Over the past two centuries, there have been several inventions that the inventors
thought would make war so terrible that all war would cease.
The general idea was that war would be made so costly in lives that the countries of the world
would recoil in horror and come together and outlaw war.
Hiram Maxim and his machine gun
Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) was the son of a farmer in rural Maine. He was a inventive
boy, apprenticed to a carriage maker at age 14, and like many other American inventors, was a
tinkerer, always trying to improve things. He was interested in electric light, powered flight,
self-resetting mousetraps, and even inhalers to improve breathing difficulty, and was awarded
271 patents.
Early versions of the machine gun already existed, notably the Gatling Gun, but Maxim
figured out a way to make such a gun more reliable and easier to use. He moved to Britain in
1881 and there after three years of experimenting, invented the machine gun in 1884, a belt-fed
machine capable of 600 rounds a minute. He demonstrated the gun and convinced buyers. He
sold his machine gun—which came to be called the Maxim gun—mostly in Europe, to France,
Spain, Germany, Sweden and the British. He became a wealthy man when his company was
bought out by another gun manufacturer, the Vickers company.
It’s not clear exactly what Maxim thought his gun could do. The New York Times
editorialized in 1897 that the machine gun was so deadly that it would convince nations that
they should settle disputes by diplomacy rather than war.
Alfred Nobel, dynamite and other inventions
Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was a Swedish inventor, who is best known as the founder of
the Nobel Prizes. He’s also the man who invented dynamite in 1867 and smokeless powder in
- The explosive agent nitroglycerin had been invented earlier, but Nobel devised a way to
use it by stabilizing it into the familiar sticks of dynamite. His invention made it possible to
harness the explosive power of the substance.
Nobel also invented smokeless powder, which replaced black powder in ammunition.
Smokeless powder meant that it was no longer possible to see where an enemy rifleman was
firing from; black powder had resulted in a kind of smoky haze that betrayed where the gunman
was firing from, and also fogged up the battlefield. Nobel invested several other improvements
that made war more efficient at killing.
Nobel was quite aware that his inventions intensified the deadliness of war. One of his
friends was Baroness Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), a famous German woman advocating
peace and the abolition of war. He wrote her, “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war
sooner than your conferences; on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each
other in seconds, all civilized nations will surely recoil in horror and disband their troops.”
Nicola Tesla and his particle beam weapon
Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serbian-American electrical engineer and a notable
inventor. Most of his inventions concerned electrical systems, power transmission, motors and
he held more than 100 related patents. He is far less known than Thomas Edison, but his
inventions underly much of contemporary technology, just as Edison’s do.
In 1934, Tesla announced a new source of energy that could be weaponized. Tesla
hated war, and thought up a kind of weapon that seems to have been a kind of particle beam
weapon. Tesla said it could destroy a fleet of 10,000 airplanes 250 miles away.
His fame assured that his concept got publicity, but the concept was never particularly
well-articulated, let alone proven by experiment. Newspapers at the time called it a “death ray,”
a concept then popular in science fiction.
Tesla maintained that the beam would make war impossible by offering every country
“an invisible Chinese wall.” He tried to interest several world leaders in the concept, among
them Winston Churchill, who was not interested. The Soviet Union was interested, and
apparently tried to test the concept.
