Tag: Technology
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A World Ruled From the Air
Three 1920 predictions by the British Air Ministry’s Cuthbert Hicks about the future speed, carrying capacity, and military influence of aircraft — two predictions proved wild underestimates, while a third proved a wild overestimate. At the moment the fastest officially recognized speed attained by aircraft is one hundred and eighty-seven miles an hour — three miles…
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A Tenderwing in the High Air
This 1919 article about the novelty of air travel made a few projections. “Tenderwing” didn’t become a common word as predicted, but the practice of photographing airplane passengers did disappear as predicted. A tenderfoot is defined as one who is not yet hardened to the life of the plains, so a person who is not…
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Business Before Pleasure on the Wire
In 1919, NYC had 3+ million telephone calls daily — more than the system could handle. “The strain at times is tremendous, and we hear many complaints of the inadequacy of the service, the slowness of operators in responding, and the tardiness of making connections.” In an era where calls required an operator to connect the…
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Peace Taking Over War’s Inventions
Several months after World War I ended, technological innovations produced for the conflict were being repurposed for peacetime uses. Take this sound pinpointer, used to calculate where distant enemy weapons were located. This same invention could also be used for bridges. One thing about bridges that has puzzled engineers up to this time is some…
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Putting the Airplane to Peacetime Uses
The development of the airplane, first invented in 1903, truly took off as a result of World War I. In January 1919, after the war, what should be the purpose of airplanes? This prediction largely ended up coming true: Some of the practical men even go so far as to say that a perfectly developed…
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Is An Air Ministry Necessary?
America is debating whether to create a new military branch: the Space Force. 100 years ago to the week, America debated whether to create the air force — or, as they called it then, an “Air Ministry.” A key difference between then and now was the stance of the president. While Donald Trump supports the…
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3,000 Planes a Month
America is the leader in aviation technology today, and has been for decades. But that was not the case in 1918, even though the Wright Brothers who hailed from Ohio had invented the airplane only a few years before. As this May 1918 article explained, the U.S. had some major catching up to do upon entering…
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World’s Scientists in Life-and-Death Race
“These pictures are six months old,” says a quote from an army officer to begin this 1918 article, “so the devices they show are, of course, perfectly obsolete.” World War I sparked a massive technological boom, a silver lining to an otherwise horrific blemish on humanity’s history. That would come to be true of World…
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Orville Wright Says 10,000 Airplanes Would End the War Within Ten Weeks
Less than 14 years after Orville Wright became the first human being to ever take flight in an airplane, he had lived to see his invention was being used in World War I, the first major war to utilize the technology en masse. (His brother and co-inventor Wilbur Wright had passed away in 1912.) In…
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Marconi on the War Needs and Ideals of Italy
Guglielmo Marconi — in the above article given the Americanized first name William — invented the radio in 1895. Although it took a bit more time for the technology to become widespread and used en masse by the public, it had already earned him the Nobel Prize by 1909 and household name recognition by this…
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