| | 1. Daniel Barnes is right about Harry Lime.
2. The computer was not "invented" by the military. Not much ever was. Other people invent things and sell them to the military. At the same time as Heisenberg was not inventing the atomic bomb in a very military nation that wanted one, that same nation was also not creating gasoline by "somehow" mixing water with coal. One of my favorite military applications is canned food, invented for (not by) the British Navy.
See http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/story080.htm
and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/telephone/sfeature/
As for the computer, several types were proposed over the early years 1890-1960. IBM was launched by Hermann Hollerith after he won a contract to tally the U.S. Census. Note that the Census Bureau -- despite its tremendous need -- did not invent the computer.
I wish I could put my hands on the issue of Scientific American that in the summer of 1929 on its back cover advertised a television jack for the RCA radio. In the book Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel by German rocket scientist Willie Ley is this story. The official German government military rocket scientists called a meeting of industry leaders to solve the problem of creating a pump that could produce the flows at pressure required by their designs. The scientists were stumped. It turns out that fire engines routinely pumped water at those rates. So, that problem was solved. In point of fact, if not for the world wars and depression, we might have been on the moon by 1940 or 1950. Robert Goddard was funded by the Guggenheim foundation on $20,000 I think. The Wright Brothers spent $10,000 of their own money while Langley spent twenty times that to put two planes in the Potomac.
War! What's it good for? Absolutely nothing!
3. Robert Kaercher pointed out that "'tis extremely difficult to produce and create in a society that is constantly at war, even if the society you're living is not the one on the receiving end of the bombs and missiles, as the State is constantly siphoning off even more resources from the private sector than it does in times of relative peace in order to maintain its war."
We forget that part of it. When you make a bomb and drop it in the enemy, the labor, the materials are lost forever. Even if you make a can opener no one wants, at least you have something to show for it.
4. Max's observation ("Perhaps, it is not war, but a rich life and some tragedy that is necessary to produce invention.") is the one that I am puzzling over, basically. War, of course, is extreme. But, do we act smarter or work harder when we perceive threats than when we enjoy comfort? And if we do, is this because of who we really are or only because of who we choose to be?
5. And as Sarah points out, we have more than enough examples of senseless violence that produced nothing.
|
|
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangel, Leonard da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
