Histories of the First World War tend to foreground aircraft, machine guns, artillery systems, and tanks because those technologies survived the conflict and shaped later warfare. Competing ideas that failed, disappeared, or never proved valuable deserve equal attention. Looking backward from the winners can make technological development seem more orderly and inevitable than it was to people in 1914. The warning prepares the discussion of one such uncertain idea: strategic bombing.
Notable Point · 52:04-52:33
Why failed military technologies disappear from history
Looking back from the First World War privileges technologies that survived it and hides the many contemporary ideas that proved unworkable.