5 Weapons That Changed the World

Nice article. Being the weirdo that I am I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Yup.. thoroughly enjoyed that too - great read!

Great article. I was reminded of the classic movie "2001:A Space Odyssey"--its unforgettable opening scenes captured, in audiovisual terms, the essential point your article was trying to make. The irony is that mankind has always found a way to turn technology into a double-edged sword-- wreaking havoc on the one hand, and advancing human progress on the other. Some things never change.
BTW, You might add the stirrup, the chariot and the English longbow to your list. by 1000 BC, the stirrup had made speedy cavalry maneuvers possible; around 800 BC, the chariot changed the velocity with which battlefields moved; and the longbow ended the sway of the heavily armored warriors, as Henry V demonstrated at Agincourt in 1415.

Those heavily armored elite warriors of Agincourt, otherwise called knights, did not entirely fade away-- banished from the battlefield, they turned to holding private jousts complete with rituals and quaint protocols, creating what we today call"chivalry". And so we make our atavistic childhoods continue in our lives-- not wishing to grow up. Some things never change-- the fault, as Shakespeare would say, is "not in our stars but in ourselves".

Dude that was like a major trip down memory lane!

RT
www.be-anonymous.tk

Boys with powerful toys to make big noise that cost many lives.
The price of intimidation is steep, used for security or for war.

A very poorly thought out piece of writing. The way it jumps eras and randomly names "things" does not fit with a progression of technology or social structure, and to include a fixture for execution is strange, because it is not a weapon-- when was the last time someone mugged a little old lady by dragging her into an alley and whipping out a Guillotine to threaten her? To name Little Boy-- a single example of a device-- as if it were the class of devices, that is clearly poor thought and writing. "The Nuke" might be a weapon that changed the world, but the single nuke known as Little Boy did not magically make the change. Greek Fire did not really alter the world, it was a small part of battlefield technology, overly hyped by people who little about real battlefields, and the rifle existed long before the Ferguson-- and they were effective weapons, too. The Ferguson was an innovation, but one that was not revolutionary (pardon the pun) despite the time frame, and American riflemen took huge tolls on British troops with their old, muzzleloading rifles. The firearm, and perhaps even the subset of firearms known as the rifle, well that might be a "world changer," but the Ferguson rifle was not. The same type of issue applies to the V2 rocket. It was an innovation, it was the first use of an item like this in circumstances like this, but sparking a book does not make it as important as the author sets forth. Weapons that changed the world? The thrown rock, the pointed stick to jab with or throw, the knife, they were weapons that changed the world-- but the bow and arrow is an evolution of that pointed stick. It helps to think before you write.

what about the AK47? surely the invention of that is quite important.

Since the weapon was loaded from the back, it allowed for spiraled rifling in the barrel.

Just a little point, but muzzle-loading rifles (ie. with spiraled grooves in the barrel) were also possible. Notably the Baker rifle used by the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars.

I felt I had to comment but colcam and richard got there first so all I can do is agree with them. A very poor choice and badly explained:

1) Guillotine - not a weapon
2) Little boy - just one example of a type of weapon
3) Greek fire - didn't change the world as we don't even know what it was and the Greeks lost even with it (to me weapons that changed the world are copied by the opponents and others)
4) Ferguson rifle - rifling may have changed the the world (and not just the battlefied) but that particular rifle didn't really do a lot
5) The V2 - the V1 certainly changed Britain a lot but the V2 came too late. Maybe some missiles today look more like the V1 and use liquid fuel but the V1 was the first to have an impact (or you could go back to Congreve or the Chinese for rockets generally).

I can't imagine why this got thumbs up on Stumble so I'll try to fix that now.

Good thing Adolf was a moron. He might have established a connection between his nuke scientists and Vernher Von Braun's rockets.

None of these things changed the world, they just changed the way wars were fought. The world is still the same, fighting over territory, money, drugs, political power, jelousy, hate, rage, but mostly, childish stupidity.

I do like the article however, you need to check some facts about the atomic bomb
1. It was not a fission bomb, it just used the energy of spliting the atom, later there was a formed that used energy from spliting atoms to fuse two Hydrogen Ions. If we found out how to cause a chain fusing of rondom compunds the power would be awsome, stats, a single fusiing of hydrogen ions can power pitsburg for a month, however we do not no how to harnes it in a contrlolled environment with out using millions of dollars is in weapon grad plutonium.

2. Its not that the bomb killed so many people, its how effective it was. The fire bombings of Tokyo killed just as many people, with one difference, they used more than 600 planes, and for all Japan knew we could destroy every single one of their cities with one plane.

3 I'll give you that the weapons race was pretty world changing, however, the real reason they dropped the bomb was because if they did go through the ground attack, the causualities were estimated at over one million for the United states alone. It also allowed Japan to become the flourishing country it is now, the United states would lose one million, but Japan would loose twice as many, they didn't give, the won or died(if they could still fight back, they didn't know how much the Nukes actualy cost). this actualy reduced casualities on Japanese side

also all this info is from sources, I had to write a paper on the Atomic Bombings