ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS INDUSTRIES. The first significant application of controlled electricity in Cleveland was telegraphy, which made its appearance in the city in 1847 on the premises of the Lake Erie Telegraph Co. Fire-alarm boxes were the second useful manifestation of the “new” power in the city, and by 1865 there were 24 of them. The telephone came in 1877. Besides these communications uses, the other main areas of electric-industrial progress in the latter part of the 19th century were lighting, traction, and industrial motors, and in these areas as well, Cleveland’s technical-entrepreneurial talent was quick to perceive opportunities and act on them.

In the lighting field, CHARLES F. BRUSH was the most prominent innovator and entrepreneur of the period. His major contribution was the practical development and commercial exploitation of the arc light. Although the latter was invented in England in 1808, Brush devised its practical application by developing an improved dynamo to provide a steady current, and by making design changes in the arc fixture itself that improved the quality of the light and extended the working life of the carbon electrodes. He also redesigned the lamp’s circuit to make arc lighting possible from central stations. Brush began to sell small arc lighting systems in the late 1870s for use in stores, factories, and hotels. However, the potential of this equipment was first realized with Brush’s demonstration of its street-lighting possibilities on 29 Apr. 1879, in Cleveland’s PUBLIC SQUARE. The brilliance of the light produced by his 12 lamps caused a sensation and foretold the decline of the gas-lighting era. As a result, Brush sold central power stations to San Francisco, New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. In 1880 Brush bought the Cleveland Telegraph Supply Co., where he had done the developmental work, and renamed it the Brush Electric Co. The battle between electric and gas lighting lasted some 30 years, and although advances were made in gas-lighting technology, electricity won out. During that time, CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL, viewing comparative costs, voted to go back to gas light in 1883 but reversed itself 17 days later. About the time that Brush was developing his arc light, Thomas Edison designed a practical incandescent lamp which later had great significance for Cleveland, because the companies that formed the National Electric Lamp Assn. in 1906 centered much of their light-bulb production in this area. When NELA became the National Quality Lamp Division of GENERAL ELECTRIC CO., it established NELA PARK in the SUBURBS. The division took the leading role in GE’s incandescent lighting development program from 1915 until 1935, when fluorescent lighting research became prominent.

The equipment for the first electric streetcar line in the Cleveland area was developed and tested in the shops of the Brush Electric Co., and a Brush generator was used in the car barn that powered the line from its start-up, in 1884. The line, which operated as the EAST CLEVELAND RAILWAY CO., had technical problems with its underground power supply cable and closed down the following year. Work continued, however, and a successor line reached Public Square from its home station in East Cleveland in 1889. This event was followed by the electrification of other local car lines in the area.

The Cleveland-area electrical industry grew rapidly during the 1800s, led by the expansion of applications in communications, lighting, and traction. The Brush Electric Co. added the manufacture of arc light carbons to its activities and also began marketing an incandescent lighting system, the rights for which it had purchased from a British firm. As the use of electricity expanded, the need grew for added power-generation and -distribution facilities, and when the Brush Electric & Power Co. merged with the Cleveland Electric Light Co. in 1892, a large powerhouse was constructed on Canal St. These developments led to the formation of the CLEVELAND ELECTRIC ILLUMINATING CO. the same year. By 1900 Cleveland ranked first in the production of electric automobiles, and at the end of the century’s first decade it also claimed first place in the production of carbons, lamps, and electrical hoisting apparatus. Its status as the site of a major exposition of the electrical industry in 1914 further promoted Cleveland’s claim to primacy.

The 1895 discovery of “x-rays” by the German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen touched off considerable activity in Cleveland. DAYTON C. MILLER , professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science, improved the x-raying process for medical uses. Henry P. Engeln, in collaboration with Dr. George Iddings, was a pioneer in the x-ray industry, establishing the Engeln Electric Co. around the turn of the century. During its independent life, the Engeln Co. did highly innovative work in the development and marketing of x-ray equipment, and when it merged with Acme X-Ray Corp. of Chicago in 1929, it had 200 employees. The merged company was acquired by Westinghouse in 1930 who sold its plant at E. 30th St. and Superior to Picker X-Ray which became a leading firm in that field (see PICKER INTL., INC.).

Arc welding was an important industrial application of electrical technology in Cleveland, as was arc welding, largely due to John C. Lincoln, founder of the LINCOLN ELECTRIC CO., who had gained experience working in Charles F. Brush’s shops. Lincoln Electric, which began producing electric motors in 1896, pioneered in the development of arc-welding equipment, and by 1938 it claimed to be the largest manufacturer of that line in the world. Variable speed electric motors were designed by John Lincoln who incorporated the Lincoln Motor Works Co. in 1906 to produce them. In 1909 the firm changed its name to the Reliance Electric & Engineering Co. (see RELIANCE ELECTRIC CO.).

In addition to lighting, traction, and industrial applications, the electrical home-appliance field was richly represented in Cleveland by World War I. Heating-related appliances included coffee percolators, hotplates, frying pans, corn poppers, baby-bottle warmers, kitchen ranges, hair dryers, and radiant heaters. In addition, there was heavy production of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fans, vibrators, and sewing machines. By 1919 Cleveland led the nation in the production of electric batteries and vacuum cleaners (7 different makes of vacuum cleaners were being produced in the city in 1931). In the mid-1920s, Cleveland ranked 3rd in the production of radios, after New York and Chicago. Theodore A. Willard, whose WILLARD STORAGE BATTERY CO. was Cleveland’s largest battery producer, founded the city’s first high-powered radio station, WTAM. By 1938, the Willard Co.’s 15-acre plant, built in 1914, was turning out 15,000 batteries per day.

In the 1920s, John A. Victoreen, an inventive Cleveland radio amateur, started a radio parts business. Soon, however, his attention turned to radiation measurement, and he developed the Condenser R-Meter, an instrument for measuring accurately the intensity and total dosage of x-ray delivery, which gained international fame. Radiation measurement remained a central concern of the Victoreen Instrument Co., founded in 1928 in CLEVELAND HEIGHTS The company provided 95% of the instrumentation for the atomic bomb tests after World War II, earning itself claim to the title of “first nuclear company.”

During World War II, Cleveland electrical firms reorganized their production around the needs of the military, which included the manufacture of miniature radio tubes at Nela Park for use in proximity fuses for antiaircraft artillery shells. Lighting and visibility research devoted to military problems also occupied the GE laboratories there. These wartime activities stimulated the formation of a new Electronics Department at GE in 1947. The postwar period was also one of rapid growth for the industry. In the Cleveland metropolitan area, electrical machinery manufacturing, for example, grew in value-added terms by 21% in the 1947-54 period. Fortune magazine’s list of the 500 largest industrial corporations for 1958 included 2 electrically related Cleveland area firms, Reliance Electric and the Addressograph-Multigraph Corp.

The demand for power was growing rapidly even before the onset of war pressed it more urgently. Between 1939-44, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co.’s output increased by 30%. In 1944 76% of the power the company produced went to industry, with an estimated 90% of that being war industry. By 1946 CEI could count 370,000 customers, in contrast to the 1,400 it had had at the turn of the century. Its service covered 132 communities, with a total population of 1.5 million. Growth continued as relatively low power rates attracted new industries to the area, and in 1954 the company was serving 465,000 customers in 137 communities, from Avon Lake on the west to Conneaut in the east. CEI’s rates have on occasion become a political issue in Cleveland due to the presence of Cleveland’s municipally-owned light plant which caused disputes with CEI over comparative rates (see MUNICIPAL OWNERSHIP).

Leading Cleveland companies active in the electronics field during the immediate postwar period were Victoreen Instrument Co., Hickok Electrical Instruments Co., and Brush Development Co. In 1946 Victoreen was the city’s major producer of electronic tubes, employed 75 people, and achieved a total output worth .5 million. The Hickok Co. manufactured precision radio and radar test equipment, and was active in exporting. Brush Development, founded in 1930 to market products developed by Brush Laboratories, began producing voice-recording equipment in 1938, and during the war was the main supplier of wire recording equipment to the armed forces. For industry, Brush made oscillographs and hypersonic analyzers, piezoelectric crystals, and other products. Cleveland Electronics, Inc., representative of other firms in the area engaged in the production of electronic goods, was turning out 50,000-60,000 radio loudspeakers per month and preparing to manufacture similar components for the new television industry by 1946. National Spectrographic Laboratories, Inc., another Cleveland firm, made electrical excitation units for spectrographic analysis. Phasing devices and tuning-fork frequency controls were produced by Acme Telectronix, while the Bird Electronic Corp. manufactured testing equipment, filters, and high-frequency antennas. The total value of the city’s electronic products for the year 1946 was more than million.

Cleveland, while not industrially top-ranked among centers of the rapidly developing microelectronics field, had establishments that have made a considerable mark in it nonetheless. In research and development, the well-established solid-state microelectronics laboratory at CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY pursued studies in the area of integrated circuits, electronic materials, and new processing technologies as well as providing graduate engineers and computer specialists for the area’s electronic industry. The NASA LEWIS RESEARCH CENTER is heavily involved in applied microelectronics in connection with space communications. TRW is among larger Cleveland-area manufacturing firms having a considerable stake in the electronics field, playing an active part in the aerospace and defense industries by developing both spacecraft and the payloads for them, communications and guidance systems, and ground station equipment. BAILEY CONTROLS, with world headquarters in Wickliffe, utilizes electronic technology in its production of industrial-controls. The firm provides analog and digital circuit design, producing control systems of varying complexity. With a long history of supplying equipment for utilities, Bailey Controls has provided instrumentation for the nuclear power-generating industry since the latter’s inception.

Allen-Bradley, a Division of Rockwell Intl. in HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, is a long-established area firm producing programmable controllers and similar capital goods, incorporating electronics, for manufacturing industries. Keithley Instruments, Inc., based in SOLON, had its beginnings in a high-impedance amplifier, called the “Phantom Repeater,” invented by Joseph Keithley in 1946. This and other Keithley-developed instruments were manufactured for him by another firm for 5 years until 1951, when Keithley moved his operation to larger quarters and began manufacturing on his own. Sensitive measuring instruments remained the core of the company’s output, which came to include voltmeters, ammeters, digital multimeters, and complex testing systems incorporating both computer hardware and software. The company’s product-development path in itself traces some of the most important steps in the technological advance of electronics since the 1940s–vacuum tubes to discrete transistors to integrated circuits, and finally, to complex computer-linked systems that can handle the tasks of measurement and computation virtually simultaneously.

SUBSCRIBE TO EXCELLENT WORLD WAR II VIDEOS This episode of TANKS! examines the Ardennes offensive launched by the German Army into Belgium and Luxemburg. The battle is commonly referred too in the United States as the Battle of the Bulge. The German Army was suffering defeat upon defeat in the east. The Soviet Unions offensive doctrine had become more complex and detailed in scope. Operation Bagration dealt a sweeping blow to Army Group Center. Almost an entire army group was destroyed in detail. The German Armys casualties were more than the replacement army could re-introduce into combat. The more powerful T-34/85 and especially the IS-2 were deployed in mid-1944. The IS-2 was equipped with the 122mm cannon. This cannon could penetrate 160mm of armor plate. More importantly the kinetic energy delivered by the 122mm could disable a Tiger or Panther without penetrating. (GDH) Hitler realized that any offensive on the eastern front in 1944 would fail. The Soviet forces were far too strong to make any impression. Hitler summarized that the logical attack should be directed at the Italians of the western alliance. The Americans. The Allies suffered from serious manpower shortages. Replacements were not making good the combat losses. Eisenhower made the decision to take a calculated risk, by leaving the Ardennes section covered with a light presence. Green and exhausted units were placed in this area. (GDH) The shock of the initial assault dumfounded most in the Allied High …Video Rating: 4 / 5

Militaries around the world have been trying to protect their personnel for hundreds of years. The only way to win wars was to have the largest troops that would be able to fight and stay alive to the very end. As longs as countries had strength in numbers, they could take over and occupy their intended targets. However, as nations became creative with their weapons they also created better protective gear.

Timeline

In the beginning, warriors wore chain mail which consisted of metal rings that were linked together to form a shirt that was worn over clothing. This type of armor would provide protection from a sword strike. Other countries would wear layers of animal skin, such as rhinoceroses as their skin were very durable. In some instances, actual metal plates would be constructed that would provide a certain level of protection.

In the 1960s, Natick Laboratories designed a vest carrier that held ceramic plates which stopped 7mm rifle rounds. In 1969, police officers would begin to use the Barrier Vest that was made by American Body Armor. It was the most widely used body armor product in its time.

In later years, weapons became stronger and companies found new ways to protect against bullets. In 1965, a DuPont scientist named Stephanie Kwolek created Kevlar. This revolutionary material would provide decades of protection from various bullets.

In 1989, the Allied Signal Company created Spectra which were a clear contender against Kevlar. The result of these two products is the same, which are high quality bulletproof vests. Since this time, other materials have been made such as Zylon, Dyneema and Gold Flex.

The Future

New technologies are making it possible to make body armor stronger, more durable and lighter. Many scientists are using liquid or fluid based materials that either coat fibers or turn into a solid state when under impact.

Testing methods are also set to become more rigid in order to ensure uniformity and safety. The National Institute of Justice will be testing for sun exposure, heat, moisture, stretching and detergents to see how it affects the life of a bullet proof vest.

Many manufacturing companies are making 2020 soldier suits that are being presented to the U.S. military and Congress. This futuristic body armour gear provides new features and added comfort.

If you are looking to purchase bullet proof vests or other body armor products, then you should visit www.bulletproofvestshop.com for high quality items.

The KA-BAR is a Combat Knife that is used by members of the Armed Forces to be used in Close Combat scenarios. These days, the Ka-Bar is used mostly as a Utility Knife. For example, opening wooden crates, clearing out foliage, cutting down branches, etc.. It’s also strong enough to easily puncture a hole in a can.

KA-BAR knives are typically very heavy and usually have a 7 Inch Long Blade. It is made of 1095 Carbon Steel. The number 1095 stands for the chemical composition of the metal as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers which assigns SAE Steel Grades. Someone was attacked by a bear before WWII. He survived the attack and wrote a letter to the company bragging that the knife saved his life when a gun failed to do the job. The letter was written in poor English and all that was readable was “k a bar” so the company used this name as their trademark.

In 1942 right after the United States entered WWII, the troops were having issues with their old Mark I Trench Knives. They came to the realization that they needed a better knive to engage in Trench Warfare, so the military picked the KA-BAR from a catalog of hunting gear, and made it standard military issue for the troops. The USMC used several different types of knives during the war, but the KA-BAR was by far the most popular.

In fact the military liked it so much it also became Standard Military Issue after WWII ended. The Marine Corps got to choose the final shape. They made the blade longer so it could be used in combat. They also wanted a fuller, which was a rounded or beveled groove that sat on the flat side of the blade. The KA-BAR company earned millions of dollars during WWII by selling this to the military.

The reason this knife became so popular was because they were very easy to manufacture and very cheap to purchase. This meant that they were also very easy to replace and performed most tasks that were required. This weapon was also being used in World War II as a Diving Knife even though it didn’t stand up to Salt Water very well. The military still uses the KA-BAR, and so do hunters, fisherman and outdoor enthusiasts. This USMC weapon has a long history that isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Semper Fi.

Soviet History Documentary WWII 1941-45 Chapter 1 This is my first chapter of a docummentary on Soviet history that I am making. Enjoy!Video Rating: 5 / 5

While O’Reilly was debating Wesley Clark on his FOX show, Bill once again was short on the facts. Keith Olberman exposes O’Reilly for TWICE claiming that US forces massacred SS German troops in Malmadey during WW2 when in fact it was the other way around.

The Asahi Shimbun, most influential (left-biased) paper in Japan, started campaign based on the book in 1991. In this book, he wrote that he had hunted comfort women in Korea. But later, he admited that he invetned stories to sell the book. Prof. Yoshimi Yoshiaki (吉見義明) of Chuo University, who appeared in the previous post as one of the key persons in the “sex slave” propaganda. Later Prof. Yoshimi Yoshiaki admitted there was no evidence about Japanese Army forced Chinese and Korean women into “sex slave”. but left-leaning Asahi shimbun splashed “coercion of the Japanese Army” on the front of the paper.Despite Yoshimi Yoshiaki admitted His lies. As a matter of fact, in the notification “discovered” by Prof. Yoshimi, the Japanese military authority ordered its troops in the Chinese frontline to carefully choose appropriate brothel managers to prevent them from recruiting comfort women by any brutal manner, as a few pimps in mainland Japan were lately arrested for such cases. Asahi shimbun made trumped-up story and sprended to the world. “Comfort women problem” is a propaganda made by Asahi Shimbun(Japanese(!) newspaper). It has ended in Japan when Seiji Yoshida ran away from the scene years ago. Today, most Japanese don’t believe that. Asahi shimbun made fabricated facts about “the Nanking incident. Honda Katsuichi “本多勝一” is an Asahi’s journalist and author book named” Travels in China(中国の旅)” and 南京への道 (Road to Nanjing)who coined the term ‘hundred head …

Russia and the West had harboured mutual suspicions of one another since before the Bolshevik revolution. Russia had aggressively sought territory from European states during the long demise of the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-twentieth century the anti-Russian role that in the past been had played by Britain, France and Austria was now adopted by the US. The seeds were sown during the inter-war years – Western intervention in the Russian civil war and the view that had been adopted by many in the West that Nazism would be a bulwark against Bolshevism increased Stalin’s hostility to the Western democracies. What cemented this resentment was the fact that the West had dithered for so long to open a second front, leaving the Russians to face the full brunt of the Reich’s armies, indeed many considered it to be intentionally done in order that the Germany and Russia would destroy one another. In turn the West were deeply suspicious of Russia’s belligerent expansive policies and Stalin’s treatment of Poland caused this divide to open even further. Poor old Poland, if you look at a map of Europe over the past centuries you will see that it has moved about quite a lot, parts have been chopped off and parts have been added on. In the post World War II talks, Stalin insisted that Eastern Poland, seized as part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 should remain Russian territory, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed and compensated Poland with former German territories in the West. But Stalin also wanted the type of government that he chose to be in power in Poland, hence his refusal to help the Poles who rose in the Warsaw Rising in 1944. In January 1945 Stalin recognised the Communist dominated Lublin committee as the government of Poland as opposed to the elected body. Later that year at the Yalta conference it was agreed that the Lublin committee would be expanded to include non-communists in a Provisional Government. However, by mid-1945 all key posts were held by Communists and in a dubious election in 1947, the Communists won an overwhelming majority.

This process was repeated in other Eastern European countries and as the Red Army liberated Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary communist governments were installed. Of course another bone of contention was what to do with Germany, the Allies could not agree over this issue, showing a tremendous lack of trust in one another. They divided up Germany so that East became moulded in the image of Russia while the West followed the West. Churchill was to define the climate of time and indeed the guts of the century when he famously declared ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent’. No direct confrontation had yet occurred but that was all to change in Greece. During the occupation of Greece in the Second World War the communist resistance movement (EAM) trained a guerrilla army (ELAS) with the intention of achieving a communist revolution similar to Tito’s in Yugoslavia. After British forces liberated Athens in October 1944 the ELAS and the nationalist forces clashed, a truce was called in February 1945 which left some two-thirds of the country in the hands of the communists. However, the communists fared badly at the subsequent elections in March 1946, Stalin intervened supporting a Communist rising which resulted in a renewal of the civil war. Britain could no longer support the non-communist Greek government, they pleaded to the American administration for support, who at the behest of Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson formulated the Truman Doctrine. It was not specifically related to Greece, it was so much more than that, it illustrated that the US was finally abandoning its isolation replacing Britain as the strong power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

The Truman Doctrine was not confined just to Europe, indeed American involvement in South-East Asia stemmed from the Doctrine. A consequence of it was the Marshall Plan which was enunciated by General George C Marshall, US Secretary of State with a view to stopping shortages of food, fuel and raw materials which he believed would make Europe an easy prey for communism. Although Eastern bloc countries were invited to partake in the Plan, it was only the Western European states that accepted, enthusiastically creating the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) to help in the administration of the Plan. It proved to be a major success, with industrial production rising by twenty-five per cent in two years. Despite the evident benefits of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern European country to have retained a democratic government, joined the Soviet Bloc in 1948. The Czechs were still disgusted with the West since the Munich sell-out of them in 1938, preferring to side with the Russians who had liberated them in 1945. However, the majority of the government was non-communist but the communists originally worked well in the system, initiating a programme of land reform and nationalisation of major industry thus making them popular with the masses. However, the communists began purging the police force of non-communists and taking over positions of power and the non-communist foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, the communists launched a coup d’etat, seizing power and probing a long red finger into the heart of the Western democracies.

America swore that it was as far as communism would get, the Russians had other ideas, the scene was set for a show-down which was to be acted out in Berlin. By 1947, the Western powers had merged their zones of occupation, ended denazification, released prisoners of war, began a programme of central German government and relaxed economic restrictions on German economies. These reforms angered Stalin who viewed it as weak and granting an opportunity for the Nazis to rise again. The issue of currency reform was in many ways the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Allies had decided to introduce a new currency to end black trading and instigate an economic revival – it worked – production rose by fifty per cent in six months. The Russians responded by introducing a new currency in their zone, thus further widening the division. Subsequently, they blockaded Berlin on 24 June 1945. The Allies organised a massive air-lift to get supplies to their beleaguered zones in Berlin. Stalin realising he had failed agreed to reopen road and rail links in May 1949. However, the Cold War was to spread far from the European arena. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, following the Second World War, the Americans and the Soviets agreed that they should occupy Korea. The demarcation line between the Communist North, under Kim Il Sung an the South under the right-wing President Syngman Rhee was the thirty-eight parallel. Both leaders desired to see the country united under their respective systems.

On 25 June 1950, the North launched a surprise attack that swiftly saw the capture of Seoul, overrunning nearly all of the South with the exception of the important port of Pusan. The UN found their hands were tied because of the Russian boycott so the vast majority of troops rallied to defend the South were American. The American offensive was highly successful, regaining all territory by October 1950. They pushed on invading the North causing the Chinese to enter the war who succeeding in rolling the American forces all the way back into the South and capturing Seoul. The war now settled into a battle of attrition, peace talks began in 1951, an agreement reached in 1953 settled on the 38th parallel dividing North and South and thus returning everything very much to the way it was before the war. To achieve this over four million Korean citizens had perished. Similarly, at the 1954 Geneva Conference Vietnam was divided along the 17th degree of latitude with the North been under the control of the communist Ho Chi Minh government. It was seen universally as a breakthrough and a series of conferences were held throughout the rest of the fifties which led to something of a thaw in the Cold War. However it was far from a total melting as the Russian invasion of Hungary and the invasion of Suez by Britain and France attested to. The thaw completely ended in May 1960 when a US spy plane was shot down over Russia, the crisis escalated into the Russian premier’s demand that the Allies completely withdraw from Berlin, which the Allies regarded as an attempt to incorporate the entire city into East Germany. Indeed, the situation in Berlin had become worrying for the communists as tens of thousands of people arrived in reception centres in the West during 1960.

This had the effect of disgracing the supposedly socialist showpiece of East Berlin and clearing it of vast numbers of skilled personnel. Reacting to this, the East German army closed all crossings from East Berlin to the West on 13 August 1961 and in subsequent weeks erected the now infamous Berlin wall. Paradoxically, the Wall contributed to a peaceful co-existence as it removed Berlin from being one of the most dangerous issues in the Cold War, the conflict once again moved to different arenas, one of which was Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro’s communist forces overthrew the dictatorship of Batista. In an attempt to kick-start the economy, many American owned industries were nationalised, a move which seriously aggravated the US. They refused to purchase Cuba’s main export, sugar which was in turn bought by Russia, bringing Castro closer to Moscow resulting in Russia building missile sites in Cuba which could threaten American cities. On 16 October, American spy planes procured aerial photographs showing ballistic missiles with atomic warheads which were on their way to Cuba. US President Kennedy ordered a blockade to prevent the ships arriving reaching Cuba, after a tentative stand-off where the whole world was held in the balance, the Russians eventually withdrew, the world had come to the brink of nuclear war. Throughout the sixties the Cold War was marked by the Soviet Union and the US doing their utmost to retain their respective spheres of influence. In 1965, US President Lyndon Johnson landed troops on the Dominican Republic with a view to preventing what the US administration styled as another Cuban revolution. In 1968, the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring of Czechoslovakia. Again in 1965, Johnson sent troops to South Vietnam to bolster the faltering anti-communist government becoming embroiled in the region for a decade. From the seventies there was an easing of tensions, a détente between the two old foes. The rise of China, Japan and Western Europe and the rise of African nationalism coupled with the disunity of the communist alliance augured a new international politic.

Propaganda posters are a great gift idea for someone who is interested in history. They make for unique gifts and are an integral part of history. Propaganda posters played a vital role in both the World Wars.

What These Posters Are Used For

All governments in World War I used posters as propaganda. They did this to justify their involvement in the war and also to get more money, men and resources to continue fighting. In most European countries like Italy, France, Germany and Britain, posters were used the whole duration of the war. In Britain, though the posters were well received, they did not get the required number of volunteers to fight in the frontlines. They ultimately had to introduce conscription to get men to fight.

Apart from recruitment, WWI propaganda posters also encouraged the people to conserve food and energy. They acted as advertisements for people to invest in war time bonds, which most people did. An interesting fact is that, though the US joined the First World War in 1917, it produced more posters than any other country.

World War II also saw an extensive use of posters. WWII propaganda posters were slightly different than the previous war. Apart from advertising for recruitment to the armed forces and investment in war bonds, they also talked about other topics. Some posters created controversy. Mostly posters were used for messages pertaining to national security, salvage, the Red Cross, things that could be sent to soldiers fighting overseas, relief efforts and food production.

All the artists commissioned to make the posters in both wars added their own unique touch to them. The use of posters had a subtle and yet profound influence on the public. They were placed in public places where they would be seen. Barbershops and store windows were popular poster sites. This encouraged people to have a sense of patriotism and pride for their country while inciting anger for the enemy country. The colors, words and images used were chosen carefully to manipulate public emotion and opinion.

Of course, there was other propaganda material used during the wars, but posters were the simplest and most eye-catching of them all. Propaganda posters encouraged people to support the war effort by working hard, enlisting and investing. The tone of the posters varied from funny to serious to patriotic. Today, some of these posters might just seem strange.

Collecting war posters is a way of preserving an important part of history. They are also considered to be works of art. You can get posters from almost every country that fought in the world wars. These posters are available online on many websites. Just log on and get a propaganda poster as a gift for someone who loves history.