Technology without the Great War--what happens?

Technology without the Great War

I’m trying to imagine how technology would have progressed without the Great War. For my proposed POD, Europe muddles through the time after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination without a general war erupting—though it’s close. Instead, the continent pulls back from the brink. No major changes politically happen for some time, and the pattern of one crisis after another being narrowly averted continues—say until at least the mid 1940’s. I’m not interested in the exact details here, even if a bit of handwavium is a necessary ingredient in the process. (I know no great war from 1914 until the 1940’s/50’s is LOW probability.)

Instead, I’m wondering how technology may advance in this time. I can see the following:

Russia may well be a very important player in air transport. Pre Great War, the Russians already had a 4 engine airliner—which in otl became the world’s first 4 engine bomber. Igor Sikorsky designed and built it—and later, was critical to helicopter development. Without a Russian Revolution, he might well have stayed in Russia. Even here, though, I doubt aeronautics will advance as fast as in OTL—though a long distance airliner may play a role here in encouraging competitors.

Motorcars for the masses: Clearly the USA is the leader here, just as in OTL, at least for some time. Ford’s Model T came out in 1909, and mass production was placing them on the roads in untold quantities. Other nations might make fancier ones, though. And perhaps without the Great War, would someone else also start cranking out a model T equivalent?

New battleships, at least ones that enter service by 1918 or so, are little changed, except for the Repulse, Renown, and Fischer’s Follies. Most of them were already cast in stone as of the POD. The later ships change, of course, as the lessons of the Great War aren’t learned, so the USA has a significant lead in protection. (Only the USA introduced All or Nothing armor before Jutland, and some have called the Standards “Post Jutland designs before Jutland”)

Submarines, and especially anti-submarine technology, develop slower, witout the needs of the war.

I would be unsurprised if TV becomes popular earlier, since it was broadcast in the pre-World War II era in OTL, but delayed by the war.

Any other thoughts on what technology comes faster, or is delayed—and who comes up with it?

(Einstein might not emigrate to the USA either, or Slizard, or a host of others.)

What else changes? The technological butterflies could be huge.
 
The technological butterflies could be huge.


That statement will be in the running for Understatement of the Year and we're still in January. ;)

Adding to your list...

Radio - Huge wartime advances here, plus batteries.
Medicine/Public Health - Think of all the casualties, camps, and whatnot.
Industrial chemistry - The Haber process is famous, but the UK's work with acetone from chestnuts was equally critical.
Clothing/Accessories - wristwatches, trenchcoats, etc.
 
Absent the war, internal combustion engines themselves would develop far more slowly, with numerous knock on effects. Weak engines would curb aircraft performance and development, making planes generally less appealing and practical. Also diesel engine(submarines) design advanced during the war; without it there'd be many fewer and later diesel merchant ships and locomotives.
On a related note trucks/lorries began to prove their utility in WWI; I imagine they'd also be less practical, powerful and useful ITTL.
so probably more horses
 
Absent the war, internal combustion engines themselves would develop far more slowly, with numerous knock on effects. Weak engines would curb aircraft performance and development, making planes generally less appealing and practical. Also diesel engine(submarines) design advanced during the war; without it there'd be many fewer and later diesel merchant ships and locomotives.
On a related note trucks/lorries began to prove their utility in WWI; I imagine they'd also be less practical, powerful and useful ITTL.
so probably more horses

This brings up a philosophical question. It is easy to point to progress made because of the world war but what about all the civilian advances that those scientists would have made working for more prosperous civilian firms? Plus would there have been more basic science from better funded government labs and with more international cooperation.

Eg the engineering necessary for nuclear activities might be behind 1940s OTL (no Manhattan project) but theoretical nuclear science might be ahead ( and more widely spread) in a 1930s without WW1.

Or a lot of aeronautical advances were driven by military imperatives, but a much larger and more diverse market for cars in Europe would support a lot of very interesting research.

Technology to substitute for raw materials (eg Haber) would proceed more slowly without military imperatives but those same chemists would be employed finding more creative uses for imported raw materials ( eg German chemists more focused on petroleum products and refining technology).
 
I see history as a web of cause and effect. If Europe was generally more prosperous in the early 1910s (and I have learned in a history class on the USA it was--immigration to America slackened, not just because of new restrictions but also because the European economy improved--and some immigrants even returned to their homelands) it was at least in part because of specifically war-preparation industries. All the powerful nations of Europe were arming; the Great Powers were very much on a collision course, and whatever happened in Sarajevo in 1914, sooner or later some flashpoint was going to start the war so many were itching for.

Now I'd be the last to deny that there might be plenty of timelines where Europe somehow did 'muddle through' and avoided any big wars whatsoever, for decades past 1920 perhaps. But I would think all but the most improbable of these would require different conditions; the PODs would have to be decades back from each potential war fever.

Thus, when we think about "well, what if the people who OTL were essentially drafted to accelerate development of engines, radios, airframes, submarines, sub detection, trucks, tanks, alternative chemical sources, etc etc actually spent their time just as productively in civilian applications," that raises the question, why didn't they OTL? Why did the war foster such a burst of development, if development is mainly a matter of people with brains solving problems? Wartime produces a sense of urgency to be sure, but can that alone account for the rapid change of pace?

I think that we tend to underestimate how much of creativity is not just genius, but investment. The most brilliant, yet methodical and disciplined inventor, innovator, developer needs capital as well. They need funds to buy the materials and tools for the test projects; they need to be able to waste a lot of this on unsuitable early models as well as pursuing false leads that look good on paper but turn out not to be so workable after all. They need to eat while working out the bugs.

During the war, money was no object if it was the only thing standing between a nation and victory--or survival for that matter.

During the peace though--potential investors would look hard and skeptically at importunate self-named geniuses and visionaries.

So it doesn't strike me as reasonable to assume that the same people who churned out so much technical progress during the Great War were bound to accomplish as much during an alternate peace. Some would, the ones with the genius or luck to come up with something obviously workable and worth investing in on their first tries, or the ones with deeper pockets (Santos-Dumont, who pioneered both airplanes and dirigibles, had a fair-sized family fortune for instance) or better connections. Many others would not. Of the people who ITTL would not be killed or have their lives otherwise ruined as in OTL's war and associated disasters, a few would accelerate the rate of progress. So it would be better than some timeline with no war but a population like after the war. But I think slower than OTL nonetheless.

That's Charybdus; Scylla is that as I said, OTL Europe was as prosperous as it was because the richest nations were competitively arming. Presumably the possible timelines where that happened but then the arms were never used are rather few; "the one thing you can't do with bayonets is sit on them!" said Napoleon. And yet, one reason for the headlong rush to world war in my opinion is that relative prosperity due to war fever or no, OTL it still wasn't prosperous enough for many people, and part of the drive to militarism was to pre-empt rising labor unrest in the forms both of union activity and other workplace struggles, and the rise of left-wing more or less socialist politics.

So if the crowned heads and parliaments and corporate boardrooms of the Belle Epoque were all collectively wise enough to take a pass on trying to cut through their various Gordian Knots with a sword in the old-fashioned way, nevertheless Europe might wind up facing a war of a different kind, if one fine day in one or two of these countries there was actual revolution. The ways to pre-empt that danger would either be to have a civil economy so booming that working-class unrest would be assuaged and diverted by the rising tide lifting all boats--which is to say, a wonderful world of unchecked prosperity that many generations have dreamed of but few attained and none sustained for long--or the tried and true methods of brutal repression. Which I believe lead straight to the equally ancient method of seeking unity through war against some demonized foreigner or other and we are right back to OTL in my view! Where both tactics mixed together--in the name of preparing to smite the ungodly foreigner, the arms factories did a booming business and quite a few more workers did find more and better-paid work. But at the price of practically scheduling the eventual day of reckoning!

I seem to have talked myself into supporting a position I hate, that war does foster technology. I wish it were not so, but I fear it is.
 
Electric razors and curling irons would have a "Handlebar Mustache" setting, and that would be awesome.

Also, think of what the 9 million KIA of every major nation of the time, a seizable part of them doctors and engineers, could have invented (like a faster curling iron from L'Oréal to make yourself instant handlebar moustaches, probably).
 
Plus would there have been more basic science from better funded government labs and with more international cooperation.
?What government Labs? Government funding is part of WW1.
 
I'd make a point about Britain, at least: A fair part of the upper classes of the UK were gutted in the opening weeks of the war. Now, most of them weren't scientists and the like, but they were well-educated and, one can make a strong argument, would have provided a larger consumer base for "new things". So that angle is definitely there.

Basically, though, I think the emphasis will be on improving existing things rather than building new ones...you're still going to get automotive assembly lines, for example, but the emphasis will be on building more "luxury" cars (at least in Britain, where it was cheaper to buy a house than a car for a very long time). The big thing you're looking at is a removal of "forced innovation" that wartime brings. For example, if you've got to feed an army of a million people in the field for a year, you'll innovate on the supply chain front. If you've got to deal with thousands of a given type of wound, somebody will start coming up with better treatments. There's a reason that you've got research into treatments and cures for some diseases but not others...put simply, if the market isn't there, the research won't be, and war creates lots of markets like that.
 

Deleted member 1487

I see history as a web of cause and effect. If Europe was generally more prosperous in the early 1910s (and I have learned in a history class on the USA it was--immigration to America slackened, not just because of new restrictions but also because the European economy improved--and some immigrants even returned to their homelands) it was at least in part because of specifically war-preparation industries. All the powerful nations of Europe were arming; the Great Powers were very much on a collision course, and whatever happened in Sarajevo in 1914, sooner or later some flashpoint was going to start the war so many were itching for.

Now I'd be the last to deny that there might be plenty of timelines where Europe somehow did 'muddle through' and avoided any big wars whatsoever, for decades past 1920 perhaps. But I would think all but the most improbable of these would require different conditions; the PODs would have to be decades back from each potential war fever.

Thus, when we think about "well, what if the people who OTL were essentially drafted to accelerate development of engines, radios, airframes, submarines, sub detection, trucks, tanks, alternative chemical sources, etc etc actually spent their time just as productively in civilian applications," that raises the question, why didn't they OTL? Why did the war foster such a burst of development, if development is mainly a matter of people with brains solving problems? Wartime produces a sense of urgency to be sure, but can that alone account for the rapid change of pace?

I think that we tend to underestimate how much of creativity is not just genius, but investment. The most brilliant, yet methodical and disciplined inventor, innovator, developer needs capital as well. They need funds to buy the materials and tools for the test projects; they need to be able to waste a lot of this on unsuitable early models as well as pursuing false leads that look good on paper but turn out not to be so workable after all. They need to eat while working out the bugs.

During the war, money was no object if it was the only thing standing between a nation and victory--or survival for that matter.

During the peace though--potential investors would look hard and skeptically at importunate self-named geniuses and visionaries.

So it doesn't strike me as reasonable to assume that the same people who churned out so much technical progress during the Great War were bound to accomplish as much during an alternate peace. Some would, the ones with the genius or luck to come up with something obviously workable and worth investing in on their first tries, or the ones with deeper pockets (Santos-Dumont, who pioneered both airplanes and dirigibles, had a fair-sized family fortune for instance) or better connections. Many others would not. Of the people who ITTL would not be killed or have their lives otherwise ruined as in OTL's war and associated disasters, a few would accelerate the rate of progress. So it would be better than some timeline with no war but a population like after the war. But I think slower than OTL nonetheless.

That's Charybdus; Scylla is that as I said, OTL Europe was as prosperous as it was because the richest nations were competitively arming. Presumably the possible timelines where that happened but then the arms were never used are rather few; "the one thing you can't do with bayonets is sit on them!" said Napoleon. And yet, one reason for the headlong rush to world war in my opinion is that relative prosperity due to war fever or no, OTL it still wasn't prosperous enough for many people, and part of the drive to militarism was to pre-empt rising labor unrest in the forms both of union activity and other workplace struggles, and the rise of left-wing more or less socialist politics.

So if the crowned heads and parliaments and corporate boardrooms of the Belle Epoque were all collectively wise enough to take a pass on trying to cut through their various Gordian Knots with a sword in the old-fashioned way, nevertheless Europe might wind up facing a war of a different kind, if one fine day in one or two of these countries there was actual revolution. The ways to pre-empt that danger would either be to have a civil economy so booming that working-class unrest would be assuaged and diverted by the rising tide lifting all boats--which is to say, a wonderful world of unchecked prosperity that many generations have dreamed of but few attained and none sustained for long--or the tried and true methods of brutal repression. Which I believe lead straight to the equally ancient method of seeking unity through war against some demonized foreigner or other and we are right back to OTL in my view! Where both tactics mixed together--in the name of preparing to smite the ungodly foreigner, the arms factories did a booming business and quite a few more workers did find more and better-paid work. But at the price of practically scheduling the eventual day of reckoning!

I seem to have talked myself into supporting a position I hate, that war does foster technology. I wish it were not so, but I fear it is.

Don't worry, you're not quite right about the technology aspect. Social stability is just as important to development in technology and science and I am confident in stating that war actually retards progress in many places. The Haber process was inventing before the war, but it was too expensive to develop quickly until the war. Without it you would likely see it happen 'naturally' a year or so later than OTL, but in a larger fashion thanks to extra money being available.

Money WAS an object during the war, because the competition with general spending (building existing technologies, payments to families for the death of a soldier, rebuilding damages from war, replacing over used and worn out rail lines and locomotives, etc.) that really drains money out of the sciences. Instead a very narrow section of science is funded: war applicable technologies. Furthermore an entire generation of university students were gutted in the war and instability in Europe after the fact, as well as a general mistrust of science and lack of funding for decades thereafter due to major war debts held science back. Without the war certain fields and discoveries won't happen as quickly, but the general progression of science will be faster, as it happens more broadly and the general infrastructure is built up.

In the war scientists were not recruited, rather, more money was thrown at existing teams or individuals like Haber that produced interesting ideas working on their own. Instead the new scientists who would carry the torch forward were dying in the millions in the trenches, which meant that they weren't bringing new ideas to research as they left school. Many of the very best and most motivated young men were slaughtered, leaving the remainder to pick up the pieces and deal with the civil wars and unrest.

IMHO the war held back the sciences, though it advances military applicable technologies more quickly than would be the case ITTL. That doesn't mean that by the 1930's or 40's that TTL would not have caught up or surpassed OTL, but the advances in airplanes or certain chemistry discoveries won't occur as quickly.

As to the political developments, its virtually guaranteed that by the late 10's and 20's that Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary would have had to deal with major unrest and probably had to correct their systematic deficiencies, even if it meant a bit of violence. Matters were coming to a head and the war was supposed to pave over the issues, instead the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, utterly wrecking the three empires that were getting ready for social upheaval.
 
Simplifying,without WW-I the world in 1940 is same,more or less advanced?
And if is less advanced,at what level?
1940 ATL-1925 OTL
1940 ATL-1930 OTL ?

Again,which change in fashions or pop culture?
I think that movies are the same that in OTL,but is probable that in 20s we not have flappers or "lost generation"..well all this stuff concerned a little minority,so is not much important.
I see a more great difference between America and old world in lifestyle.
A last consideration: wihout WW-I millions of peoples would live,and probably tragedies like fascism,nazism,communism,Holocaust would be not happened.
So... who cares about a little less advanced technological level???
 
And millions more wouldn't be born, due to, for example, their mother's husband / fiancé dying in the war in OTL, if they don't die then the mother doesn't meet their father.

Plus the spread of the 1918 Flu epidemic is probably curtailed since you don't have all the troops heading home to spread it around.
 
So... who cares about a little less advanced technological level???


I'm thinking about the advances in medicine alone and remembering the summertime polio epidemics...

I wonder if you'd care about "a little less advanced technological level" if you were typing your posts with a stick held between your teeth because everything below your neck is wrapped in an iron lung...
 

Deleted member 1487

Simplifying,without WW-I the world in 1940 is same,more or less advanced?
And if is less advanced,at what level?
1940 ATL-1925 OTL
1940 ATL-1930 OTL ?

Depends on the field. Theoretical fields like Physics get a major boost, while practical fields (medicine, avionics, applied chemistry) gets hindered to a degree. The large numbers of survivors and the lack of damage to economies ITTL mean that the Sciences receive more money and probably are able to make up some ground on OTL. Theory is at least 5-10 years ahead, while applied is 5-10 years back. I'm leaning to the 5 year mark.
Also militarily theory keeps progressing, especially as the political situation alters, which means some armies go in the wrong direction more than others.

Fetishizing technology, science, progress, and the future will continue and probably pick up, meaning people become less religious without the backlash of the the Great War. C.S. Lewis for instance is probably going to stay an Atheist without the war.

The social changes in Russia, Germany, and AH will likely improve those nations by the 1930s significantly, but Germany will become more militaristic with time, but will improve her army even more than OTL. Outnumbered by her foes she will focus on improving and expanding her armies, especially as Russia grows and improves. The navy will be a luxury she cannot afford and as the army opens to the middle class, the naval league will decline in favor of the army league. AH will also improve, as the Hungarians are going to get their power checked with Franz Ferdinand surviving and taking the throne. This means the military can grow in relation to its strength and not be divided between three forces. It will continue to industrialize and modernize while getting more populous, remaining an important force in the Balkans and Central Europe.
Russia will get richer, more populous, and stronger with every decade. After a liberalization period in the late 1920's the Russians will be open to expansion and will be the big boogey man on the continent.
The Ottomans will get rich and modern with oil money and Germany will play a big part in developing that.

Britain and France will decline economically and militarily vis-a-vis Central and Eastern Europe as well as the US. France and Russia will remain tight so long as Germany continues to grow, but Britain IMHO will end up fearing Russia more in the 1930's.
 
Theory is at least 5-10 years ahead, while applied is 5-10 years back. I'm leaning to the 5 year mark.

I agree,
i think that delay in some technologies is in 1940 no more that 5 year at the least.
Is also possible the development of others technology (more airship,for exemple).
The real delay could be after,for the absence of WW-II and the cold war.
In this case the gap between 2011 OTL and 2011 ATL could be 20 years at the least (2011 ATL= 1970 OTL).
However i suspect that in this timeline technologies are more sustainable,and quality of life better.
 
The point about war leading to key technologies getting heavy funding is true. And the necessity of finding a solution to a specific tactical problem will probably help to concentrate minds. But on the other hand the need for the research to be done really, really quickly and in secret will make it less efficient than peacetime research.

So while there will be some areas ahead, and some behind, I would be surprised if science as a whole was held back.

Also a lot of science is inter-related. You need breakthroughs in physics and mathematics interacting with material science breakthroughs, interacting with electronics breakthroughs, interacting with developments in industrial processes, etc to get a late 30s fighter. This effect will I think tend to limit the extent that the development of technologies diverge from OTL.
 
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