Today, a little exercise in blowing smoke. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
I get one comment over and
over. It is that war stimulates inventions, which
then serve us in peacetime. Don't we need war so
we'll keep inventing? Didn't the atom bomb give us
nuclear power? Didn't war give us the jet plane
which now takes us from Houston to Paris? The truth
is: war produces very little new technology. It is
even an enemy of invention.
Soon after WW-I, Lisa Meitner began bombarding
heavy elements with fast neutrons. In 1939, she
wrote a paper describing the enormous release of
energy when uranium fissions into barium. She
expressed hope for a "promised land of atomic
energy." The result was a furious attempt, on both
sides, to build an a-bomb.
But the Jewish/German Meitner refused to have
anything to do with anyone's bombs. And we didn't
return to atomic power -- to her original intention
-- until after the war.
Same story with the jet plane: the first jet flew
in 1939, before WW-II. The first jets in combat
were German designs that'd also been on the drawing
boards before the war.
But writer Alexander Roca gives us one invention,
conceived in war, which really did serve in peace.
It began when chemical warfare people went to
inventor Thomas Shelton and asked him to invent a
way to throw poison gas from a distance. You
obviously can't squirt poison gas from a nozzle.
It'll diffuse within a few feet and harm the person
holding the nozzle.
Shelton was famous for his knowledge of vortex
shedding in airplane design. So he sat down and
invented a large bell-shaped chamber. When he
exploded a shotgun shell in one end, it burped a
gigantic smoke-ring out of the other. A smoke-ring
is a vortex of spinning gas that holds together
while it propels itself forward. This vortex was 18
inches across, and it traveled 150 feet. We're told
that the gadget made "an eerie howling sound."
From there, he went on to interest the Air Corps in
a huge version that would fire vortices large
enough to knock enemy airplanes out of the sky.
But, in the end, the war effort went -- as it
usually does -- in safer and more conventional
Shelton's vortex machine came to nothing. So, after
the war, he turned it into a toy gun that knocked
targets over with an air vortex. He called it the
"Flash Gordon Air Ray Gun." Popular
Mechanics named it Toy of the Year in 1949.
The Lion Match Company invented a pellet that
generated smoke for the vortices.
So, I cannot categorically claim that no civilian
technology comes out of war. Now and then it does.
But remember: when people try to claim that war is
the mother of invention, they are, by and large,
just -- blowing smoke.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds