Technology and Society Timeline

Theme Five: Military Conflict and Technology

Henry Shrapnel (1761
Adopted by the British
-1842) was a British
Army in 1803.
Army officer and
Until the end of World
inventor, most famously,
War I the shells were still
of the "shrapnel shell":
being manufactured
a hollow cannon ball
according to his original
filled with shot which
principles.
burst in mid-air.

Industrial Revolution 1800 - 1840

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of conflicts
declared against Napoleon's French Empire from 1803
to 1815.
As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French
Revolution of 1789, they revolutionized European
armies and played out on an unprecedented scale,
mainly due to the application of modern mass
conscription.
French power rose quickly, conquering most of Europe,
but collapsed rapidly after France's disastrous
invasion of Russia in 1812.

Industrial Revolution 1800 - 1840

 1839 - 1842/1856 -1860 The Opium Wars
• Opium was smuggled by merchants from British India into
China in defiance of Chinese prohibition laws.

• China was defeated in both wars leaving its government

having to tolerate the opium trade.

• Britain forced the Chinese government into signing the Treaty

of Nanking and the Treaty of Tientsin, also known as the
Unequal Treaties, which included provisions for
the opening of additional ports to
unrestricted foreign trade,
for fixed tariffs;
and for the cession of Hong Kong to Britain.

Mechanization 1840 - 1860

Toussaint-Henry-
Joseph Fafchamps was
a Belgian Army The Fafschamps gun was
Captain. In 1851 he a manually-fired 50-barrels
developed what is volley gun using needle fire
sometimes considered and paper cartridges.
the first machine gun
in history, 10 years
before the advent of the
Gatling gun.

Mechanization 1840 - 1860

1853-56: The Crimean War was a conflict fought
between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the
French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman
Empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Duchy of
Nassau.
The war was part of a long-running contest
between the major European powers for influence
over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire.

Mechanization 1840 - 1860

The Crimean War is sometimes considered to be one of the first
"modern" wars as it "introduced technical changes which affected
the future course of warfare," including the first tactical use of
railways and the telegraph.

Left: Valley of the shadow of death

It is also famous for the work of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole,
who pioneered modern nursing practices while caring for wounded British
soldiers.

Nightingale’s social reforms included improving healthcare for all sections

of British society, advocating better hunger relief in India, helping to
abolish prostitution laws that were harsh for women, and expanding
the acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.
It is also famous for the work of Florence Nightingale and Mary
Seacole, who pioneered modern nursing practices while caring for
wounded British soldiers.

Seacole was a British-Jamaican business woman and nurse who set

up the "British Hotel" behind the lines during the Crimean War.
 The causes of the Franco-Prussian War are
deeply rooted in the events surrounding the
balance of power in Europe after the Napoleonic
Wars.
Otto von Bismarck was keen to bring about
the war, noting in his book "I knew that a
Franco-Prussian War must take place before a
united Germany was formed."

Concerns 1860 - 1880

Fenian Ram is a submarine designed by John
Philip Holland for use by the Fenian Brotherhood,
American counterpart to the Irish Republican
Brotherhood, against the British.
The Ram's construction and launching in 1881 by
the Delamater Iron Company in New York was
funded by the Fenians' Skirmishing Fund.
Fenian Ram's design was partly modelled on the
Whitehead torpedo (1875).

Concerns 1860 - 1880

 Hiram Stevens Maxim produces the first fully automatic
machine gun: the Maxim gun.
• The mechanism of the Maxim gun used the energy from
the recoil force to eject each spent cartridge and
insert the next one.
• This made it vastly more efficient and less labour intensive
than previous rapid-firing guns, such as the Gatling,
Gardner, or Nordenfelt guns.
• Used in the Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese
War.

Steel/Electricity 1880 - 1900


The Second Boer War
(1899–1902) ended with the
conversion of the Boer
republics into British
colonies.
The bloodshed was due to
two main factors:
Steel/Electricity 1880 - 1900
• First, British soldiers were
physically unprepared for the
environment and poorly trained
for the tactical conditions they
faced.
• Second, the policies of
"scorched earth" and civilian
internment (adopted by the
British in response to the Boer
guerrilla campaign) ravaged the
civilian populations in the
Transvaal and the Orange Free
State.
The Boxer Rebellion, also called The Boxer
Uprising was a nationalist movement by the
"Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists" in
China between 1898 and 1901, opposing
Western imperialism and Christianity:
• opium traders,
• political invasion,
• economic manipulation,
• missionary evangelism,
• "unequal treaties"

Steel/Electricity 1880 - 1900

 Casimir Zeglen was a Catholic priest in Chicago
and designer of the first bullet-proof vest
without metal plates.
In his early 20s he began experimenting with the
cloth, using steel shavings, moss, hair, etc. but
nothing stood the test until he made use of silk.
In his mid 30s he discovered a way to weave the
silk, to enable it to capture the bullet, while visiting
weaving mills in Vienna, Austria, and Aachen,
Germany.

Mobility 1900 - 1920

 The Japanese military
attained victory over the
The Russo-Japanese War
Russian forces.
was a conflict that grew out
The embarrassing string of
of the rival imperial
defeats inflamed the
ambitions of the Russian
Russian people's
Empire and Japanese
dissatisfaction with their
Empire over Manchuria and
inefficient and corrupt Tsarist
Korea.
government, and proved a
The Russians sought a
major cause of the
warm water port.
Russian Revolution of
1905.

Mobility 1900 - 1920

"Victory in this war will belong to the belligerent
who is the first to put a cannon on a vehicle
capable of moving on all kinds of terrain"

—Colonel Jean Baptiste Estienne,

24 August 1914.

Mobility 1900 - 1920

 The Beer Hall Putsch (also known as the
Munich Putsch but, in German, referred to as
the Hitlerputsch or the Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch)
was a failed attempt at revolution that occurred
between the evening of 8 November and the
early afternoon of 9 November 1923, when Nazi
Party leader Adolf Hitler, ‘Generalquartiermeister’
Erich Ludendorff, and other heads of the
Kampfbund unsuccessfully tried to seize power
in Munich, Bavaria and Germany. Putsch is the
German word for a military coup d'état.

Rationalization 1920 - 1940


Kristallnacht, or the
Night of Broken Glass,
was a pogrom or
series of attacks
against Jews
throughout Nazi
Germany and parts of
Austria on November
9-10, 1938.
Rationalization 1920 - 1940
Jewish homes were
ransacked, as were
shops, towns and
villages, as SA
stormtroopers and
civilians destroyed
buildings with
sledgehammers, leaving
the streets covered in
pieces of smashed
windows.
1939: The Invasion of Poland was an
invasion of Poland by Germany.
The invasion began on 1 September 1939, one
week after the signing of the Molotov–
Ribbentrop Pact, and ended 6 October 1939
with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing
and annexing the whole of Poland.

Rationalization 1920 - 1940

 During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the
United States conducted two atomic bombings
against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
Japan, the first on August 6, 1945 and the second
on August 9, 1945.
These two events are the only active deployments
of nuclear weapons in war to date.

Automation 1940 - 1960

 The U.S. government viewed
involvement in the war as a way
The Vietnam War was to prevent a communist takeover
a Cold War military of South Vietnam and part of
conflict that occurred in their wider strategy of
Vietnam, Laos, and containment.
The North Vietnamese
Cambodia from government viewed the war as a
November 1, 1955 to colonial war, fought initially
the fall of Saigon on against France, backed by the
April 30, 1975. U.S., and later against South
Vietnam, which it regarded as a
U.S. puppet state.

Automation 1940 - 1960

On February 17, 2011, the Toronto Star revealed that Agent Orange
was employed to clear extensive plots of Crown land in Northern
Ontario.

• The Toronto Star reported that, "records from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
show forestry workers, often students and junior rangers, spent weeks at a
time as human markers holding red, helium-filled balloons on fishing lines while
low-flying planes sprayed toxic herbicides including an infamous chemical
mixture known as Agent Orange on the brush and the boys below."

• In response to the Toronto Star article, the Ontario provincial government

launched a probe into the use of Agent Orange.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a
CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba,
with support and encouragement from the US government, in
an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel
Castro.

The conflict was launched in April 1961, less than three

months after John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency in the
United States.
The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern
Bloc nations, defeated the invading combatants within
three days.

Brief video that followed was Che Guevara,

not Fidel Castro.

Automation 1940 - 1960

 The Soviet Union begins developing a super-
cavitating torpedo in the 1960s. By exploiting
the way water forms bubbles around fast-
moving objects the Shkval can travel at ~500
kilometres an hour. It was completed in the
early 1990s.

Super-cavitation is the use of cavitation

effects to create a large bubble of gas
inside a liquid. The cavity (the bubble)
reduces the drag on the object.

Communication 1960 - 1980

The Cuban Missile Crisis
was a confrontation among
the Soviet Union, Cuba and
the United States in October It marks the first documented
1962, during the Cold War.
instance of the threat of
Mutually Assured
The Cuban and Soviet
Destruction (MAD) being
governments began to build
discussed as a determining
bases in Cuba for a number
factor in a major international
of medium-range and
arms agreement.
intermediate-range ballistic
nuclear missiles with the
ability to strike most of the
continental United States.

Communication 1960 - 1980

Post-colonial organizations
Due to a common history and culture, former
colonial powers created institutions which more
loosely associated their former colonies.

Membership is voluntary, and in some cases can

be revoked if a member state loses some
objective criteria (usually a requirement for
democratic governance).

Communication 1960 - 1980

 Troops from the United
States, alongside the
The 2003 invasion of
United Kingdom, and
Iraq (March 20 – May 1,
smaller contingents from
2003), was the start of
Australia and Poland
the conflict known as
invaded Iraq and toppled
the Iraq War.
the regime of Saddam
Hussein.

Globalization 1980 - present

In 2000, former U.S. Naval intelligence officer
Edmond Pope (Captain, USN, retired) was
held, tried, and convicted of espionage
related to information he obtained about
the Shkval weapon system.
Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned
Pope in December 2000, allegedly on
humanitarian grounds because he had bone
cancer.

Globalization 1980 - present

Thank you