The technological progress during the First World War Essay

Additionally, the First World War led to new inventions such as tanks, air planes, submarines, long range artillery, and poison gas (Mintz,2009). According to Mintz, at the beginning of the war the armies used carrier pigeons for communication and horses for movement, but then these new inventions changed the nature of the war (Mintz,2009). For example, "in 1918, the Germans fired shells containing both tear gas and lethal chlorine. The tear gas forced the British to remove their gas masks the chlorine then scarred their faces and killed them" (Mintz,2009). In 1916, 419,654 British men were missing, wounded, or killed in a single day at the Battle of the Somme where German troops used machine-gun to fight (Mintz,2009). Furthermore, a million British troops, 1.7 million Russian troops, 1.7 million French troops, and 2 million German troops were killed during the time from 1914 to 1918 (Mintz,2009).
Moreover, Mintz states that World War I left a health impact such as Influenza epidemic which killed over 25 million people worldwide (2009). However, Ubelacker says that the First World War developed the medical achievements which have served people from the past to the current days (2014). During the war, millions of soldiers suffered horrific injuries on a scale never before witnessed in combat because of violent weapons, which do a terrible things to human bodies, and since "the necessity is the mother of invention", medical officers tried their best to create new medical devices to increase the rate of survivors (Ubelacker, 2014).
According to Ubelacker, there are many types of medical devices which are created because of the war and some of which are hospitals, blood banks, X-ray machines, iodine, prostheses, and plastic surgeries (2014). For example, hospitals were established because the injured people were conveyed from the place of the battle to dress stations and after that on to casualty clearing stations, but the doctors were forced to practice a system of triage which means "they determine which patients would be operated on immediately , which could wait for a few hours, and which were untreatable and therefore, would be left to die" (Ubelacker, 2014).
Moreover, people were bleeding during the war and it was necessary to replace the blood in the body (Ubelacker, 2014). In 1917 , Capt. Oswald discovered that "blood could be donated in advance and stored using sodium citrate as an anticoagulant" (Ubelacker, 2014). Then it was developed by the British and Americans and they invented the first mobilized blood bank (Ubelacker, 2014).
In addition, to detect broken or shrapnel bones and bullets buried in flesh or to save lives and prevent disability, Marie curie discovered the X-ray machine (Ubelacker, 2014). Although, there were no antibiotics to clean wounds, doctors used iodine to clean wounds instead of antibiotics. Furthermore, prostheses and plastic surgeries were invented for those patients who survived amputations and suffered from facial disfigurement because of the war, so these medical devices helped them to continue their life and it are still help people during these days (Ubelacker, 2014).