It was not used extensively during the Civil War. Both recognized the importance of armor-cladding their ships. The first fight between iron clad ships of war, in Hampton Roads, March 9, , in which the Monitor whipped the Merrimac and the whole school of Confederate steamers.
Naval mines and torpedoes Naval mines were developed by the Confederates in the hopes of counteracting the Union's blockades of Southern ports. Mines and later, torpedoes, were very effective sinking 40 Union ships.
The success of these mines led to the creation of land mines and grenades that would be used in later wars. All rights reserved. History Detectives. Civil War Innovations Submarines were not the only innovation to come out of the Civil War, which some call the first "modern" war.
History Detectives has highlighted a few of the more important developments. These not only changed the course of the Civil War, but also the face of warfare to this day. Candles were wasted in the evenings of summer because the sun set before human beings went to bed, he said, and sunshine was wasted at the beginning of the day because the sun rose while they still slept.
Similar proposals were made in New Zealand in and in the UK in , but without concrete results. It was WW1 that secured the change. Faced with acute shortages of coal, the German authorities decreed that on 30 April , the clocks should move forward from to midnight, so giving an extra hour of daylight in the evenings. What started in Germany as a means to save coal for heating and light quickly spread to other countries.
Britain began three weeks later on 21 May Other European countries followed. On 19 March , the US Congress established several time zones and made daylight saving time official from 31 March for the remainder of WW1. Once the war was over, Daylight Saving Time was abandoned - but the idea had been planted and it eventually returned. Tea bags. The tea bag was not invented to solve some wartime problem.
By common consent, it was an American tea merchant who, in , started sending tea in small bags to his customers. They, whether by accident or design, dropped the bags in water and the rest is history.
So the industry says. But a German company, Teekanne, did copy the idea in the war, and developed it, supplying troops with tea in similar cotton bags. They called them "tea bombs". The wristwatch. It is not true that wristwatches were invented specifically for World War One - but it is true that their use by men took off dramatically.
After the war, they were the usual way to tell the time. But until the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, men who needed to know the time and who had the money to afford a watch, kept it in their pocket on a chain.
Women, for some reason, were the trailblazers - Elizabeth I had a small clock she could strap to her arm. But as timing in war became more important - so that artillery barrages, for example, could be synchronised - manufacturers developed watches which kept both hands free in the heat of battle. Wristwatches, in other words. Aviators also needed both hands free, so they too had to throw the old pocket watch overboard. Mappin and Webb had developed a watch with the hole and handles for a strap for the Boer War and then boasted of how it had been useful at the Battle of Omdurman.
But it was WW1 which really established the market. In particular, the "creeping barrage" meant that timing was everything. This was an interaction between artillery firing just ahead of infantry. Clearly, getting it wrong would be fatal for your own side. People fight and kill for personal reasons, but homicide is not war. War is social, with groups organized to kill people from other groups. Today controversy over the historical roots of warfare revolves around two polar positions.
In one, war is an evolved propensity to eliminate any potential competitors. In this scenario, humans all the way back to our common ancestors with chimpanzees have always made war. The other position holds that armed conflict has only emerged over recent millennia, as changing social conditions provided the motivation and organization to collectively kill.
The two sides separate into what the late anthropologist Keith Otterbein called hawks and doves. This debate also ties into the question of whether instinctive, warlike tendencies can be detected in chimpanzees [ see sidebar below ]. If war expresses an inborn tendency, then we should expect to find evidence of war in small-scale societies throughout the prehistoric record.
The hawks claim that we have indeed found such evidence. LeBlanc and his co-author Katherine E. With casualties of that magnitude, evolutionary psychologists argue, war has served as a mechanism of natural selection in which the fittest prevail to acquire both mates and resources.
This perspective has achieved broad influence. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote that the roots of recent wars and genocide go back for tens or hundreds of thousands of years among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, even to our shared ancestor with chimpanzees. Bradley Thayer, a leading scholar of international relations, argues that evolutionary theory explains why the instinctual tendency to protect one's tribe morphed over time into group inclinations toward xenophobia and ethnocentrism in international relations.
If wars are natural eruptions of instinctive hate, why look for other answers? If human nature leans toward collective killing of outsiders, how long can we avoid it? The anthropologists and archaeologists in the dove camp challenge this view. Humans, they argue, have an obvious capacity to engage in warfare, but their brains are not hardwired to identify and kill outsiders involved in collective conflicts.
Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture.
Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare. In the search for the origins of war, archaeologists look for four kinds of evidence.
The artwork on cave walls is exhibit one. Paleolithic cave paintings from Grottes de Cougnac, Pech Merle and Cosquer in France dating back approximately 25, years show what some scholars perceive to be spears penetrating people, suggesting that people were waging war as early as the late Paleolithic period. But this interpretation is contested. Other scientists point out that some of the incomplete figures in those cave paintings have tails, and they argue that the bent or wavy lines that intersect with them more likely represent forces of shamanic power, not spears.
In contrast, wall paintings on the eastern Iberian Peninsula, probably made by settled agriculturalists thousands of years later, clearly show battles and executions. Weapons are also evidence of war, but these artifacts may not be what they seem. I used to accept maces as representing proof of war, until I learned more about Near Eastern stone maces.
Most have holes for handles so narrow they could not survive one blow in battle. Maces also symbolize authority, and established rule can provide a way to resolve conflict without resorting to war. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to go to war without traditional weapons: in southern Germany around B. Beyond art and weapons, archaeologists look to settlement remains for clues. People who fear attack usually take precautions.
In the archaeological record, we sometimes see people who lived in scattered homes on low flatlands shifted to nucleated defendable villages. Villages across Neolithic Europe were surrounded by mounded enclosures. But not all these enclosures seem designed for defense. Some may mark off distinct social groups. Skeletal remains would seem ideal for determining when war began, but even these require careful assessment. Only one of three or four projectile wounds leaves a mark on bone. Shaped points made of stone or bone buried with a corpse are sometimes ceremonial, sometimes the cause of death.
Unhealed wounds to a single buried corpse could be the result of an accident, an execution or a homicide. Field commanders issued orders to rapidly concentrate forces to confront Union advances—a tactic that led to victory in the First Battle of Bull Run, in Arguably the most revolutionary aspect of the device was how it transformed the relationship between the executive branch and the military.
Before, important battlefield decisions were left to the discretion of field generals. Now, however, the president could fully exercise his prerogative as commander in chief. The inspiration for this armored behemoth was the American tractor. Or, more specifically, the caterpillar tractor invented in by Benjamin Holt. Later, Holt sought to sell his invention to government agencies in the United States and Europe as a reliable means for transporting artillery and supplies to the front lines during wartime.
One person who saw the tractor in action was a friend of Col. Swinton of the Engineering Corps of the British Army. Camera: Aerial photographic reconnaissance came of age in World War I, thanks to higher-flying planes and better cameras.
Initially, planes were deployed to help target artillery fire more accurately. The opposing armies took measures to thwart photographic reconnaissance. Potential ground targets were disguised with painted camouflage patterns. The French, naturalment , enlisted the help of Cubist artists.
Of course, the most effective countermeasure was to mount guns on planes and shoot down the observation aircraft. To provide protection, fighter planes escorted reconnaissance craft on their missions. Chlorine: Historians generally agree that the first instance of modern chemical warfare occurred on April 22, —when German soldiers opened 5, canisters of poisonous chlorine gas on the battlefield at Ypres, Belgium. British records indicate there were 7, casualties, of which were lethal.
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