How Military Conflict Accelerates Technology.
Almost every appliance and innovation we take for granted in twenty-first-century life has come from technologies developed as a result of war. The list is huge and wide-ranging, touching on inventions and procedures of enormous diversity, from microwave ovens to television and radio; contact lenses to computers; the Internet to open-heart surgery. By considering seven of the most important developments in the history of technology and science, Michael White reveals how so much of the modern technological world has come to us through the silver-lining in the black cloud of war.
How did the car evolve from the chariot? What impelled humans to take to the oceans, to lay railway tracks across continents or to conquer the air and to press on into space? What drove humans to develop language and writing, banking, mass-media and the device of propaganda? How did the lessons from the battlefield transform medicine from witchcraft to twenty-first-century sophistication, and in the process save more lives than the total lost in all the wars of history?
War, White concludes in this entertaining and thought provoking book, is an inevitable consequence of human greed and aggression, a given; but from this negative may come many positives that make the world a far better place for the majority of humanity. War has always been with us and is built into the very fabric of our existence. But with the sufferings and torment to come in the future there will also be great achievements as a result of conflict, and with them will come wonders about which we can only imagine.
Spanning continents and centuries with great narrative flair, 'The Fruits Of War' is a hugely informative history of human innovation, packed with fascinating stories of how we are often at our most creative when being destructive.
