Slashdot Mirror
Innovation's Role Is Sorely Exaggerated
Strudelkugel writes "The New Yorker has a book review describing our common misunderstanding of the value of technology and its ultimate uses. The reviewer notes that the way we think about technology tends to ignore older objects of technology. Quoting: '[W]hen we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often... an innovation — the steam engine, electricity, computers — brings a new age into being. In "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900", by David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls "the innovation-centric account" of technology.'" Money quote: "Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest."
Nah, the V-2 was crap. He's right about that. Strategic bombing was much more damaging and accurate; the V-2 was primarily a terror weapon--just an explosion out of nowhere on a clear day, and then after it blew up, the sound of it's passage would catch up and you could hear it coming in.
Freaked a lot of people out, but didn't do all that much damage. Couldn't be aimed accurately enough to take out a strategic target. There is some debate on how worthwhile strategic bombing was in general, but the V-2 especially was much less worthwhile as an innovation than the late planes and subs that the Germans were capable of producing; subs that could run underwater the whole way, and the first true jet aircraft.
Compared to that, the ability to toss a bomb across the Channel is small potatoes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
One of the things that amazes me is that Robert Heinlein, admittedly like so many others of his time, completely failed to see the implications of the modern computer. His view of the computer was consistently that of a better sliderule. Although, I'm somewhat ignoring his ideas of Computer intelligence here, which arose by the end of the 50's. He was still imagining computers solely as massive installations, existing solely for special purpose uses, or as master control systems. Despite the fact that he was so prescient in so many others ways. And he was in the Navy, one of the first places to see widespread deployment of mechanical computers, although admitted these were not General Purpose and were for the calculation of ballistic trajectories for long range gunfire. He foresaw the profound impact of Computer Aided Design in Drafting, although he imagined it as a special purpose device, rather than an application of a general purpose computer. It wasn't really until the 1980's when visionaries really started to get a grasp on what the computer really meant.
Couldn't have said it better. That is to say that Toohey might have said the same thing. Toohey is the Anti-Hero of the Ayn Rand novel 'The Fountainhead', and had such disdain for the common man that he would say such things to get people to decide to actually abandon the time saving or life improving devices they already had - since they had at some time used the thing that had been superceded. Like saying that because I had been to the mall sometime since I had first shopped at amazon.com that I must have decided that the mall was better than amazon, and as such I should abandon using Amazon forever. In My Humble Opinion Toohey would make such an argument just to make my life more difficult. The author of tfa seems remarkable similar. I suggest critical reading, and caution.
'Only a Barbarian believes that his tribes customs are the laws of nature'
" the tanks of WWI weren't the tanks of WWII"
I presume you're thinking of "lozenge" tanks such as the British Mk. 4 with side-mounted guns. These were specifically designed to cross trenches and large shell craters, and are still the finest vehicles ever made for that particular role, being capable of traversing terrain and climbing vertical obstacles that would immobilise a modern tank, despite having 100 HP engines that gave them a power to weight ratio of only 3 HP/ton. Early designs had a turret, but this was discarded in production models for the side-mounted gunnery because it allowed "female" (machine-gun carrying) tanks to fire downwards into a trench while crossing it, while providing "male" (cannon equipped) variants to engage two separate targets simultaneously.
Not all WW1 tanks were lozenges, and some looked quite a bit like early WWII designs, e.g. the Renault FT-17 with its rotating turret and tracks that lie under its body instead of going over the top. Over 4700 of these were built, and the US army bought a fair number of them -- about 2,500 were still in service in France in 1940, and actually scored several kills against German tanks (which were mostly lightly armoured Pzkfw 1 & 2 types in 1940).
"In WWI the role of the tank was basically to provide light fire support, and a slow moving wall for soldiers to walk behind while it crossed the land between the trenches."
This is just plain wrong. British tanks at The Somme and Cambrai were used to storm enemy lines, in both cases with considerable success, although only 49 were used a The Somme itself. At Cambrai, an attack planned by the visionary J.F.C. Fuller smashed through the previously impenetrable Hindenburg Line to a depth of five miles, the biggest single territory gain in the entire land war. Fuller's plan was in most respects classic Blitzkrieg, using mixed tank and infantry formations with air and artillery support (combined arms) that simply bypassed heavily contested positions, the idea being that the could later be mopped up after the fast-moving front had cut their supply lines. Unfortunately for Fuller, the British in typical fashion completely failed to exploit the opening that he'd made.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
We have known for a very long time that a sphere contains the most volume with the least area and therefore material.
The geodesic dome was a bear to construct and did indeed leak most of the time. Not all of Fuller's experiments were completely successful. On the other hand, he was one of the first to point out that we had to start thinking about conserving resources. He also pointed out that as we acquire knowledge, we can make do with less and less material. Innovation, in that light, is crucial to human survival.
As part of the construction of the dome, Fuller relied on separating tension and compression members. Tension members can be quite thin because they don't have to resist flexing. As a wild assed guess, I would say that Fuller's dome probably weighed half what a more conventionally constructed dome would weigh.
"However, despite that early use in WWI, it was not until WWII, and Germany's use of blitzkrieg tactics, that the tank would radically revolutionize warfare."
Heinz Guderian, the father of Blitzkrieg, credited J.F.C. Fuller and Liddel Hart as the originators of the theories behind it. Fuller had already used Blitzkrieg-like tactics at the Battle Of Cambrai in 1917, and the British pursuit of retreating Germans during late 1918 began to look very much like it indeed, with rapidly advancing tanks being supported by troops in a growing number of armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft, all of which the Germans fought desperate rear-guard actions to stop. The war ended before Fuller's 1919 plan for a fully mechanised army could be realised, but his post-war writings about it and the strategic and tactical advantages it could offer would ironically end up inspiring a new generation of German theorists, while both the British and French military authorities decided to build armies that were beautifully suited to fighting a static trench war. As is often the case in military history, the losing side ends up learning a whole lot more from the experience than the winners, who have a propensity to use the last war as a basis for planning the next one.
The tactics of Blitzkrieg were thus not only already in place during WW1, but actively being used, albeit in a piecemeal fashion by a few visionaries who received little support (and in some cases outright opposition) from people higher up the command ladder. Hitler acknowledge this by inviting Fuller to his birthday party in 1939, where he said "How do you like your children?" while they both watched Germany's mechanised army and airforce parading past them.
"That time was necessary for military theory to catch up to the tank's true implications for warfare"
It was actually more a case of technology having made Blitzkrieg practical in a way that it hadn't been during WW1. Technology in 1918 was more or less up to the job of attacking fixed positions from other fixed positions that were a few miles away, but tanks which can only move at walking pace, have a 1 in three chance of breaking down every five miles, and eat so much fuel that they can only carry enough to go 20 miles wouldn't have been very useful for invading another country, and the aircraft of the time were also severely limited by their engines in speed, range, ceiling, and the amount of ordnance they could carry.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
If the British had repeated the air raid which destroyed Hamburg several more times (e.g. on Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, etc.), the war might have ended sooner.
(7) Albert Speer discussed the bombing of Hamburg when he was interrogated in July 1945.
We were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production. It was I who first verbally reported to the Fuehrer at that time that a continuation of these attacks might bring about a rapid end to the war."
link
It is likely that the a-bomb was to sole cause of the decision by Japan to surrender. Of course, the general situation in 1945 played a huge role but the Japanese military officials were prepared to use the entire Japanese population to defeat the Allies. Other factors considered by some to be important:
1. Russian attacks - a great deal of the news of the Russian success arrived in Tokyo after they agreed to surrender and the Japanese were prepared to fight the Russians. The Japanese military wanted a negotiated peace which left them in power.
2. Lack of fuel and supplies - The Japanese military was prepared to fight on. They had 10,000 planes (5000+ for kamikaze attacks on shipping, landing sites, etc. and 5000 for normal activity), multiple (thousands) fast boats for kamikaze attacks on shipping, at least a million men ready to defend the south coast of Japan, etc.
Eventually a naval blockade, bombing attacks on infrastructure, etc. over several years might have led to the defeat of Japan. Alternatively attacks which yielded huge numbers of American casualties (well over 2,000,000 if the entire country had to be taken) could have ended the war in a year or two. The Japanese considered it honorable to fight for their country. When the A-bomb removed their ability to fight against soldiers, they agreed to surrender because there was no point to fighting on and it was not honorable to die pointlessly with no ability to hurt the enemy.