Innovation
From Trench Warfare to Trench Coat? *duh*
I was happily taking notes about the transformation of the Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition into that paper’s Paris Edition in the years after World War I —a subject I’ve spent quite a bit of time on during the last couple of years. I wasn’t expecting to learn much that was new, but I have…
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The Birth of the Microphone
Recently, while reading a history of the German revolutions of 1918 and 1919,* I ran across this sentence about the events of November 10, 1918: “With the meeting interrupted, the soldiers going wild in the lower rows and the workers in the upper rows engaged in bewildered discussions with each other, there was feverish negotiation…
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The Puckle Gun (Not to be Confused with Pickleball)
Recently My Own True Love and I were discussing machine guns over breakfast. (What, you’ve never discussed armaments over an omelet and an order of hash browns?) In the course of settling the question of whether the Gatling gun or the Maxim gun was the first machine gun,* we discovered an ancestor of the machine…
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