Technology throughout the twentieth century was growing rapidly. New ideas sparked out of the water to try to modernize every aspect of the world. In world war 1 new types of methods were needed to, obviously, fight. If the technological advances world war 1 had were not available it would not have ended the way it did. They were extremely important to the impact of the war and the cause of the millions of deaths. The use of technology in the war was beneficial. We were/are so technologically advanced and it is a very good thing.
Tanks
A seemingly unwinnable and unexpected war of trenches in 1914 had to be dealt with when the "war of movement" was expected by most European generals. Having machine guns reinforcing massed rifle from fire the defending trenches made attackers move down by the thousands before they could even get to the other side of "no-man's land." Powered by a small internal combustion engine burning diesel or gas, a heavily armored vehicle advanced in the face of overwhelming small arms fire. Once one added some serious guns and replaced the wheels with armored treads to hand rough terrain, and the tank was born. This solution presented itself in the form of an automobile and took the world by storm after the 1900s.
The first tank was British Mark 1. It was designed in 1915 and first saw combat at the Somme in September 1916. Although 21 tanks were produced in the unwieldy A7v model, Germans never got around to large-scale tank production in WW1.
The first flamethrower was first used by German troops near Verdun in February 1915. The Byzantines and Chinese had already used weapons that hurled flaming material in the medieval periods. The first design for a modern flamethrower was submitted to the German Army by Richard Fiedler in 1901, and then was tested by the Germans with an experimental detachment in 1911. The true potential of the flamethrower was realized during trench warfare. Flamethrowers could "neutralize" enemy soldiers in confined spaces without inflicting structural damage unlike grenades.
A lot of Futile Activity was involved in the Great War. During the Battle of Bolimov the Germans pioneered the large-scale use of chemical weapons with a gas attach on Russian positions on January 31, 1915, but low temperatures froze the poison (xylyl bromide) in the shells. On April 22, 1915, near Ypres, the first successful use of chemical weapons occurred. When Germans sprayed chlorine gas from large cylinders towards trenches held by French colonial troops.
Typically for the first World War, the poison gas did not yield a decisive result. The Germans were slow to follow up with infantry attacks, the gas dissipated, and the Allied defenses were restored. Before long, of course, the Allies were using poison gas too, and over the course of the war both sides restored to increasingly insidious compounds to beat gas masks, another new invention; thus the overall result was a huge increase in misery for not much change in the strategic situation.
In 1920, Kimberly Clark introduced the first commercial sanitary napkin, Kotex ("cotton "+"texture").
It was going rough at first, no publications would carry advertisements for such a product. Women traditionally improvised all kinds of disposable or washable undergarments to deal with their monthly period, all the way back to softened papyrus in ancient Egypt. It was not long before French nurses figured out that clean absorbent cellulose bandages were far superior to any predecessors. British and American nurses picked up on the habit. It was not until 1926 that Montgomery Ward broke the barrier, carrying Kotex napkins in its popular catalogue.
As we know, millions of soldiers suffered grievous, life-threatening injuries, and there was obviously a huge need during the Great War for the new wonder weapon of medical diagnostics, the X-ray -- but these required very large machines that were both too bulky and too delicate to move.
Marie Curie was set to work creating mobile X-ray stations for the French military immediately after the outbreak of war; by October 1914, she had installed X-ray machines in several cars and small trucks which toured smaller surgical stations at the front. By the end of the war there were eighteen "radiologic cars" or "Little Curries" in operation. Fredrick Jones later developed an even smaller portable X-ray machine in 1919.
Poison gas is no longer used. It is only used by rogue states but it is now deadlier than it was before. The whole bulky, slow vehicles carrying machine guns with relatively light armor and no reliability idea for tanks has changed to super heavy armored vehicles with a single machine gun, very reliable, and relatively fast. Weapons continue to change, technology is advancing, and to be completely honest airplanes and submarines have seen the greatest changes. They changed the nature of the war during World War II, but that can be talked about another time. War has not changed, weapons however, have.
