During my pursuit of a research process for my History research course, I stumbled across some interesting articles concerning Nazi superweapons during the Second World War. I'm talking about ridiculously large tanks, super submarines, and attachments to your semiautomatic rifle that let you shoot around corners. I'm serious, people.
http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/news/images/03-2003/03-03-2003-stg2.jpg
In any event, war has played an important role in the evolution of technology. An awful lot of peaceable inventions and tech in general has come from humans thinking of better ways to wipe out other humans. For example, look at radar. Radar was developed as a tool to warn of incoming enemy bombers. Now we use it to manage the massive commercial airline industry and cut travel times dramatically without planes flying into one another during the middle of the night. Everything that came out of the Space Race - microwaves, dehydrated food, silicon chips, smaller and more affordable computers - came about simply because we were obsessed with beating the Russkies into space. We thought that was the last great frontier, and damned if the Reds were going to use it against us. It was certainly a war-time effort.
This may be why I find the late 19th century and early 20th century so fascinating in terms of technology. Those were relatively peaceful years, considering what had come before and what had yet to come. With no mass-murder on the mind, what drove those inventors to create? What gave them the idea to run electricity through a particular elemental metal? Why on earth would man want to fly? Who the hell invented the parachute, and who DARED to test it?
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They invented things because, as agriculturally fueled civilizations became rather posh, fewer people got to kill things. Citizens got bored and were willing to jump off of tall things with oversized umbrellas. Worst case scenario, they died (and got to kill something finally) and were no longer bored to tears. Unfortunately for one, they invented the parachute and survived. He was pissed, and out of spite, went on to invent just about everything else. Then Dan Brown wrote a shitty book that had nothing to do with him. Such is life.
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