Inventions that owe their success to the WWI era

[Jimbuna]

From sanitary towels to daylight saving, tea bags and wristwatches...the top ten here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26935867

[GoldenRivet]

I recall some years ago reading or listening to something which indicated that all technology owes itself to war... except in peace time, where all technology owes itself to the sex/porn industry.

The argument was for the development of canned goods, aviation technology, communications technology and the like in time of war.

In time of peace however, it was all about developing technologies toward photographing, filming, and viewing porn in such ways as to retain the utmost in home privacy (VHS tapes, DVDs, digital cameras, Polaroid cameras, MPEG, JPEG, GIF, etc) LOL

the arguments were very convincing

and it is true that in trying our best to kill one another various civilian fields are technologically advanced a level or two.

personally i think our efforts would be better used on some other competitive endeavor like racing to mars, or colonizing the moon as opposed to conquest of our fellow man and his resources. Think of what would happen to technology in 10 years if we were forced to adapt to having to sustain a livable environment on another planet

[Aktungbby]

Amazing! And it hits home! I helped put the wife through law school delivering truck loads of all the Huggies and Kotex Kimberly-Clark makes-62 years later!..My dad avoided being called up for Korea, after 5 years of WWII, as his engineering skills and employment at National Tea Company were deemed more important to the war effort,(c-rations) than his skills as an aircraft engineer/navigator...on out-of-date B29's- by then pure MIG fodder! I'm probably here as a result! And of course, I collect wrist-watches as my principle hobby. Of particular interest on the WWI wristwatch also was the 'hacking' mechanism to stop the watch; SIMPLE but necessary!(VON C. ON WAR?!) every subaltern could then reset to a correct time (every mechanical watch runs a little differently) so that all would 'go over the top' on schedule as well as stay ahead of the 'creeping' barrage. ""The idea that time matters to warfare appears in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war.” Time’s importance calls for critical inquiry, but time is often treated as if it were a natural phenomenon with an essential nature, shaping human action and thought. Yet our ideas about time are a product of social life, Émile Durkheim and others have argued. Time is of course not produced by clocks, which simply represent an understanding of time. Instead, ideas about time are generated by human beings working in specific historical and cultural contexts. Just as clock time is based on a set of ideas produced not by clocks but by the people who use them, wartime is also a set of ideas derived from social life, not from anything inevitable about war itself.
Yet war seems to structure time, as does the clock. Stephen Kern argues that World War I displaced a multiplicity of “private times,” and imposed “homogenous time,” through an “imposing coordination of all activity according to a single public time.” During World War I, soldiers synchronized their watches before heading into combat. In Eric J. Leed’s description of trench warfare, war instead disrupted time’s usual order. Battle became an extended present, as considerations of past and future were suspended by the violence of the moment. “The roar­ing chaos of the barrage effected a kind of hypnotic condition that shattered any rational pattern of cause and effect,” so that time had no sequence. And so one meaning of “wartime” is the idea that battle suspends time itself."" Simply put: It wouldn't do to stride bravely into 'no mans land' while the Fusilier company on your flank was still having it's A.M. tea...thinking it had 5 minutes more. Although at the Somme that might have passed for military genius! WWI Waltham with shell-proofing-and a similarly protected Jaeger-LeCoultre...'what will I be getting myself into today?' would have passed through my (rational?) mind strapping either of these BBY'S on!?

[nikimcbee]

I recall some years ago reading or listening to something which indicated that all technology owes itself to war... except in peace time, where all technology owes itself to the sex/porn industry.

See VCR vs Betamax.

[TarJak]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

I recall some years ago reading or listening to something which indicated that all technology owes itself to war... except in peace time, where all technology owes itself to the sex/porn industry.

The argument was for the development of canned goods, aviation technology, communications technology and the like in time of war.

In time of peace however, it was all about developing technologies toward photographing, filming, and viewing porn in such ways as to retain the utmost in home privacy (VHS tapes, DVDs, digital cameras, Polaroid cameras, MPEG, JPEG, GIF, etc) LOL

the arguments were very convincing

and it is true that in trying our best to kill one another various civilian fields are technologically advanced a level or two.

personally i think our efforts would be better used on some other competitive endeavor like racing to mars, or colonizing the moon as opposed to conquest of our fellow man and his resources. Think of what would happen to technology in 10 years if we were forced to adapt to having to sustain a livable environment on another planet

You touch on a good point that the space race gave us quite a few inventions as well.

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/w...nasa.everyday/

[Wolferz]

If "Necessity" is the mother of invention then War is certainly the father.

[banryu79]

If you place the "space race" in the context of the cold war... well, you see the point.