World Wars of the Twentieth Century 331mass production had been applied to the manufacture of small arms in
the United States after the War of 1812, and appropriate machines
were subsequently imported into Europe after the Crimean War. In
the latter half of the nineteenth century, American businessmen, fac
ing persistent shortages of skilled labor, had applied similar tech
niques to other kinds of manufacture, most notably in mass producing
sewing machines and typewriters. But in Europe little had been done
before the sudden emergency of World War I required vast numbers
of identical items for military use. Thereupon, jigs and dies, auto
mated machinery and assembly lines, came rapidly into their own.
Radical cheapening of manufactured articles of mass consumption
became technically feasible with such methods. As so often before,
military demand thus blazed the way for new techniques, and on a
very broad front, from shell fuses and telephones to trench mortars
and wristwatches. The subsequent industrial and social history of the
world turned very largely on the continuing application of the
methods of mass production whose scope widened so remarkably
during the emergency of World War I. Anyone looking at the equip
ment installed in a modern house will readily recognize how much we
in the late twentieth century are indebted to industrial changes pio
neered in near-panic circumstances when more and more shells, gun
powder, and machine guns suddenly became the price of survival as a
sovereign state.
Of almost equal importance was the broadened application of de
liberate, planned invention to the design of new weapons and ma
chines. As we saw in the preceding chapter, before 1914 deliberate
invention was patronized and funded for the most part by the world’s
leading navies, thanks to the scale of expenditure on warships and the
complexity that their armament had attained. World War I brought
deliberate invention ashore, and applied it to new and old weapons.
The Germans did more to improve the performance of traditional
weapons than their rivals, if only because their need to conserve scarce
materials dictated careful reconsideration of every aspect of the design
and manufacture of artillery and infantry equipment. Newer devices
like U-boats and airplanes also underwent very rapid evolution on the
Allied as well as on the German side. Experience in battle suggested
desirable performance characteristics for all such weapons, which
were then translated into reality so far as engineers and designers were
able to meet the users’ demands. Command invention thus became
generalized and applied to every kind of military hardware.
The development of tanks provides the most remarkable example