Allies might have put more effort into developing them earlier and on a far larger scale, “if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.” [30]

Communications: Telephone and Wireless ↑

Field communications was a major problem during the war. All trenches were wired for using field telephones, but the wires were easily cut by bombardments, even if buried. The problem became even more intractable during an offensive, as laying down wires from a reel while crossing no-man’s-land was not a very practical solution. Visual signaling exposed the signaler and could be very dangerous, as was the traditional method of sending runners. As a result, one of the most common means of communication, albeit an unreliable one, remained the carrier pigeon . The uncertain communications typically left senior officers in the rear with no clear idea of the status and location of their forward units during an offensive, and thus reinforcements, supplies, and artillery barrages might be misdirected or mistimed.

The obvious solution was wireless communication , i.e. radio telegraphy or telephony, which however presented many problems of its own, especially for the field units for transmitting and receiving. By this time it was possible to transmit voices using a continuous wave with amplitude modulation (AM), which was far superior to the older spark-coil systems. In 1914 AM sets were not yet sufficiently lightweight and reliable (due to the need for fragile vacuum tubes) to be easily portable in themselves, aside from the need for an external antenna to achieve any real range as well as a portable power source in the form of batteries (either too heavy or too short-lived/underpowered) or a generator (requiring fuel or human power). It must be recalled that commercial radio broadcasting scarcely existed, so the needs of the war greatly intensified work on these problems. All sides made considerable progress during the war, setting the stage for commercial radio in the early 1920s. Although many portable field sets were produced, the most practical types were mounted in vehicles (making tanks especially useful for field communications during the 1918 Allied offensives) and in aircraft. [31]

Related to military communications is of course the field of cryptography, a very ancient art that took new forms as a result of radio communications during the war. In the early stages, the ability to read enemy messages greatly assisted military intelligence on both sides, figuring in the German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg and possibly also the French victory on the Marne . [32] The war made it obvious that every army had to pay special attention to secrecy in communications, and in the interwar period the development of coding/decoding equipment became a particular priority for technical experts in all nations.

Naval War: Surface Ships and Submarines ↑

The most complex, sophisticated, and above all expensive weapons system of the war was the super- dreadnought battleship, the product of major technological innovations in design led by the British in an intensely competitive pre-war naval arms race with Germany . [33] These innovations culminated in the Scott-Vickers gun director and the Dreyer fire control table (a mechanical computer), which made possible highly accurate and synchronized salvos at sea. Thus in 1914 everyone expected surface ships to play a major role in the Great War, with the British and German battle fleets slugging it out for supremacy on the high seas, yet in actuality there was only one (and indecisive) major battle, Jutland .

The key dimension of the naval war was under water, whereby the Germans countered the effective British blockade of the North Sea by a submarine campaign against shipping to the British Isles. The submarine was a true product of the Second Industrial Revolution, driven by internal combustion and electricity, and its torpedo weapons were ingeniously designed missiles propelled by compressed-air motors and guided by gyroscopes. German submarines repeatedly violated international conventions and produced enormous controversies by sinking passenger liners without warning, most notoriously the Lusitania in May 1915. [34] On the other hand, the Germans also briefly experimented in 1916 with the use of large, ocean-going commercial submarines as blockade-runners, shipping stocks of dyes and pharmaceuticals to the United States . [35] The British undertook a variety of counter-measures against the submarine during the war, including the depth charge and massive minefields, which together destroyed seventy submarines by the end of the war, as well as the defensive use of aircraft and convoys (introduced after the United States entered the war and provided sufficient destroyers as convoy guards). But the most significant innovation to come out of the war was “asdic” (which the Americans later called sonar) a method of detecting submarines underwater based on the ultrasound research of the French physicist Paul Langevin (1872-1946) ; however, effective asdic devices were only deployed after the war’s end. [36]

Conclusion: Science, Technology and the Birth of Total War ↑

Was the Great War of 1914-1918 a “modern” war ? As the foregoing essay has shown, the armed forces on both sides utilized some of the most modern technologies of the day, products of the Second Industrial Revolution: rapid-fire weapons (cannon and machine guns) with recoil-damping devices that permitted far more accurate fire, chemicals (in particular explosives, but also pharmaceuticals, photochemicals, and chemical warfare agents), electronic communications (radio, telephones, and microphones for sound ranging), photographic and optical technologies, and self-propelled machines driven by electricity or internal combustion which expanded the mobility, scale, and scope of warfare to include the air and under the seas. Moreover, the industries that produced these technologies and products included highly efficient factories and inventing laboratories staffed by scientifically-trained chemists, physicists, and engineers. From a medical perspective, this war was also notable as the first in which disease did not produce the majority of casualties (at least on the Western Front).

Yet modern as it may appear, the Great War also continued to exhibit many old-fashioned traits, particularly given the 19 th -century mindsets of the top military leaders. The generals on both sides wasted millions of lives in infantry charges against prepared positions while continuing to dream of unleashing massed cavalry charges after breakthroughs that, on the Western Front at least, never came. Given the rather conservative outlook of most of the leaders, it is not surprising that they were slow to recognize the full potential and implications of the technologies at their command, and it thus took several years before the war took on most of its most modern features. This also meant that, despite the national loyalties and enthusiastic willingness of most scientists to participate, the military authorities were slow to find the most effective means of mobilizing them for war work. The military-related innovations that emerged from this work did not, on the whole, arise from scientific research during the war. Instead, they primarily made use of previously known scientific or technical knowledge utilized in new ways, or on a far greater scale and sophistication than previously experienced. The most significant impact of the war on fundamental scientific innovation was negative, diverting human and material resources from disinterested research to short-term, destructive purposes that made it possible to take 20 th -century warfare to a new level of totality and horror.

Ultimately, therefore, the most significant scientific consequence of the war was that it militarized modern science, if only by demonstrating unmistakably that even ostensibly innocuous civilian scientific work could produce indispensable tools for modern warfare. Moreover, warfare itself had become more dependent upon such scientific innovation. The “chemists’ war” taught this lesson most clearly by publicizing the “dual-use” characteristics of such peacetime products as synthetic dyes and ammonia. As the British General Harold Hartley (1878-1972) wrote in reporting on an Allied inspection tour of German chemical factories in February 1919, “In the future...every chemical factory must be regarded as a potential arsenal.” [37] But the same principle would apply to a host of disciplines, including physics, engineering, even biology. The widespread perception of the militarization of science, and the fear that German science might emerge even stronger to fight a victorious “war after the war,” helps to explain the Allied scientific leaders’ insistence on excluding the Germans from the international scientific community at the end of the war. Henceforth it would no longer be possible to draw a convenient dividing line between civilian and military technologies, a factor that helped to undermine the Allied efforts to disarm Germany through the Versailles Treaty and ultimately shaped planning for the Second World War. But this blurring of the distinction between the civilian and the military, already advanced in the First World War, came to tragic fruition in the Second, the epitome of modern “total war.”

Jeffrey Johnson, Villanova University

Section Editor: Pierre Purseigle

• ↑ See especially Chickering, Roger/Förster, Stig (eds.): Great War, Total War. Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918, Cambridge 2000.
• ↑ Edgerton, David: The Shock of the Old. Technology and Global History since 1900, New York 2007, pp. 143, 158-159.
• ↑ For logistics see Brown, Ian M.: Transportation and Logistics, in: Daniel, Ute / Gatrell, Peter/Janz, Oliver/Jones, Heather et. al. (eds.): 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10454 (Brown also discusses the special logistical issues of non-European fronts); for military medicine in general, see Bergen, Leo van: Medicine and Medical Service. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10221 ; for the influenza epidemic, see Phillips, Howard: Influenza Pandemic. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10148 ; for psychiatry and shell shock, see: Reid, Fiona: War Psychiatry. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10288 . For the humanities and social sciences in an academic context, see Donson, Andrew: Schools and Universities. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10346 ; see also selected articles on science and technology in individual countries.
• ↑ Cf. Forman, Paul/Heilbron, John L./Weart, Spencer: Physics Circa 1900. Personnel, Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishments, in: Historical studies in the physical sciences 5 (1975); Kern, Stephen: The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. With a New Preface, Cambridge, MA 2003.
• ↑ Vom Brocke, Bernhard: Wissenschaft und Militarismus. Der Aufruf der 93 „An die Kulturwelt!“ und der Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg, in: Calder, William M./Flashar, Hellmut/Lindken, Theodor (eds.): Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, Darmstadt 1985; Nicolai, Georg Friedrich: Die Biologie des Krieges. Betrachtungen eines Naturforschers, den Deutschen zur Besinnung, Zürich 1919.
• ↑ Levenson, Thomas: Einstein in Berlin. New York 2003, pp. 84-86, 110-114, 129.
• ↑ Cited in Heilbron, John L.: H. G. J. Moseley. The Life and Letters of an English Physicist, 1887-1915, Berkeley 1974, p. 124.
• ↑ Fordham, Elizabeth: Universities, in: Winter, Jay M./Robert, Jean-Louis (eds.): Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919, vol. II: A Cultural History, Cambridge 2007, pp. 235-79; Irish, Tomás: The University at War, 1914-25. Britain, France, and the United States, Basingstoke 2015.
• ↑ Cf. Johnson, Jeffrey Allan: Women in the Chemical Industry in the First Half of the 20th Century, in: Tobies, Renate/Vogt, Annette (eds.): Women in Industrial Research, Stuttgart 2014, pp. 119-144. On Curie see Quinn, Susan: Marie Curie. A Life, New York 1995, pp. 361-371.
• ↑ Lepick, Olivier: La Grande Guerre chimique. 1914-1918, Paris 1998, pp. 54-56, 93-119.
• ↑ Chancerel, Pierre: Raw Materials. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2015-07-16. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10686 ; Schwarz, Angela: Science and Technology (Germany). In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10413 ; Marsch, Ulrich: Zwischen Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft. Industrieforschung in Deutschland und Grossbritannien, 1880-1936, Paderborn et al. 2000, pp. 293-338; Szöllösi-Janze, Margit: Fritz Haber, 1868-1934. Eine Biographie, Munich 1998, pp. 256-408. The best discussion of German war corporations is in Roth, Regina: Staat und Wirtschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kriegsgesellschaften als kriegswirtschaftliche Steuerungsinstrumente, Berlin 1997.
• ↑ MacLeod, Roy M.: L’Entente chimique, in: Aubin, David/Bret, Patrice (eds.): Le sabre et l’éprouvette. L’invention d’une science de guerre, 1914-1939, in: 14-18 Aujourd’hui-today-heute (2003), pp. 135-152; Schroeder-Gudehus, Brigitte: Les scientifiques et la paix. La communauté scientifique internationale au cours des années vingt, Montréal 1978. Greenaway, Frank: Science International. A History of the International Council of Scientific Unions, Cambridge 1996.
• ↑ For weapons overall see Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane: Weapons, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10417 . Translated by: De Schaepdrijver, Sophie; also Cornish, Paul: Machine Gun, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2015-12-02. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10779 .
• ↑ Storz, Dieter: Artillery, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-12-16. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10510 . Translated by: Reid, Christopher.
• ↑ For the tactical and strategic context of these developments see Philpott, William: Warfare 1914-1918. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10172 .
• ↑ Palazzo, Albert: Seeking Victory on the Western Front. The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I, Lincoln 2000, pp. 40 and 90.
• ↑ Storz, Dieter: Artillery, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-12-16. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10510 .
• ↑ As shown in Figure 1 of Brown, Transportation and Logistics 2014 .
• ↑ Dutrône, Christophe: Paris Guns. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10335 .
• ↑ Travis, Anthony S.: The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I. Its Emergence and Expansion, Cham 2015.
• ↑ Baumann, Timo: Giftgas und Salpeter. Chemische Industrie, Naturwissenschaft und Militär von 1906 bis zum ersten Munitionsprogramm 1914/15, Düsseldorf 2011.
• ↑ Still the best general work is Haber, L. F.: The Poisonous Cloud. Chemical Warfare in the First World War, Oxford, UK 1986; see also Lepick, Olivier: La Grande Guerre chimique. 1914-1918, 2d ed., Paris 1998; Martinetz, Dieter: Der Gaskrieg 1914/18. Bonn 1996; and Girard, Marion: A Strange and Formidable Weapon. British Responses to World War I Poison Gas, Lincoln 2008.
• ↑ Steen, Kathryn: The American Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry. War and Politics, 1910 – 1930, Chapel Hill 2014, pp. 95-112. On US chemical warfare development in general see Heller, Charles E.: Science and Technology (USA). In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10292 .
• ↑ Crowell, Benedict: America's Munitions 1917-1918, Washington, DC 1919.
• ↑ Eckert, Michael: The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics: A Discipline Between Science and Technology, Hoboken 2006, pp. 57-82; Ortner, M. Christian: The Austro-Hungarian Artillery from 1867 to 1918. Technology, Organization and Tactics, Vienna 2007.
• ↑ As argued in Morrow, John H.: The Great War in the Air. Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921, Washington, DC 1993.
• ↑ Woodman, Harry: Early Aircraft Armament, London, 1989.
• ↑ Bowyer, Chaz: Handley Page Bombers of the First World War, Bourne End, Bucks 1992.
• ↑ Details in Crowell, America’s Munitions 1919, pp. 221-226; ;”); see also Arnold, Chris: Steel Pots: The History of America's Steel Combat Helmets, San Jose 1997; Baer, Ludwig: The History of the German Steel Helmet, 1916-1945, San Jose 1985.
• ↑ Churchill, Winston: The World Crisis. New York 1931, p. 745; for British tank development see Hartcup, Guy: The War of Invention. Scientific Developments, 1914-18, London 1988; on the French see Audoin-Rouzeau, Weapons 2014.
• ↑ Tworek, Heidi J.S.: Wireless Telegraphy. In: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10347 .
• ↑ Showalter, Dennis E.: Tannenberg. Clash of Empires, 1914, Washington, DC et al. 2004.
• ↑ Brose, Eric: Arms Race prior to 1914, Armament Policy, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10219 ; see also Soubiran, Sébastien: in Aubin/Bret, Le sabre et l’éprouvette 2003, pp. 153-166.
• ↑ Medlock, Chelsea Autumn: Lusitania, Sinking of, in: 1914-1918-online, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1546333/ie1418.10051 .
• ↑ Steen, American 2014, pp. 1-2.
• ↑ Hackmann, Willem D.: Seek & Strike. Sonar, Anti-Submarine Warfare, and the Royal Navy, 1914-54, London 1984.
• ↑ Cited in Johnson, Jeffrey Allan/MacLeod, Roy M.: The War the Victors Lost. The Dilemmas of Chemical Disarmament, 1919-1926, in: MacLeod, Roy M./Johnson, Jeffrey Allan (eds.): Frontline and Factory. Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914-1924, Dordrecht 2006, pp. 222.
• Aubin, David / Bret, Patrice (eds.): Le sabre et l'éprouvette. L'invention d'une science de guerre, 1914-1939 , 14-18 Aujourd’hui-today-heute, Paris 2003: Agnès Viénot.
• Baumann, Timo: Giftgas und Salpeter. Chemische Industrie, Naturwissenschaft und Militär von 1906 bis zum ersten Munitionsprogramm 1914/15 , Düsseldorf 2011: Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
• Brocke, Bernhard vom: Wissenschaft und Militarismus. Der Aufruf der 93 'An die Kulturwelt!' und der Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg , in: Calder, William M. / Flashar, Hellmut / Lindken, Theodor (eds.): Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, Darmstadt 1985: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 649-719.
• Chickering, Roger / Förster, Stig (eds.): Great War, total war. Combat and mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918 , Washington, D.C.; Cambridge; New York 2000: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press.
• Eckert, Michael: The dawn of fluid dynamics. A discipline between science and technology , Weinheim 2006: Wiley-VCH.
• Edgerton, David: The shock of the old. Technology and global history since 1900 , Oxford; New York 2007: Oxford University Press.
• Fordham, Elizabeth: Universities , in: Robert, Jean-Louis / Winter, Jay (eds.): Capital cities at war. Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919, volume 2, Cambridge 2007: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–279.
• Freemantle, Michael: The chemists' war, 1914-1918 , Cambridge 2015: Royal Society of Chemistry.
• Galison, Peter / Roland, Alex (eds.): Atmospheric flight in the twentieth century , Dordrecht; Boston 2000: Kluwer.
• Greenaway, Frank: Science international. A history of the International Council of Scientific Unions , Cambridge; New York 1996: Cambridge University Press.
• Haber, Ludwig Fritz: The poisonous cloud. Chemical warfare in the First World War , Oxford; New York 1986: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.
• Hackmann, Willem Dirk: Seek and strike. Sonar, anti-submarine warfare, and the Royal Navy, 1914-54 , London 1984: H.M.S.O..
• Hartcup, Guy: The war of invention. Scientific developments, 1914-18 , London; Washington, D.C. 1988: Brassey's Defence Publishers.
• Irish, Tomás: The university at war, 1914-25. Britain, France, and the United States , Basingstoke; New York 2015: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Lepick, Olivier / Chaunu, Pierre: La grande guerre chimique, 1914-1918 (2 ed.), Paris 1998: Presses universitaires de France.
• MacLeod, Roy: Sight and sound on the Western Front. Surveyors, scientists, and the ‘battlefield laboratory’, 1915-1918 , in: War & Society 18/1, 2000, pp. 23-46, doi : 10.1179/072924700791201405 .
• MacLeod, Roy / Johnson, Jeffrey Allan (eds.): Frontline and factory. Comparative perspectives on the chemical industry at war, 1914-1924 , Archimedes, 16, Dordrecht 2006: Springer.
• Marsch, Ulrich: Zwischen Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft. Industrieforschung in Deutschland und Grossbritannien, 1880-1936 , Paderborn 2000: Schöningh.
• Martinetz, Dieter: Der Gaskrieg 1914/18. Entwicklung, Herstellung und Einsatz chemischer Kampfstoffe. Das Zusammenwirken von militärischer Führung, Wissenschaft und Industrie , Bonn 1996: Bernard & Graefe.
• Mendelsohn, Everett: Science, scientists, and the military , in: Krige, John / Pestre, Dominique (eds.): Companion to science in the twentieth century, London 2003: Routledge, pp. 175-202.
• Morrow, Jr., John Howard: The Great War in the air. Military aviation from 1909 to 1921 , Washington, D.C. 1993: Smithsonian Institution Press.
• Steen, Kathryn: The American synthetic organic chemicals industry. War and politics, 1910-1930 , Chapel Hill 2014: The University of North Carolina Press.
• Steinhauser, Thomas: Hundert Jahre an der Schnittstelle von Chemie und Physik. Das Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zwischen 1911 und 2011 , Berlin; Boston 2011: De Gruyter.
• Szöllösi-Janze, Margit: Fritz Haber, 1868-1934. Eine Biographie , Munich 1998: C. H. Beck.
• Tobies, Renate / Vogt, Annette (eds.): Women in industrial research , Stuttgart 2014: Franz Steiner.
• Travis, Anthony S.: The synthetic nitrogen industry in World War I. Its emergence and expansion , Cham 2015: Springer.
• Woodman, Harry: Early aircraft armament. The aeroplane and the gun up to 1918 , London 1989: Arms and Armour.

Johnson, Jeffrey: Science and Technology , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2016-09-01. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10956 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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Dr Stuart Parkinson, SGR, examines how technological innovation contributed to one of the most devastating wars in human history – and asks what lessons we should take from this.

Article from SGR Newsletter no.44; online publication: 5 April 2016  

Download pdf of article  

2016 is the centenary of two of the bloodiest battles of World War I: the Somme and Verdun. And WWI itself is one of the most destructive wars in human history. As an example of the carnage, the total death toll of the war has been estimated at over 15 million people between July 1914 and November 1918 – an average of about 3.5m per year. Only the Russian Civil War and World War II had higher annual death rates. [1] [2] The centenary is therefore an important opportunity to reflect on a conflict in which rapid developments in technology led to a huge increase in the devastation that could be caused by war.

In this article, I examine which technological developments led to the most casualties and what lessons we can draw about science, technology and the military today.  

Harnessing the Industrial Revolution for war

The late 18th and 19th centuries saw a rapid development in technology which we now, of course, refer to as the Industrial Revolution. Starting in Europe, major developments transformed a wide range of industries. Growing exploitation of minerals like coal and iron were especially important, as was the advent of the steam engine – especially in ships and trains.

It was not long before the military started harnessing some of these inventions. Mass production in factories churned out not only large numbers of standardised guns and bullets, but also boots, uniforms and tents. [3] The guns were more reliable and hence more accurate. A bullet was 30 times more likely to strike its target. Developments in transport were also utilised, with steel becoming standard in battleships and trains starting to be used to quickly ferry large numbers of troops to war zones. Advances in chemistry led to new high explosives.

The first wars in which these new military technologies were used on a large scale included the Crimean War (1854-56) and the American Civil War (1861-65). Both of these provided a taster for the carnage of WWI, being characterised by trench warfare in which frontal assaults against well-defended positions led to massacres of infantry soldiers.  

Pre-1914 arms races

In the years running up to the outbreak of WWI, there were several key developments in military technologies that would lead to high casualties during the war itself.

Arguably the most important were new high explosives. Gunpowder had been the explosive of choice in war for around 500 years, but new developments in organic chemistry by Alfred Nobel and others led to new materials, initially used in mining. Further work in the late 19th century especially in Prussia/Germany, Britain and France refined the materials for use in hand-guns and artillery. Most successful were Poudre B and Cordite MD which burnt in such a way as to provide the required directed pressure needed to propel a projectile, without blowing up the weapon. [4]

Developments in gun manufacture were also crucial. Muskets were being replaced by rifles, which were more accurate. Machine guns were also brought onto the scene, first invented in the USA. By 1914, the most widely used machine gun was the British Maxim, capable of firing a shocking 666 rounds per minute. [5]

New artillery was also developed to use the new explosives. By the outbreak of WWI, a single shell weighing one tonne could be propelled more than 30 kilometres. However, smaller and more mobile guns were preferred as these could accurately fire a shell every three seconds. [6]

The development of weapons using poisonous gases was limited by the Hague peace conference of 1899. However, this only limited the development of the delivery systems rather than the gases themselves, in which Germany, Britain and France all had active research programmes. [7]

The development of the submarine and the torpedo would also prove to be crucial. Work in France and the USA led to the first successful military submarines, with Britain, Germany and Italy quickly commissioning their own. At the start of the 20th century, there were about 30 military submarines. This number would rapidly grow. The main weapon of the submarine immediately became the torpedo, invented in Britain. An early demonstration of the effectiveness of this weapon was in a Japanese attack on the Russian fleet in 1904. It was then rapidly deployed by all the major powers. [8]

The other major development in military technology that occurred in the years running up to 1914 was the steam-driven battleship. The first was the Dreadnought , launched by the British in 1906. Heavily armed and fast, it helped to cement Britain’s naval dominance. However, other naval powers, especially Germany, developed their own more powerful battleships during a rapid naval arms race in the pre-war years. [9]

Helping to fuel these arms races were not just competition between national militaries and technological innovation, but also international commerce. Major private corporations such as Vickers and Armstrong in the UK and Krupp in Germany made huge profits from arms sales, including major contracts with governments which would later become the ‘enemy’. [10]  

Key technological developments during the war

After WWI broke out, in summer 1914, the pressure rapidly grew for the warring nations and their scientists and engineers to try to create ‘military advantage’ through innovation. The main areas were diverse, including trench construction, artillery and its targeting, poisonous gases, submarines, tanks and planes.

In terms of artillery, perhaps the most important development during the war was the scaling up of production of the heavy guns which had begun to be deployed by militaries before 1914. Many thousands of these weapons, such as the British 18 Pounder and the French 75mm, were produced. [11] Also important was the development of improved targeting – such as ‘sound-ranging’. These developments led to artillery use on an unprecedented scale. For example, during the Meuse-Argonne campaign – part of the final Allied advance in 1918 – US forces were firing an incredible 40,000 tonnes of shells each day . [12]

Mass production also led to the machine gun being a widely used and devastating weapon, especially in defending trenches. For example, the British favoured the Lewis gun whose numbers increased nine-fold between 1915 and 1918. [13]

German research resulted in the first use of lethal gas in the war – in this case, chlorine – in April 1915. [14] Further development work led to Germany deploying phosgene and mustard gas later in the war. Britain’s first use of lethal gas was in September 1915, although it never used it on the scale that Germany did. However, poisonous gases proved to have limited military value – due to their dependence on weather conditions and their countering through, for example, gas masks. Gases also proved to be significantly less lethal than more conventional weapons. [15]

There was rapid development of military aircraft during WWI, although their role in the conflict remained largely marginal. [16] Planes and airships were adapted to drop bombs, but their main role was reconnaissance, especially spotting the location of enemy artillery.

Submarine development also proceeded quickly during WWI. Germany, in particular, favoured this sort of weapons system, given British superiority in surface warships. By the war’s end they had built 390 ‘U-boats’, and used them to devastating effect, especially from early 1917 onwards when they resorted to ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare to try to cut off Britain’s maritime supply routes. About four million tonnes of shipping – much of it crewed by civilians – was sunk in little over a year. [17]

In military terms, arguably the most decisive new technology of the war was the tank. First deployed by Britain in 1916 with the aim of overrunning trenches defended by barbed wire and machine guns, it did not initially prove effective. However, further innovation and mass production led to Britain and France each deploying several hundred from the summer of 1918. They proved critical in driving back German forces. [18]  

Which weapons were the biggest killers?

Estimating casualty rates in war is a notoriously difficult exercise, especially when analysing data from a century ago. Nevertheless, World War I historians and other researchers have uncovered a range of information which allows some assessment to be made of the most lethal technologies.

Overall, based on a range of sources, researcher Matthew White has estimated that approximately 8.5 million military personnel and around 6.5m civilians died in World War I. [19] Wikipedia researchers have provided comparable estimates. [20]

Within the military totals, the overwhelming majority of deaths (and injuries) were borne by armies, with naval deaths being only a few percent of the total. [21] Of land-based deaths, the evidence points to artillery being by far the leading cause, followed by machine guns. For example, historians Stephen Bull, [22] Gary Sheffield, [23] and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau [24] quote a range of official figures that indicate between 50% and 85% of casualties on the battlefield were due to artillery fire.

Civilian deaths – which are much less certain – were overwhelmingly caused by malnutrition and disease, as a result of shortages due to the effect of battlefields, blockades and damage to infrastructure caused by the war. Hence, no single weapons system can be identified as the cause in those cases. Nevertheless, artillery and machine gun fire still resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties.

Drawing on sources already quoted, I estimate the following overall numbers of deaths due to different weapons systems. I must emphasise these have high levels of uncertainty.

• Artillery: 6m (5m military and 1m civilian)
• Machines guns: 3m (2m military and 1m civilian)
• Submarines; rifles: 0.5m each
• Tanks; chemical weapons; warships; planes: 0.1m each

A further 5m civilians are thought to have died due to malnutrition and disease.  

Some lessons

Lessons from the carnage of the World War I continue to be hotly debated, but I want to offer some especially related to science and technology.

Historian John Keegan points out that there was rapid technological development in weapons systems in the years before WWI, in contrast to that in communications. [25] As such, the means to wage war on an unprecedented scale was readily at hand when the international political crisis struck in summer 1914, whereas technologies which political leaders could use to clarify and defuse the situation (e.g. high quality person-to-person phones) were not.

Today, the rapid pace of development in communications technologies is outpacing much in the military field – indicating that perhaps some lessons have been learned about the importance of communication in helping different peoples understand and trust one another. However, militaries are harnessing some of those communications technologies to help revolutionise warfare, an obvious example being the remote piloting of ‘drones’. New international arms controls are urgently needed in this area.

This brings me to another key lesson. 100 years on from the Battle of the Somme, artillery is still being used to devastating effect in many parts of the world – with the carnage of the Syrian war being an obvious example. Campaigners are attempting to get their use restricted under existing international disarmament treaties, but governments are currently showing little interest. [26]

A further lesson concerns the international arms trade. A lack of controls in the years before WWI allowed private corporations to profit from arming both sides. While a new international Arms Trade Treaty was agreed in 2013, its currently weak provisions still allow a major trade which fuels war and repression across the world. [27]

The overarching conclusion is that allowing militaries to play a significant role in scientific research and technological development was a major driver of world war 100 years ago, and it still creates major dangers today. We need to prioritise using science and technology to support and strengthen disarmament processes across the world – that would be the best way of commemorating the fallen from the century past.  

Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, and has written widely on the links between science, technology and militarism.

Thanks to Daniel Cahn for valuable help with research for this article.  

[1] Figures and calculations based on data from: White M (2011). Atrocitology. Canongate, London. Death rate of World War II (1939-45): approx 6.5m/y; Russian Civil War (1918-20): approx 4m/y.

[2] See also figures in: Wikipedia (2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

[3] p295 of: White (2011) – as note 1.

[4] Chap. 14 of: Williams T (1999). A history of invention: from stone axes to silicon chips. TimeWarner books.

[5] As note 4.

[6] As note 4.

[7] Bull S (2014). Trench: A History of Trench Warfare on the Western Front. Osprey Publishing.

[8] As note 4.

[9] As note 4.

[10] On the Record/ Campaign Against Arms Trade (2014). Arming All Sides. http://armingallsides.on-the-record.org.uk/

[11] History Learning Site (undated). http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/artillery_and_world_war_one.htm

[12] McKenny J (2007). The Organizational History of Field Artillery: 1775-2003. US Government Printing Office.

[13] Sheffield G (ed.) (2007). War on the Western Front. Osprey Publishing.

[14] As note 7.

[15] As note 7.

[16] As note 4.

[17] p.361 of: Keegan J (1998). The First World War. Random House.

[18] As note 4.

[19] As note 1.

[20] As note 2.

[21] As note 2.

[22] As note 7.

[23] As note 13.

[24] Audoin-Rouzeau S (2012). Combat. Pp.173-187 in: Horne J (2012). A Companion to World War I. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

[25] As note 17.

[26] Article 36 (2011). http://www.article36.org/explosive-weapons/introduction-explosive-weapo…

[27] War Resisters International (2013). http://www.wri-irg.org/node/21654/

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Technology and Innovation

The Allies introduced the U.S. military to technological advancements in weapons, medical treatment, communication, and transportation. On the battlefield, American forces fought using airplanes, long-range artillery, gas, motorized ambulances, mobile X-ray equipment, wireless radio, and other modern tools of war.  

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This article is from Tar Heel Junior Historian , published for the Tar Heel Junior Historian Association by the North Carolina Museum of History. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other uses directly to the museum editorial staff .

Is anything in this article factually incorrect? Please submit a comment.

Have a question or a suggestion about this entry contact ncpedia at https://www.ncpedia.org/contact, wwi: technology and the weapons of war.

by A. Torrey McLean Reprinted with permission from Tar Heel Junior Historian , Spring 1993. Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of History

See also: WWI: Life on the Western Front

The popular image of World War I is soldiers in muddy trenches and dugouts, living miserably until the next attack. This is basically correct. Technological developments in engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, and optics had produced weapons deadlier than anything known before. The power of defensive weapons made winning the war on the western front all but impossible for either side.

When attacks were ordered, Allied soldiers went “over the top,” climbing out of their trenches and crossing no-man’s-land to reach enemy trenches. They had to cut through belts of barbed wire before they could use rifles, bayonets, pistols, and hand grenades to capture enemy positions. A victory usually meant they had seized only a few hundred yards of shell-torn earth at a terrible cost in lives. Wounded men often lay helpless in the open until they died. Those lucky enough to be rescued still faced horrible sanitary conditions before they could be taken to proper medical facilities. Between attacks,the snipers, artillery, and poison gas caused misery and death.

Airplanes , products of the new technology, were primarily made of canvas, wood, and wire. At first they were used only to observe enemy troops. As their effectiveness became apparent, both sides shot planes down with artillery from the ground and with rifles, pistols, and machine guns from other planes. In 1916, the Germans armed planes with machine guns that could fire forward without shooting off the fighters’ propellers. The Allies soon armed their airplanes the same way, and war in the air became a deadly business. These light, highly maneuverable fighter planes attacked each other in wild air battles called dogfights. Pilots who were shot down often remained trapped in their falling, burning planes, for they had no parachutes. Airmen at the front did not often live long. Germany also used its fleet of huge dirigibles, or zeppelins, and large bomber planes to drop bombs on British and French cities. Britain retaliated by bombing German cities.

Back on the ground, the tank proved to be the answer to stalemate in the trenches. This British invention used American-designed caterpillar tracks to move the armored vehicle equipped with machine guns and sometimes light cannon. Tanks worked effectively on firm, dry ground, in spite of their slow speed, mechanical problems, and vulnerability to artillery. Able to crush barbed wire and cross trenches, tanks moved forward through machine gun fire and often terrified German soldiers with their unstoppable approach.

Chemical warfare first appeared when the Germans used poison gas during a surprise attack in Flanders, Belgium, in 1915. At first, gas was just released from large cylinders and carried by the wind into nearby enemy lines. Later, phosgene and other gases were loaded into artillery shells and shot into enemy trenches. The Germans used this weapon the most, realizing that enemy soldiers wearing gas masks did not fight as well. All sides used gas frequently by 1918. Its use was a frightening development that caused its victims a great deal of suffering, if not death.

Both sides used a variety of big guns on the western front, ranging from huge naval guns mounted on railroad cars to short-range trench mortars. The result was a war in which soldiers near the front were seldom safe from artillery bombardment. The Germans used super–long-range artillery to shell Paris from almost eighty miles away. Artillery shell blasts created vast, cratered, moonlike landscapes where beautiful fields and woods had once stood.

At sea, submarines attacked ships far from port. In order to locate and sink German U-boats, British scientists developed underwater listening devices and underwater explosives called depth charges. Warships became faster and more powerful than ever before and used newly invented radios to communicate effectively. The British naval blockade of Germany, which was made possible by developments in naval technology, brought a total war to civilians. The blockade caused a famine that finally brought about the collapse of Germany and its allies in late 1918. Starvation and malnutrition continued to take the lives of German adults and children for years after the war.

The firing stopped on November 11, 1918, but modern war technology had changed the course of civilization. Millions had been killed, gassed, maimed, or starved. Famine and disease continued to rage through central Europe, taking countless lives. Because of rapid technological advances in every area, the nature of warfare had changed forever, affecting soldiers, airmen, sailors, and civilians alike.

A. Torrey McLean, a former United States Army officer who served in Vietnam, studied World War I for more than thirty years, personally interviewing a number of World War I veterans.

Additional resources:

"World War I in Photos."  The Atlantic.  http://www.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/wwi/introduction/ (accessed April 16, 2015).

Fitzgerald, Gerard J. 2008. "Chemical warfare and medical response during World War I." American Journal of Public Health. April 2008. 98(4): 611-625. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2376985/ . Corrected July 2008. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424079/

North Carolinians and the Great War. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. https://docsouth.unc.edu/wwi/

Rumerman, Judy. "The U.S. Aircraft Industry Durin World War I." U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission. #

"Wildcats never quit: North Carolina in WWI."  State Archives of North Carolina. N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/SHRAB/ar/exhibits/wwi/default.htm (accessed September 25, 2013).

"World War I." North Carolina Digital History. Learn NC. http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newcentury/3.0

WWI: NC Digital Collections . NC Department of Cultural Resources.

WWI: Old North State and the 'Kaiser Bill.' Online exhibit , State Archives of NC.

Image credits:

"Gas Mask. WWI. Used in France." NC Museum of History. Accession no. H.1999.1.406. http://collections.ncdcr.gov .

"Browning Machine Gun. Model 1917." 1918. NC Museum of History. Accession No. H.1918.31.9. http://collections.ncdcr.gov .

1 May 1993 | McLean, A. Torrey

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Science and Technology in War by William J. Astore LAST REVIEWED: 06 February 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 06 February 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0054

Science, technology, and warfare exist in a nexus of dependencies and possibilities. Science may be defined as organized knowledge; technology, as applied knowledge; and warfare, as organized violence. But warfare generates chaos, leading to unpredictability, uncertainty, and even irrationality. The rationality associated with science and technology rests uneasily with the chaos of war. That said, as long as humans have fought, they have sought advantages in speed, firepower, protection, reach, and similar qualities amenable to enhancements by rational methods of science and engineering. Some of history’s best minds––Archimedes of Syracuse, Leonardo da Vinci, J. Robert Oppenheimer––devoted much of their lives working as military engineers or scientists. The challenge is to situate science, technology, warfare and its practitioners into broader historical and social contexts, thereby revealing linkages to political structures, economic concerns, logistical and material considerations, and moral beliefs and constraints.

Eight studies pointed the way for sophisticated analysis of science, technology, and warfare. They have become classics in the field. Mumford 1934 highlights the intrusion of military imperatives and values on technological change, a critique the author develops further in Mumford 1967–1970 . Holley 1953 illustrates the importance of doctrine to the development and effectiveness of weapons in war; Morison 1966 shows how commitments to preexisting modes of training and fighting may discourage technical innovation. Nef 1968 and Kranzberg and Pursell 1967 provide context on the economic and technical factors driving changes in weaponry and warfare in the industrial age. Cipolla 1988 and Smith 1977 are model case studies of groundbreaking developments in a Western way of war that drew strength from its cannon-bearing oceangoing vessels and its ability to mass-produce firearms for its foot soldiers. White 1962 shows how the marriage of comparatively simple technology (stirrups) within a complex social structure (feudal Europe) can have astonishing impact and staying power.

Cipolla, Carlo M. Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 . Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1988.

Classic study that highlights cannon-laden galleons as Europe’s weapon of power projection in the early modern period. Concludes that non-Western peoples had to adopt or adapt to Western technology or be subjugated. Whichever path they chose led to a loss of indigenous cultural and intellectual diversity vis-à-vis “the West.” Originally published in 1966 (New York: Pantheon).

Holley, I. B., Jr. Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapon by the United States during World War I; A Study in the Relationship of Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953.

Privileges doctrine as defining “the scope and potential capabilities” of weapons systems and its foundational role in shaping which weapons will be selected for development. Doctrine defines roles and responsibilities, but more importantly it shapes what is considered to be desirable or even possible.

Kranzberg, Melvin, and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds. Technology in Western Civilization . 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Standard reference source in the history of technology; see in particular Thomas A. Palmer’s chapter on “Military Technology” in Volume 1, and Edward L. Katzenbach Jr.’s article on “The Mechanization of War, 1880–1919” in Volume 2.

Morison, Elting E. Men, Machines, and Modern Times . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.

Especially strong on bureaucratic resistance to technological change and the way in which change creates uncertainty and thus resistance within tradition-minded military circles.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.

Classic statement on the interconnectivity of technology with civilization and culture, by the doyen of the field. “In short,” says Mumford, “the partnership between the soldier, the miner, the technician, and the scientist is an ancient one.” Filled with provocative insights, for example, weapons and machines as “a means of creating a dehumanized response in the enemy or victim,” a facilitator of estrangement as well as of death. Essential.

Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine . 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967–1970.

Irascible, at times brilliant, critique of technology and its dehumanizing qualities; each volume concludes with an annotated bibliography whose pithy assessments are often spot on and always entertaining. Volume 1, Technics and Human Development ; Volume 2, The Pentagon of Power .

Nef, John U. War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization . New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

Classic statement of the interconnectivity of war with the industrial revolution, commerce, and capitalism. Comprehensive and erudite. Originally published in 1950 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Smith, Merritt Roe. Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in 1978, a model study of arms manufacturing in antebellum America that addresses “The American System” of manufacturing (interchangeable parts and mechanization), as well as workers’ reactions (and resistance) to the same. Based on deep archival research.

White, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Groundbreaking work that highlighted the role of stirrups in the ascendancy of knights as an arm of shock and decision in feudal Europe. Criticized, undeservedly so, for its apparent technological determinism.

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165 World War 1 Topics for Essays with Examples

Looking for good World War 1 topics to write about? This area of study is exciting, controversial, and worth analysing!

• 🔝 Top 10 WW1 Topics to Write about
• 📝 WW1 Essay: How to Write
• 🏆 Best WW1 Essay Topics & Examples

💡 Good Essay Topics on WW1

• 🔎 Interesting Topics to Write about WW1
• ⭐ WW1 Research Topics
• 📃 Simple & Easy WW1 Essay Titles
• ❓ WW1 Essay Questions

In your WW1 essay, you might want to focus on the causes of the conflict, its participants, or answer the question of who started the First World War. In this article, we’ve gathered 139 WW1 ideas that you can use in any project, presentation, or even debate. There are also great World War 1 essay examples to inspire you even more.

🔝 Top 10 World War 1 Topics to Write about

• Causes of World War I
• Political and military alliances before the WWI
• Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the starting point of WW1
• Naval warfare of World War I
• Ottoman Empire in World War 1
• The role of technology in World War 1
• The use of chemical weapons in WWI
• The most cruel war crimes of WW1
• Armenian genocide as a part of World War 1
• The effects and consequences of WW1

📝 World War 1 Essay: How to Write

With over 60 million people mobilized and involving countries all around the world, any World War 1 Essay is bound to touch upon a wide variety of topics.

The mechanics behind the start of the war, its process, and results all interconnect, which may make the subject seem hard to understand and harder to outline.

However, navigating your way around World War 1 essay questions is only a matter of taking note of a few cornerstone historical processes.

Before You Start Your Outline

Do some research on your assigned issue. The more books and journals you peruse, the more aware of your subject you will be. You will not use all of them, but you will form an understanding of which titles your essay needs.

As you continue your research, start compiling your bibliography, which will be the backbone of your essay’s credibility. World War 1 is a highly historiographical event, and you will be sure to find a wide variety of literature on it on the internet.

Write down some essential terms and think about how they relate to your essay. Imperialism, nationalism, the Versailles treaty are good starter examples of omnipresent processes and results of World War 1. Doing so may help you give your essay a new, previously explored perspective.

Structuring your Thoughts into an Essay Outline

After you have finished with your sources and key terms, think about how you can split your main theme into subtopics.

Even if your essay is a single page, doing so will allow you to divide your ideas evenly between paragraphs. If it is on the longer side, think about including subheadings in your work.

This action gives your essay a more rigid structure that is easy to read. Additionally, now is the time to think about your essay’s title. World War 1 essay titles should reflect your stance as the writer and hint at the conclusion that you will draw.

You may feel like your outlined subheadings are overlapping, making your essay seem messy. In this case, find and read a World War 1 essay sample. Plagiarism is a severe academic offense, but getting inspired by someone else’s work, while giving credit, is not.

Beginning to Write

You should try to start your essay with something that attracts the attention of your readers. This World War 1 essay hook can be a fact or an intriguing explanation of a process central to your topic. Then, in this paragraph:

• Give your readers a brief overview of the events that are relevant to your essay;
• Hint at your intent, explain your methods and make your point of view clear;
• Make sure your readers are aware of what problems you will touch upon;
• Create a working thesis statement that will be your guideline throughout your work.

Each paragraph you include should link back to your thesis statement. Always be sure to ask yourself when writing:

• Does this further my argument?
• Can my facts be used against me? How can I fix that?
• Is there a different perspective on this issue?
• Could I remove this without hurting the quality of my essay?
• Is my structure reflective of the problem it is covering? What can I do better?

Remember that a good structure reflects the amount of effort you put into your work. Need a sample to get inspired? Head over to IvyPanda!

🏆 Best World War 1 Essay Topics & Examples

• First World War: Causes and Effects This later led to the entry of countries allied to Serbia into the war so as to protect their partners. In conclusion, the First World War led to the loss of many lives.
• Positive and Negative Effects of WW1 on Canada: Essay Nonetheless, the war led to great negative impacts such as loss of lives, economic downtrend, and the generation of tensions involving the Francophones and Anglophones who disagreed after the emergence of the notion of conscription.
• American Dream After World War I People lost vision of what this dream was supposed to mean and it became a dream, not of the vestal and industrious, but of the corrupt coterie, hence corrupting the dream itself.
• Total War of World War I The paper will demonstrate that the First World War was a total war since it bore most the hallmark characteristics of the total war including unlimited warfare, prioritization of armament efforts, involvement of the civilian […]
• World War I Technology Although the question of the origins of the Great War is highly debated, and although this war is considered by many as the beginning of a new stage in history and the real starting point […]
• Ernest Hemingway’s Personality and His Reflections on WWI The events of World War I and Hemmingway’s personal experiences seemed to have an impact on his writings as he sought to establish himself alongside great writers in the Lost Generation, thus portraying his sensitivity.
• Causes of WWI and WWII: Comparing and Contrasting In the following paper, Kenneth Waltz’s levels of analysis will be used for the comparison and contrast of causes of WWI and WWII. The second similarity refers to the distribution of power and the division […]
• Effects of the Industrial Revolution in Relation to World War I During the last period of the 19th century all the way to the early 20th century, Europe and America experienced revolutions in communication, transportation and weapons which were very crucial particularly in the manner in […]
• Federal Government Expansion During World War I The period between 1914 and 1918 was marked by the increased role of the federal government in the United States and the dramatic expansion of its bureaucracies.
• The Causes and Effects of World War I To this end, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties met in Paris in 1919. It is impossible to name a single reason for the initiation […]
• Aboriginal Soldiers in the World War I and II Additionally, the paper will argue that the role and experiences of Aboriginal soldiers and the manner in which they have been overshadowed by other significant events in Australian history.
• The Book “The First World War” by John Keegan However, the emergence of the bill of the right to people’s life across the globe is owed to the occurrence of the First and the Second World War.
• The Aftermath of World War I for Germany In spite of the fact that Germany was one of the most powerful European states before the war’s start in 1914, World War I led to the political, economic, and social decline in the country […]
• World War 1 Origins (How and Why the War Started) William Anthony Hay claims that according to McMeekin, a tutor of international relations, “The war’s real catalyst lay in Russia’s ambition to supplant the waning Ottoman Empire in the Near East and to control the […]
• America’s Involvement in World War I The issues that led to America’s involvement in this were the German’s resumption of unexpected submarine attacks and the Zimmerman telegram.
• Life of Soldiers During the World War I In this paper, we are going to discuss how the World War I affected live of people and what was the life of soldiers and civilians serving and living on the frontlines.
• Eastman Kodak Company and Fujifilm The Eastman Kodak Company has been focusing on photography and has currently added the use of technology in combining images and information in order to alter the ways through which businesses and people communicate.
• Effects of World War I on the Development of Modern Art For the artists and most of the people in Europe, the time that preceded the World War I, the actual war period and the aftermath of the was presented a period of profound disillusionment 13.
• Events Leading Up to WWI This move also contributed to the start of the conflict and eventually to the war. This decision was vehemently opposed by the Slavs, which saw Russia come to the aid of Serbia while on the […]
• The Progressive Movement and the American Entry Into World War I The motivations of the progressive movement were complex and varied, but they all sought to improve the lives of the people of the United States.
• World War I as the Catastrophe of the 20th Century There were increased cataclysms in Europe over time; for instance, the war laid a foundation for the rise of Hitler and increased the influence of the Nazism ideology.
• World War I: American Policy of Neutrality Even though the people of America were shocked and firmly against involvement in the war, the US president thought of the crisis as a turning point that could significantly change America’s place in the world.
• Economic Causes of World War I As of 1860, the American South was generating 75% of the world’s cotton due to the institution of slavery on the part of its wealthy farmers.
• The Role of Canada in World War I The beginning of the war was marked by great losses in the field and in the economy of the state. By the war’s end, Canada had shown itself as a great power, which allowed the […]
• America’s Progressive Era and World War I This paper will outline the events leading to America’s entrance into the war, the obstacles faced by the U.S.military, and the role of American women and minorities.
• The Entry of the United States Into World War I The United States is believed to have entered the war after sinking the American liner Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915. Due to the competent actions of President W.
• Role the United States of America in the World War I The main result of the battle was the victory of the Entente and the collapse of the four largest empires: the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German.
• Impact of World War I on the American Army Some of the major strategies include the use of airplanes in the field of battle, employing armored vehicles, and electronic communication.
• The United States Priorities Following World War I Gentile, Linick, and Shurkin single out four important periods in the evolution of the US army: Constitutional moorings and the 19th century, the Spanish-American War to Total War, and the Korean War to Total Force […]
• Biggest Influence on the US Involvement in World War I Although a combination of factors including trade alliances and the interception of the Zimmerman note encouraged the decision to join the fray, Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare was the biggest reason for the US involvement.
• Nationalism in Europe Before WWI This movement was the result of effective propaganda and an aggressive policy aimed at the redistribution of territories and the seizure of power.
• Factors Leading to the Termination of World War I However, the deliberate humiliation of the German leadership at the hand of the Allied forces perpetrated through the signing of the “war guilt clause” indicates that the reason for the Allied forces was not solely […]
• World War I Causes by Ethnic Problems in Austro-Hungary The presence of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in the said maneuvers was the perfect opportunity. After the capture of Gavrilo Princip it was time for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to react and teach the […]
• World War I: Medias of Propaganda in the U.S. Posters of World War 1 presented a different style of propaganda because of the war time effort of U S government.
• America Changes After World War I Among the various changes underwent by America during their recovery period in the 1920s were changes in culture, economy as well as in the workforce.
• America in World War I One of the events that led America into the First World War was when a liner belonging to the British was sunk by the U-boat belonging to Germans.
• The Nature of the Fighting in World War I and World War II So, the results of this war were awful, but still, speaking about the losses of the World War II, it can be said, that it was the bloodiest conflict in human history. The most obvious […]
• Treaty of Versailles History: The Pact of Peace After WWI The differences among the winners of the war, later on, led to the emergence of more conflicts simply because Germany was not fully weakened; it is believed that the conflicts between these nations were the […]
• The Wars Between 1815 and WWI in Europe Tsar Nicholas moved into Moldavia and Wallachia and secret accords with the Austrian and British governments for the disposition of the Ottoman empire were formulated in 1844 in London.
• World War I Within the Context of Military Revolution The main peculiarity of the World War I is the advent of the so-called “three-dimensional conflict”, which means that the combat is held also in the air.
• Life Before World War I and Life of Soldiers in Trenches The future of these Habsburg domains, assembled over the centuries by marriage, purchase and conquest, was the subject of endless coffee-table speculation, but the subsequent demise of the monarchy should not necessarily encourage the notion […]
• Great Depression of Canada and Conscription During World War I in Canada Due to the depression in the United States, the people across the border were not able to buy the wheat produced and cultivated in Canada and as a result, the exports declined.
• Anti-War Movement DADA Vs. Propaganda Posters of WWI In relation to the causes of the WWI, these can considered as pertinent specifically on the basis that the reasons can be related to the type of society that is present during the said era.
• Leadership in the World War I Environment Military leadership is the process of influencing others to accomplish the mission by providing purpose, direction, and motivation and the basic responsibilities of a leader are the accomplishments of the mission and the welfare of […]
• World War 1 and Technological Improvement The was sparked by the assassination of the Heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip on June 28th, 1914.
• The Battle of Verdun: World War One The choice of Verdun as the center of interest by the Germans was not very effective because the French men lost faith in the fortresses and the need to defend them.
• Imperialist Global Order After World War I Thus, the general trend of the after-war years was the dismantling of multiethnic empires and the establishment of new nation-states. However, World War I also created new challenges to the existing hierarchies of wealth and […]
• Soccer Influence on Sociopolitical Aspects of WWI During this period, many footballers and athletes were tempted or encouraged to join the militaries of their respective countries and become part of the ongoing war.
• Idealist Philosophy After World War I Although I disagree with the philosophy of idealism, it is a fact that it managed to create a better world following the events of World War I.
• World War I and Its Outbreak Causes Some of the events that influenced the eruption of World War I include the Franco-Prussian war, the Moroccan crisis, the Balkan wars, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand from Austria.
• World War I and Battle of Vimy Ridge for Canadians If the authors of the required readings gathered for a discussion of the First World War and Vimy Ridge, they would be likely to agree and disagree with one another on some points.
• Aftermath of the WWI The source concludes that the provisions of the treaty were unfavorable to the government and the people of Germany, something that forced the country’s leaders to respond with militarization of the state.
• Trucial States’ History From World War I to the 1960s During the decline of the pearling industry, the British were highly vigilant to sustain the existing regional trend of alienation amongst leaders and the people.
• World War I and Its Aftermath In 1930, Hitler’s ambitions and the rise of Nazism was boosted by president’s declaration that the state was to be ruled autocratically.
• American Experiences in World War I: Radio Broadcast There was a heated debate in the American society concerning the county’s involvement in the Great War, and President Wilson was heavily criticized not only for the fact of entering the war but also for […]
• World War I and the 1920s In this case, American citizens went from industry workers and soldiers during the World War I to the explorers, who discover different forms of entertainment in the 1920s because of stabilization of the politics in […]

🔎 Interesting Topics to Write about World War 1

• World War I, Its Origin and Allies Many researchers consider the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in June 1914 in Sarajevo to be the reason for the start of World War I.
• The Progressive Era and World War I To achieve the intended goals, many progressives began by exposing the major evils and challenges that were affecting the United States towards the end of the 19th century.
• World War I for Americans: Before and After It is important to say that lower classes had to deal with the biggest number of issues, and they have suffered the most.
• France Before World War I and After World War II To overcome the negative consequences of the Franco-Prussian War, France needed to focus on new perspectives for the state’s economic and political development, and such an approach could provide the state with the necessary resources […]
• Pozieres Battle in World War I on Western Front The battle for the village of Pozieres was one of the deadliest and most remarkable for the Australian troops which took part in the First World War.
• Native Americans Role in World War I Most of the students who went to schools away from the reserves came to the realization that they were, ‘first Americans and then indians second.’3 The schools also taught patriotic songs as well as observation […]
• American History From Reconstruction to World War I However, despite the popular opinion of the individual initiative of the first settlers, the federal government played a great role in facilitating the settlement of the West.
• America & World War I The three years have been used to argue that the US was unwilling to enter the war; that the US was neutral as Woodrow Wilson had declared.
• From World War One to Globalization Even though the First World War shook Europe to the core, the combination of the first and the Second World War created a three world order, modeled along three rival political affiliations.
• How the Federal Bureaucracy Expanded During WWI? The role of the bureaucracy was expansive during the war since the state was expected to provide many services to the citizens, something that led to the formulation of stronger rules and regulations to guide […]
• The Expansion of Federal Bureaucracy During WWI With these, a number of government agencies were created during the WWI particularly when it emerged that there was a need to regulate or control industrial sector as well as the call for the US […]
• Role of Civilian Population in World War I Not only did the war encouraged people to join their forces in order to fight the enemy, but also affected their perception of the state’s key political processes raising political engagement rates among population, WWI […]
• WWI: Germany’s Secret Gambles The “interception of the German arms shipment by the Royal Navy” led to the quick suppression of the Eastern uprising and execution of key leaders of the Irish Republicans.
• The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism, and the First World War The first theme is the connection of writings of women on the subject of the First World War and the modernism theoretical constructs.
• Watching the World Fall Apart: A Post-WWI Vision of the World in the Works of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz While it is quite understandable that at the current stage of the development of humankind, some conflicts still have to be resolved with the use of coercive methods, war as a massive homicide still remains […]
• First World War and Germany In particular, the author is more concerned with giving the effects of the war on the German people, unlike other authors who generalize the effects of the war.
• Ernist Junger’s World War I Experiences When the Storm of Steel was published, it became a favorite in Germany since it adored the greatness of war and the huge sacrifices made by the Germany warriors to end the war victoriously.
• World War I Technological Advancements World War I saw the application of several new technologies to the battlefield, the most important being that of the internal combustion engine, which permitted the development of the first successful mechanized armored fighting vehicles1.
• The First World War and the Russian Revolution Scholars argue that Russia’s involvement in the First World War and the economic consequences are the primary causes of the revolution.
• United States and World War I The paper further gives an in-depth analysis of how the Germans waged war against the European countries and the circumstances that forced the United States to abandon its neutrality to take part in the Great […]
• WWI-War: Revolution, and Reconstruction In as much as soldiers and civilians garnered experience during WWI, it is imperative to acknowledge that the unsuitable environment at the forefront led to deterioration of health standards; furthermore, civilians were forced to live […]
• The Causes of the First World War In his description of the war, it is clear that Europe played a key role towards the formation of the war alliances.
• The Role of Airplanes During World War I (1914-1918) The government further formed a consultative ‘Aircraft Production Board’ that was made up of members of the Army, Navy, as well as the sector to assess the Europeans’ fortunes in aircraft sector in a bid […]
• The World War I The war brought to the fore various issues which had been in the air in the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Importance of Accountability: World War I It is clear from the beginning of this article, that the statistics on the World War I causalities indicates that the Germans suffered fewer casualties compared to their western counterparts, who are the French and […]
• America and Democracy, at Home and Abroad, During and Just After the First World War Democracy is a kind of regime in which all eligible citizens are allowed to contribute to the decisions of the state.
• Causes and Consequences of World War 1 In social and economic cycles, the interaction of the whites and Blacks was controlled by the laws that neither of the groups was allowed to cross the other party’s path.
• Changes in the Middle East After the World War I The involvement in the war by the countries from the Middle East not only led to loss of power but also spurred the economic decline and created social problems.

⭐ World War 1 Research Topics

• Industrialization and Competition for Resources Which Led to the First World War
• Factors That Made the First World War Unique
• Identify and Evaluate Two Main Themes That Have Defined Management Thought Since the End of the First World War.
• The Events and Results of the First World War I
• Terrible Beauty: Music and Writing of the First World War
• Liberal Democracy and Capitalism After World War 1
• European Politics and the Impact of French Foreign Policy Before the First World War
• Chemical Warfare During the First World War
• The First World War and Russian Revolution
• European Diplomacy and the First World War
• With What Justification Can World War 1 Be Called a Total War
• The Catalyst for the First World War
• The Reasons for the Economic Prosperity in America After the First World War
• Events Leading for the First World War
• Imperialistic Rivalries and the Road to the First World War
• Shaping the American Dream, Defining Success From the First World War to Present
• Austro-Serbian Relations Provoked the First World War
• America and the First World War
• The Purpose and Intent of the League of Nations After the First World War
• The First World War Impact on Australian Economy
• The Long Term and Short Term Causes of World War 1

📃 Simple & Easy World War 1 Essay Titles

• European Goods Market Integration in the Very Long Run: From the Black Death to the First World War
• The Reasons for the American Support for the Involvement in the First World War
• Military Technology During the First World War
• German Foreign Policy and the Impact of Nationalism on It Before the First World War
• The American Foreign Policy After the First World War
• The Economic, Social, and Political Impact of the First World War on Eur
• Technological Advancements During the First World War
• The World Before the First World War According to Barbara Tuchman
• The Effects That the First World War Had on Many People
• The Effective Weapons Used in the First World War
• Women’s Work During the First World War
• Diplomatic Crises: The First World War and the Cuban Missile Crisis
• The First World War Changed the Way People Thought About War and Patriotism
• Gender Roles During the First World War
• The Reasons for the Outbreak of the First World War
• Australia’s Economic and Military Contribution in the First World War
• The First World War: A New Era of Military Conflict
• German Propaganda During the First World War
• Analyzing Propaganda During World War 1
• Britain During the First World War and the Social and Welfare Reforms

❓ World War 1 Essay Questions

• How Important Was the Entry of the U.S. Into the First World War?
• Was the First World War a Total War?
• What Effect Did the First World War Have on Germany?
• How Significant Was the First World War?
• In What Ways Were People’s Lives at Home Affected by the First World War?
• The Russian Revolution Us a Direct Result of the First World War
• How Did Medical Care Change During the First World War?
• How the First World War Created Modern America?
• Was the First World War the Cause of the February Revolution in Russia?
• Was the First World War Inevitable?
• How Did the First World War Change the Role of Women?
• How Industrialization Powered the First World War?
• Why Did the First World War Last So Long?
• How Far Was the First World War Responsible for the Growth of the Labour Party and the Decline of the Liberal Party?
• Why Did the United States Entry Into World War 1?
• How Did the United States Prepare to Fight for the First World War?
• How Did the First World War Set the Global Stage for the Second World War?
• Why Did World War 1 End So Quickly After the Years of Stalemate?
• Why Did the First World War End When It Did?
• How Did the First World War Affect Britain Society?
• How Did Women Affected World War 1?
• How Did Imperialism Cause World War 1?
• How the First World War Impacted the Homefronts of Participating Nations?
• Was the Alliance System the Main Cause of the First World War?
• How Did the Middle East Change as a Result of World War 1?
• Why Did the Ottomans Enter the First World War?
• Why Did Germany Lose the First World War?
• What Was the Most Important Cause of the First World War?
• How Did the Allies Win World War 1?
• Why Did Some Men Oppose Women’s Employment in the Industry During the First World War?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 165 World War 1 Topics for Essays with Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/world-war-1-essay-examples/

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Technology and equipment developed during World War I

The war drove scientific and technological initiative on an unprecedented scale. Innovation on both sides created more destructive and effective weapons. Communications, medicine and transportation were also advanced. But not all inventions achieved their intended goals.

A significant technological advance in World War I was the adoption and modification of aeroplanes for military use.

Early aircraft flown by Australian Flying Corps crews were unsuited to operations in the Middle East. When Lieutenant George Merz was let down by a faulty plane on 30 Jul 1915, he became the first Australian airman to die in the war. His unarmed Caudron G.3 was prone to engine problems. In the desert between Nasiriyeh and Basra, Merz and his passenger were murdered while trying to fix the plane.

Only 3 years later, Australian airmen were piloting the deadliest machines of the war. The last Australian airmen to die in the war were:

• Captain Thomas Baker of Adelaide, South Australia
• Lieutenant Arthur 'Jack' Palliser of Ulverstone, Tasmania
• 2nd Lieutenant Parker Symons of Moonta, South Australia

Captain Baker was an accomplished combat pilot. As part of No. 4 Squadron, he had brought down five German planes over 7 days.

All three men were killed on 4 November 1918 while escorting a squadron of British bombers back to base after a raid over Leuze. Their manoeuvrable Sopwith Snipe planes were shot down by the ace German pilot, Rittmeister Karl Bolle.

Tactics in aerial warfare developed throughout the war and included:

• artillery spotting
• battery ranging
• sector reconnaissance
• spotting for fire-effect
• dogfighting

Germany’s Baron Manfred von Richthofen , 'the Red Baron', was a well-known fighter pilot at the time. With 80 combat victories, he was the highest scoring pilot of the war. Von Richthofen was killed in action over France on 21 April 1918. At his funeral the next day, the Australian Flying Corps No. 3 Squadron fired a 12-gun salute.

Anti-aircraft weapons

At the start of World War I, dedicated anti-aircraft weapons were rare because few aircraft were used and their military use had not been proven. At first, Allied units were slow to provide dedicated anti-aircraft batteries. Germany initially led the way with motorised and horse-drawn guns controlled by the German Army Air Service.

Both sides quickly realised the value of planes during combat. Aircraft were used to undertake:

• offensive roles, such as bombing and artillery spotting
• reconnaissance operations, such as photography and surveillance

Combatting these offensive aerial roles needed more effective weapons that could:

• provide high rates of fire with specialised munitions
• be elevated towards the sky to shoot down aircraft

Scientific research to develop specialised munitions included:

• timed fuses that would detonate shells in the air, dispersing shrapnel to destroy aircraft
• incendiary shells that would ignite and set fire to airships and balloons

Other ways to prevent attacks from aircraft and airships were devised to:

• disrupt their passage, such as searchlights and web-like barriers of tethered balloons
• funnel aircraft into anti-aircraft firing range

Optical systems to track and range aircraft were important. Such advances helped to direct more accurate fire at incoming planes.

Both sides mounted machine guns on tripods as anti-aircraft measures. Although machine guns had a high rate of fire, they lacked the range of heavier calibre artillery munitions. Infantry on both sides sometimes used their rifles to shoot at low flying planes.

In 1917, Germany released a high velocity 88mm artillery gun as an anti-aircraft weapon. It allowed anti-aircraft gunners to more accurately calculate their bearings to shoot down Allied planes.

The British also developed some specialised anti-aircraft guns in different calibres. The best known was a variation of the ' pom-pom' gun .

By the end of the war, adoption of anti-aircraft tactics and weapons meant that:

• Americans claimed 58 aircraft shot down from 1917 onwards
• British and Australian forces claimed 340 aircraft shot
• French forces claimed 500 aircraft shot down
• German forces claimed over 1500 aircraft shot down

Airships and balloons

Military use of balloons peaked during World War I.

Newly developed dirigibles were more manoeuvrable and tougher than traditional hot air balloons. They were a constant sight above both sides' trenches on the Western Front.

Observation balloons:

• were floated or tethered to a great height behind the front lines
• carried observers who could spot enemy troop movements and collect intelligence

Ground artillery took advantage of the observer's increased range of sight from up high.

Anti-balloon warfare

Balloons became a target for both sides during the war. They were heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns on the ground and patrolling fighter aircraft.

Allied flying squadrons shot down German balloons with specially developed ammunition. This was an important tactic to prevent intelligence collection before major offensives. Incendiary bullets ignited the flammable gases in the balloons, causing them to erupt into fireballs.

The Buckingham incendiary bullet was developed for Allied airmen to use against German balloons.

Being an observer in a balloon or dirigible was risky business. You could be shot down by the enemy. Observation crews used parachutes long before they were adopted by airmen.

If a balloon came under attack, its occupant's only chance of survival would be to bail out and deploy a parachute as they left the basket. Sometimes their escape was too late, or their parachute caught alight.

Tethered observation balloons were used at sea, including by the Royal Australian Navy. Balloons were tethered to vessels, such as HMAS Parramatta , to help spot, pursue and sink enemy submarines.

The saying, 'The balloon goes up', means that something exciting or risky is beginning. During the war, the ascent of the enemy's observation balloon was nearly always followed by a barrage of shells.

Armoured cars and other vehicles

Armoured cars were widely used in the Middle East and on the Western Front. These cars were particularly useful for reconnaissance.

Even taxis played a role in the war. A fleet of taxis carried reinforcements to the forward areas in the First Battle of the Marne in 1914.

Where they could be used, motorised ambulances fulfilled a vital role. They provided rapid transportation for the wounded to hospitals.

Gas and anti-gas measures

Gas canisters and shells.

Gas was an effective tactic for clearing enemy forward positions during the war. Gases used included:

• mustard gas

When gas was first used in combat on the Western Front, it was stored in cylinders. When the wind was favourable, it was released to drift over enemy lines.

The gas from cylinders had a fairly short range in windy conditions and could prove lethal to the side using it if the wind changed direction.

At the Battle of Loos, the chlorine gas used against the Germans blew back into the faces of the British and Canadian troops. War correspondent Charles Bean wrote:

as a matter of fact gas in cloud form, emitted from cylinders, was never used directly against an Australian division

From 1916, gas was delivered in shells, which could be shot over a greater distance.

Anti-gas measures became increasingly sophisticated as the war progressed. In 1915, the British Army issued its troops with primitive cotton face pads soaked in sodium bicarbonate. The bicarb soda in the 'Black Veil' worked against a normal concentration of chlorine for about 5 minutes. By 1918, it was common to use filter respirators with charcoal or chemicals to neutralise the gas.

Gas alarm gong

When a gas attack seemed imminent or was in progress, the troops on the front would bang on a gas alarm gong to warn others. The gongs were usually hand made from metal rods or shell casings.

Sometimes strombus horns were sounded too.

A foldable anti-gas fan was designed to supply the troops with fresh air after a gas attack. It was used to clear gaseous residue that collected in shell-holes and craters.

Communication

The nature of trench warfare drove a need for more rapid communication between headquarters and the front lines. Conventional methods of communication at the time included:

• animals , such as pigeons and dogs

Telephones were widely used in the trenches, but their lines could easily be cut due to artillery damage or enemy sabotage.

The portable Morse code machine used by British forces enabled:

• communication between headquarters and the front line
• developments in field radios for forward observers to communicate with artillery units

The portable Fullerphone included both Morse code and speech facilities.

Early aircraft could drop message canisters down to ground forces. As planes became more sophisticated, so did their methods of communication.

A throat microphone described as 'a cap with a throat microphone and earpiece' was developed for hands-free communication. Pilots could receive orders from ground staff and pass on intelligence they had collected in the air.

[xxx **insert image of throat microphone from UK Archive's record - cat ref: AIR 10/100 - Image available from UK Archives booklet at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/first-world-war/telecommunications-in-war/ **]

<caption>Flying cap equipped with telephone headset and throat microphone, 1918 handbook, UK Archives ref. AIR 10/100</caption>

Wireless was used to send messages between ships on convoy duty or during battle.

Other important communications methods included:

• heliographs (sunlight flashed in mirrors)
• signalling flags
• signalling lamps (eg Begbie oil lamp and Lucas daylight electric lamp)
• simple tools for transmitting Morse code (eg a whistle)

Signalling flags, lamps and whistles carried the risk of being seen or heard by the enemy.

Some technical developments enabled the collection of intelligence from intercepted telecommunications. Wireless signals from German Zeppelins were collected at 'Direction Finding Stations' in Great Britain. This provided both the location and anticipated targets of Zeppelin attacks.

As a final measure, the complete 'cut off' of communications was another way to stall and disrupt a German attack.

Inventions and innovation

Artillery techniques.

Artillery was the most devastating weapon during the war.

The Allies put a lot of effort into locating and destroying German artillery positions. One technique was artillery sound ranging . This process used the sound of individual artillery pieces to work out the position and coordinates of enemy batteries.

Another technique was acoustic location , a forerunner to radar. An unusual device with large horns could amplify distant the sounds of enemy aircraft. The sound was monitored through headphones. Similar developments were initiated in marine acoustics to locate enemy submarines.

Flash spotting was important too. Ground troops would observe for the flash of an artillery piece being fired as another method of locating enemy batteries.

Kettering unmanned torpedo

The Americans developed the first pilotless flying weapon ('drone') in 1918.

The Kettering Bug had pre-set pneumatic and electrical controls to stabilise and guide it toward a target. After a set period, the controls closed an electrical circuit to stop the engine. This released the wings and caused the machine to plunge to earth, where 180 pounds (82kg) of explosive would detonate on impact.

The war ended before it could be used in combat.

Periscope rifle

The trench periscope rifle was invented in May 1915 by Lance Corporal William Beech, 2nd Battalion AIF. The gun allowed a soldier to take accurate aim and fire from down inside the trench, without exposing himself to fire from enemy trenches or snipers.

Flamethrower

The Germans improved the flamethrower , a brutal infantry weapon. Its operator could send a jet of flame many metres towards enemy troops. Inside the device, a cylinder of oil was being pressurised by a propellant, such as carbon dioxide or nitrogen.

Hand grenades

The hand grenade (called 'bombs' at the time) became more advanced and lethal during the war.

Initially, the Germans had the most advanced grenades. By the end of the war, the British and French forces had developed more effective:

• fragmentation and concussion grenades
• 'smoke' grenades to conceal movement
• coloured smoke grenades for signalling
• gas grenades
• rifle launched grenades

Sometimes the troops themselves took the initiative to make grenades. The AIF’s ' jam tin' bomb was an empty tin or two packed with explosives, shrapnel and a fuse.

Medical advances

No one was prepared for the tremendous physical impact that modern artillery, gas and machine guns — and the stress of battle — would have on the men.

At first, armies had very basic arrangements in place for moving and treating wounded men. Usually, a man would be carried away from the battle by soldiers, or be placed on a stretcher or a horse or mule-drawn cart. Private Simpson and his donkey is one early Australian example of using donkeys to transport for the wounded.

Military medical facilities were also poorly equipped to treat:

• loss of blood
• open wounds

Before the age of antibiotics, medical officers were unable to kill harmful bacteria, such as gangrene-causing Clostridium perfringens . Many patients either died from the infection or underwent salvage amputations of gangrenous limbs.

Transport and treatment improvements

Three significant medical advances sprang from the experience of mass casualties in World War I:

• specialised anaesthetists

The methods of evacuating and treating wounded that evolved so quickly during World War I are the forerunners of the technologically advanced tools used in modern military medicine.

The Carrel-Dakin method to wash open wounds with a solution of sodium hypochlorite was a major breakthrough. It helped to prevent the spread of deadly bacteria.

Other major developments included:

• anaesthetic to reduce pain, such as nitrous oxide
• anti-coagulants to store blood in 'blood banks'

Medical treatment became more hygienic and less traumatic. Supplies of blood saved countless wounded men from bleeding to death.

Specialist anaesthetist posts were introduced to casualty clearing stations behind the lines by late 1917. This enabled specialist medical officers to help prevent shock during surgery by focusing on:

• blood transfusions
• pain relief
• resuscitation

The British Army trained 200 nurses in anaesthesia in late 1917. They were posted to the casualty clearing stations in 1918.

Post-war improvements

The terrible effects of modern weapons on the human body were addressed as the war went on.

Men who suffered tremendous disfigurements were helped with the development of:

• maxillofacial reconstructive surgery
• use of prostheses as facial masks and limb replacements

Common conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) , were little understood at the time. The psychological impact of the war was called 'shell shock'. It was known that loud explosions, such as fireworks, could trigger a reaction in some returned service men and women.

Both Navy and merchant navy ships helped the Allies to win the war against Germany.

For the first 6 months of the war, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) fleet operated under one command. After that, its sailors and ships served with different squadrons around the world - as requested by the British Admiralty.

RAN ships and submarines worked with the Grand Fleet and other Allied navies to:

• search for enemy raiders over thousands of miles of ocean
• carry out anti-submarine warfare
• escort convoys of merchant ships carrying supplies and troops
• do long routine patrols, essential to the blockade of Germany and enemy ports
• experiment with the use of aircraft at sea
• sweep for mines in home waters

Australian ships could be found around the world during the war. From South Pacific outposts to the freezing North Atlantic Ocean, the waters off Africa, the Caribbean off Mexico’s west coast, navigating New Guinean rivers, patrolling the Mediterranean and in the waters surrounding Australia.

Ultimately, the British Grand Fleet, which included Australian ships, played a vital role in the defeat of Germany. Not by destroying the Imperial German Navy, but by preventing the German fleet from reaching open waters and making possible the Allied blockade of Germany.

The Allies’ ability to maintain a naval blockade of Germany crippled Germany’s imports and industry. It was a significant factor in the Allied victory.

Naval developments

More powerful battleships could carry the largest guns. The Dreadnought class of battleships gave both sides tremendous destructive capability.

• ammunition with greater firing range
• naval fire control systems in Dreadnought class battleships for added lethality
• steam turbines for a faster more agile battleship

Small torpedo boats were developed to attack and harass much larger naval and merchant navy vessels.

Merchant navy

Both sides used converted merchant vessels to attack or defend shipping.

German commerce raiders were converted civilian ships carrying disguised weapons. Their apparent vulnerability often lured enemy vessels towards them. Armed merchant cruisers were converted civilian ships equipped with guns.

The German raider, Möwe, sank 34 merchant ships. The German raider, Wolf, sank 12 ships and laid sea mines in the Indian and Pacific oceans and the Tasman Sea in 1917. The mines sank three ships in Australian and New Zealand waters.

The heaviest ships engaged in commerce raiding were German light cruisers. They attacked Allied shipping in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Pacific and Indian oceans. The SMS Emden sank Allied vessels before being sunk by HMAS Sydney

The British and French navies also used armed merchant vessels. The British 'Q' ships were used in anti-submarine warfare.

Submarines played a significant role during World War I.

The Allied and German navies used submarines against enemy warships from the outset of the war.

Australia’s submarines, AE1 and AE2, served the British Admiralty from the start of the war. AE1 tragically became the first Allied submarine los in the war. It disappeared with all 35 British and Australian crewmen on 14 September 1914.

Great feats of submariners' bravery were celebrated early in the war.

British Captain Norman Holbrook led the submarine B11 on a high-risk mission through the Dardanelles on 13 December 1914. After a tortuous passage through the narrow waterway, the crew sank the Turkish battleship, Mesudiye, and then escaped.

Australia’s AE2 also traversed the Dardanelles . The crew damaged an Ottoman gunboat before the submarine was attacked by a Turkish ship and scuttled on 30 April 1915. They were all taken prisoner.

Submarine warfare

Submarine warfare was almost polite at first. Submarine crews tried to obey the internationally agreed cruiser rules . For example, a German U-boat would surface and allow the crew to abandon a ship before it was sunk. But this operation was difficult and risky for submarines, and it was soon replaced with more aggressive tactics.

In 1915, the Germans declared unrestricted submarine warfare on Allied and neutral vessels. The policy aimed to isolate Britain and starve its people of resources.

The infamous sinking of the RMS Lusitania by Germany's U-20 was an example of this policy. An angry response from the United States made Germany stop the practice between September 1915 and February 1917.

In response to the Allied blockade of German sea ports, Germany escalated its submarine operations from 20 U-boats in 1914 to 140 by 1917 when the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare was resumed in full force.

Anti-submarine strategies

During the war, Allied forces initiated U-boat countermeasures, such as:

• warship escorts ordered for convoys of merchant ships
• heavily armed Q-ships disguised as merchant ships
• airborne reconnaissance to spot U-boats

The Royal Navy used heavily armed merchant ships called Q-ships to lure U-boats into making a surface attack. When the U-boat approached, the Q-ship would unleash its superior concealed guns. Deceitful tactics included staging an abandonment, with some crew visibly 'leaving' the ship in lifeboats.

The Allies also tried airborne reconnaissance to spot U-boats, with varying success. Spotters in airplanes or tethered balloons were used to this end.

Anti-submarine technology

The Allies developed other anti-submarine measures, including:

• depth charges
• detection equipment
• underwater barriers

Australian ships were at the forefront of early experiments to launch military planes at sea . The idea of operating aircraft from platforms on battle cruisers and light cruisers became reality.

On 1 June 1918, a Sopwith Camel scout (fighter) aircraft flown from the deck of HMAS Sydney intercepted two German reconnaissance aircraft. One was badly damaged and reportedly went into a tail spin.

Tanks and land vehicles

The tank was developed in response to the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. German trenches seemed impenetrable to Allied infantry, with a combination of:

• barbed wire
• overlapping arcs of machine-gun fire and rifle fire from German infantry
• strong-points and concrete reinforced pillboxes on the Hindenburg Line
• rapid counter-attacks by fresh reinforcements

Attacking forces suffered horrendous casualties as soon as they left the protection of their own trenches. Even if an Allied assault met with early success, the costly gains were often held only fleetingly.

Tank design combined:

• all-terrain capability of the tank's caterpillar tracks
• armour to protect it from machine gun and rifle fire

In April 1917, the First Battle of Bullecourt left the Australian troops suspicious about the capability of tanks. But further developments made tanks a potent weapon for the Allies.

Tanks were used with success at:

• Battle of Arras in April and May 1917
• Battle of Hamel in July 1918
• Battle of Amiens in August 1918

Anti-tank tactics

Germany was the first to develop anti-tank warfare to combat the tanks being developed by Allies. On the battlefield, tanks were susceptible to:

• German artillery firing directly over their sights
• anti-tank ditches
• anti-tank 'traps'
• anti-tank rifles (Mauser 13mm)  
• fragmentation
• strong-point

Further reading

• Impact of aircraft in World War I
• Tanks and armoured vehicles
• Armoured cars at Aleppo
• Transport and supply during the First World War
• A fleet of taxis and the Battle of Marne
• The submarine war
• Anti-aircraft warfare
• Anti-submarine warfare
• Armoured vehicles
• Chemical warfare
• Communications
• Inventions and innovations
• Personal protective equipment
• Sound ranging techniques
• Technology and equipment
• World War I 1914-1918

Last updated: 13 April 2021

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The New Technologies of WWI Lesson

Learning objectives

In this lesson, students will gain an understanding of the role of new technologies during World War One. They will develop an awareness of the development of military technology such as the use of tanks, aeroplanes, and chemical weapons (gas). Students will have the opportunity to achieve this through choosing their own method of learning, from reading and research options, as well as the chance to engage in extension activities. This lesson includes a self-marking quiz for students to demonstrate their learning.

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The Silent Warriors of WW1: Submarines in Maritime Warfare

This essay about WW1 submarines explores their pivotal role in maritime warfare. It highlights their technological advancements, such as diesel-electric propulsion and periscopes, which transformed them into stealthy predators of the deep. The essay also discusses the impact of German U-boats and unrestricted submarine warfare on naval tactics and international law. Despite being overshadowed by other aspects of the war, submarines left a lasting legacy, shaping the course of naval warfare and influencing subsequent conflicts through their contributions and challenges to established norms.

How it works

When discussing the annals of World War I, the focus often gravitates towards the thundering clashes of infantry on land or the aerial dogfights that defined the era. However, beneath the waves, a silent yet formidable force was at play – submarines. These underwater vessels, often overshadowed by their surface counterparts, played a pivotal role in shaping the course of the war at sea. In this narrative, we delve into the captivating world of WW1 submarines, exploring their technology, tactics, and lasting impact on naval warfare.

At the outset of World War I, submarines were still in their relative infancy. However, they quickly proved their worth as effective tools of naval warfare. German U-boats, in particular, emerged as a potent threat to Allied shipping lanes, employing daring tactics such as unrestricted submarine warfare. This strategy aimed to starve Britain of vital supplies by sinking merchant vessels without warning, regardless of their neutral status. The devastating effect of these attacks, coupled with the sinking of passenger liners such as the Lusitania, fueled international outrage and significantly escalated the conflict.

One of the defining technological advancements of WW1 submarines was the introduction of diesel-electric propulsion systems. Unlike earlier models reliant on gasoline engines, diesel-electric submarines could operate submerged for extended periods, drastically enhancing their stealth and endurance. Additionally, innovations such as periscopes and torpedo tubes allowed submarines to engage enemy vessels while remaining hidden beneath the surface, transforming them into deadly predators of the deep.

The role of submarines in World War I extended beyond mere military tactics; it fundamentally altered the nature of naval warfare. The concept of unrestricted submarine warfare challenged established norms of maritime conduct and tested the limits of international law. The sinking of civilian vessels sparked debates over the ethics of targeting non-combatants and influenced subsequent treaties and conventions governing naval warfare. Furthermore, the fear instilled by U-boat attacks prompted the development of anti-submarine measures, leading to advancements in sonar technology and convoy escort tactics that would shape naval strategy in future conflicts.

Despite their significant impact, the legacy of WW1 submarines is often overshadowed by other aspects of the war. However, their contributions should not be overlooked. These silent warriors played a pivotal role in shaping the course of maritime history, showcasing the evolving nature of warfare in the modern age. From their humble beginnings to their lasting influence on naval doctrine, submarines of the Great War left an indelible mark on the annals of military history, forever earning their place as integral players in the theater of war.

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The Silent Warriors of WW1: Submarines in Maritime Warfare. (2024, May 21). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-silent-warriors-of-ww1-submarines-in-maritime-warfare/

"The Silent Warriors of WW1: Submarines in Maritime Warfare." PapersOwl.com , 21 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-silent-warriors-of-ww1-submarines-in-maritime-warfare/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Silent Warriors of WW1: Submarines in Maritime Warfare . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-silent-warriors-of-ww1-submarines-in-maritime-warfare/ [Accessed: 22 May. 2024]

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Silent Warriors of WW1: Submarines in Maritime Warfare . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-silent-warriors-of-ww1-submarines-in-maritime-warfare/ [Accessed: 22-May-2024]

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• 21 May 2024

Pay researchers to spot errors in published papers

• Malte Elson 0

Malte Elson is an associate professor of the psychology of digitalization at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

In 2023, Google awarded a total of US$10 million to researchers who found vulnerabilities in its products. Why? Because allowing errors to go undetected could be much costlier. Data breaches could lead to refund claims, reduced customer trust or legal liability.

It’s not just private technology companies that invest in such ‘bug bounty’ programmes. Between 2016 and 2021, the US Department of Defense awarded more than US$650,000 to people who found weaknesses in its networks .

Just as many industries devote hefty funding to incentivizing people to find and report bugs and glitches, so the science community should reward the detection and correction of errors in the scientific literature. In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.

Retractions are increasing, but not enough

That’s why I have joined with meta-scientist Ian Hussey at the University of Bern and psychologist Ruben Arslan at Leipzig University in Germany to pilot a bug-bounty programme for science, funded by the University of Bern. Our project, Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences (see go.nature.com/4bmlvkj ). Our reviewers are paid a base rate of up to 1,000 Swiss francs (around US$1,100) for each paper they check, and a bonus for any errors they find. The bigger the error, the greater the reward — up to a maximum of 2,500 francs.

Authors who let us scrutinize their papers are compensated, too: 250 francs to cover the work needed to prepare files or answer reviewer queries, and a bonus 250 francs if no errors (or only minor ones) are found in their work.

ERROR launched in February and will run for at least four years. So far, we have sent out almost 60 invitations, and 13 sets of authors have agreed to have their papers assessed. One review has been completed , revealing minor errors.

I hope that the project will demonstrate the value of systematic processes to detect errors in published research. I am convinced that such systems are needed, because current checks are insufficient.

Structure peer review to make it more robust

Unpaid peer reviewers are overburdened , and have little incentive to painstakingly examine survey responses, comb through lists of DNA sequences or cell lines, or go through computer code line by line. Mistakes frequently slip through. And researchers have little to gain personally from sifting through published papers looking for errors. There is no financial compensation for highlighting errors , and doing so can see people marked out as troublemakers.

Yet failing to keep abreast of this issue comes at a huge cost. Imagine a single PhD student building their work on an erroneous finding. In Switzerland, their cumulative salary alone will run to six figures. Flawed research that is translated into health care, policymaking or engineering can harm people. And there are opportunity costs — for every grant awarded to a project unknowingly building on errors, another project is not pursued.

Like technology companies, stakeholders in science must realize that making error detection and correction part of the scientific landscape is a sound investment.

Funders, for instance, have a vested interest in ensuring that the money that they distribute as grants is not wasted. Publishers stand to improve their reputations by ensuring that some of their resources are spent on quality management. And, by supporting these endeavours, scientific associations could help to foster a culture in which acknowledgement of errors is considered normal — or even commendable — and not a mark of shame.

How ‘research impact bonds’ could transform science funding

I know that ERROR is a bold experiment. Some researchers might have qualms. I’ve been asked whether reviewers might exaggerate the gravity of errors in pursuit of a large bug bounty, or attempt to smear a colleague they dislike. It’s possible, but hyperbole would be a gamble, given that all reviewer reports are published on our website and are not anonymized. And we guard against exaggeration. A ‘recommender’ from among ERROR’s staff and advisory board members — none of whom receive a bounty — acts as an intermediary, weighing up reviewer findings and author responses before deciding on the payout.

Another fair criticism is that ERROR’s paper selection will be biased. The ERROR team picks papers that are highly cited and checks them only if the authors agree to it. Authors who suspect their work might not withstand scrutiny could be less likely to opt in. But selecting papers at random would introduce a different bias, because we would be able to assess only those for which some minimal amount of data and code was freely available. And we’d spend precious resources checking some low-impact papers that only a few people build research on.

My goal is not to prove that a bug-bounty programme is the best mechanism for correcting errors, or that it is applicable to all science. Rather, I want to start a conversation about the need for dedicated investment in error detection and correction. There are alternatives to bug bounties — for instance, making error detection its own viable career path and hiring full-time scientific staff to check each institute’s papers. Of course, care would be needed to ensure that such schemes benefited researchers around the world equally.

Scholars can’t expect errors to go away by themselves. Science can be self-correcting — but only if we invest in making it so.

Nature 629 , 730 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01465-y

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Request for Papers: Science & Technology - 2024 NEPCA Hybrid Conference

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2024 annual conference this Fall as a hybrid conference from Thursday, October 3 – Saturday, October 5. Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom, and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts.

The Science & Technology area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association encourages paper submissions that explore the relation of science and technology to popular culture and American culture , with science and technology broadly defined. We are particularly interested in putting science, technology, culture, and the humanities in conversation with one another. How are science and technology represented in popular culture? How do we use popular culture to understand science and technology? And how do we use science and technology to understand narratives, art, and culture? What do we gain, what do we risk by approaching science and technology from the lens of the humanities, the humanities from the lens of science, by putting these disciplines in conversation with one another? Some topics may include:

representations of science and technology in print and visual culture digital humanities AI and algorithmic culture cognitive science/cognitive humanities environmental science and ecocriticism internet studies and digital technology technology, race, gender, and sexuality cultural influences on science and technology popularization of science and technology science education and technology in the classroom the celebrity scientist and science fans science and technology in the museum technologies of cultural production

This call will be open until June 15, 2024 . You can submit your proposal at this link . Contact the Science & Technology chairs with any questions:  [email protected]  and  [email protected] .

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Let’s All Take a Deep Breath About China

By Rory Truex

Dr. Truex is an associate professor at Princeton University whose research focuses on Chinese authoritarianism.

The amygdala is a pair of neural clusters near the base of the brain that assesses danger and can help prompt a fight-or-flight response . A prolonged stress response may contribute to anxiety, which can cause people to perceive danger where there is none and obsess about worst-case scenarios.

America’s collective national body is suffering from a chronic case of China anxiety. Nearly anything with the word “Chinese” in front of it now triggers a fear response in our political system, muddling our ability to properly gauge and contextualize threats. This has led the U.S. government and American politicians to pursue policies grounded in repression and exclusion, mirroring the authoritarian system that they seek to combat.

Congress has moved to force the sale of TikTok , the Chinese-owned social media application; some states have sought restrictions on Chinese individuals or entities owning U.S. land and on Chinese researchers working in American universities ; and the federal government has barred certain Chinese technology firms from competing in our markets. These measures all have a national security rationale, and it is not my intention here to weigh the merits of every one. But collectively they are yielding a United States that is fundamentally more closed — and more like China in meaningful ways.

When you are constantly anxious, no threat is too small. In January, Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, introduced legislation that would ban imports of Chinese garlic, which he suggested could be a threat to U.S. national security , citing reports that it is fertilized with human sewage. In 2017, scientists at McGill University wrote there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if it was, it’s common practice to use human waste, known as “biosolids,” as fertilizer in many countries, including the United States.

More recently, Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Elise Stefanik introduced legislation that would bar the Department of Defense from contracting with Tutor.com, a U.S.-based tutoring company, on the grounds that it poses a threat to national security because it was purchased by Primavera Capital Group, an investment firm based in Hong Kong. Their argument is that this could give the Chinese government backdoor access to the tutoring sessions and personal information of American military personnel who use the firm’s service.

The legislation does not mention that Tutor.com’s student data is housed in the United States , that it volunteered for a security review by the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and that it created additional levels of data security protection in coordination with the U.S. government. The bill also does not specify how exactly the Chinese government would get access to Tutor.com’s data or what use it would actually have for information on the tutoring sessions of U.S. military personnel.

Last summer, several Republican lawmakers cried foul over the “Barbie” movie because a world map briefly shown in the background of one scene included a dashed line. They took this as a reference to China’s “nine-dashed line,” which Beijing uses to buttress its disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. According to Representative Jim Banks, this is “endangering our national security.” The map in the movie is clearly fantastical, had only eight dashes and bore no resemblance to China’s line. Even the Philippine government, which has for years been embroiled in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, dismissed the controversy and approved the movie’s domestic release.

Of course, the United States should actively confront President Xi Jinping of China about his repression at home and aggression abroad. As a scholar of China’s political system, I worry about how Mr. Xi has made his country even more authoritarian; about increasing human rights abuses in China, particularly those directed at the Uyghur population in Xinjiang ; about Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan, its increasingly cozy relationship with Russia and its support for the war in Ukraine . America must remain alert to legitimate concerns about well-documented Chinese activities such as espionage and cyberattacks.

But should our policymakers really be focusing on Tutor.com, Chinese garlic or “Barbie”? Or should they concentrate on the more serious threats posed by China’s authoritarian system, or the many other issues that meaningfully affect the day-to-day lives of Americans?

Perhaps the most worrisome effect is that China anxiety is slowly creeping toward discrimination against Chinese Americans, a new “yellow peril.” We’ve already seen how an initiative begun during the Trump administration to target Chinese espionage led to unfair scrutiny of Chinese researchers and even Asian American government employees, leading to the program being terminated in 2022. And we saw how xenophobia during the pandemic triggered threats and attacks against Asian Americans. There also have been numerous reports of law enforcement officials interrogating Chinese students and researchers traveling to and from China on the grounds that they may be agents of the Chinese state. Again, this treatment — being brought in for questioning by the police or government officials — is something foreign scholars experience in China , where it is euphemistically referred to as “being invited for tea.”

Last year, state legislators in Texas proposed a bill that initially sought to prevent Chinese (as well as Iranian, North Korean and Russian) citizens and entities from buying land, homes or other real estate, citing concerns about the security of the food supply. Putting aside the fact that Chinese citizens are not the Chinese government, the actual amount of American farmland owned by Chinese entities is negligible — never exceeding 1 percent of farmland in any given American state as of 2021. The bill ultimately failed , but only after substantial pushback from the Chinese American community.

This China panic, also stirred up by both liberal and conservative U.S. media, may be influencing how average people perceive their fellow Americans of Chinese heritage. Michael Cerny, a fellow China researcher, and I recently surveyed over 2,500 Americans on the question of whether Chinese Americans who were born in the United States should be allowed to serve in the U.S. intelligence community. Roughly 27 percent said Chinese Americans’ access to classified information should be more limited than for other U.S. citizens, and 14 percent said they should be allowed no access at all.

This is overt racism, and while not the majority opinion, it is concerning that so many Americans are blurring the line between the Chinese government and people of Chinese ethnicity, mirroring the language of our politicians.

China is a formidable geopolitical rival. But there is no world in which garlic, “Barbie” or a tutoring site poses meaningful threats to American national security. Labeling them as such reveals a certain lack of seriousness in our policy discourse.

If the United States is to properly compete with China, it’s going to require healthy, balanced policymaking that protects U.S. national security without compromising core American values.

Let’s take a deep breath.

Rory Truex (@rorytruex) is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on Chinese politics and authoritarian rule.

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