Many products and ideas we take for granted today rose to prominence during the conflict.
Ahead of Remembrance Day and the anniversary of the armistice, the Royal British Legion has produced a list of just a few of them:
Licensing laws
Four days into the war, a law was passed that effectively controlled every aspect of society.
The 1914 Defence of the Realm Act gave powers to prosecute anyone deemed to “jeopardise the success of the operations of His Majesty’s forces or to assist the enemy”.
The regulations covered the deadly serious to the seemingly trivial.
In some areas they even allowed imprisonment without trial.
Discussion of military matters was illegal and any property could be requisitioned. Whistling for taxis, kite-flying, bonfires, binoculars sales and feeding bread to wild animals were banned.
Worried that too much boozing would hamper the war effort, the government also cut the 18-hour drinking day to less than six hours. Pubs could open only from noon-2:30pm and 6:30pm-9:30pm.
In some areas there was no alcohol on Sundays and no spirits on Saturdays.
It was promised that the restrictions would be relaxed after the war, but they remained in England and Wales for 60 years, until 1988, when today’s all-day drinking law was brought in.
Zips
Sewing machine pioneer Elias Howe patented an Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure in Massachusetts in 1851 but it wasn’t until 1913 that the zip we know today was invented.
Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American electrical engineer and head designer at the Universal Fastener Company in Meadville, Pennsylvania, came up with the Separable Fastener.
The US military quickly began using zips in boots and uniforms and they were first seen in Europe when America joined the war in 1917.
Mass production began in the 1920s, mainly for boots, and Sundback’s firm Talon Zipper dominated the market for decades.
Zips were slow to catch on in clothing; it wasn’t until the 1930s that Esquire magazine hailed them as the “newest tailoring idea for men”, preventing “the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray”.
Disposable sanitary pads
First marketed by Johnson & Johnson in the US in 1896, the widespread use of disposable sanitary pads was inspired by nurses on the western front.
In 1914, researchers from Kimberly-Clark, then a small US paper firm, were touring Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.
They discovered a material made from wood pulp that was five times more absorbent than cotton.
Patented as Cellucotton, from 1917 it was used for surgical dressings for US troops. Nurses at the front began using the dressings as sanitary pads and in 1920 Kimberly-Clark launched Kotex.
They were advertised as “a wonderful sanitary absorbent which science perfected for use of our men and allied soldiers wounded in France.”
The first ad showed a recovering soldier surrounded by women carers.
The early pads were 55cm long and 9cm wide with a 22cm-long area of Cellucotton.
They were expensive; and those who could afford them were often embarrassed to ask for them from male shop workers. Kimberly-Clark introduced “honesty boxes” to boost sales.
Paper hankies
Scientists at Kimberly-Clark produced a flattened form of Cellucotton while trying to develop filters for gas masks.
The project ended when the war ended; but two years later they came up with the idea of ironing cellulose material to produce a soft tissue.
In 1924 the firm launched Kleenex, the first paper handkerchief. Initially introduced as a cold cream remover for women, by 1929 they were marketed as an alternative to the handkerchief, especially good at stopping colds from spreading germs. A year later, sales had doubled.
Pilates
Had Joseph Pilates not been interned in Britain for the war the world may have been deprived of one of its most popular fitness regimes.
Born in Monchengladbach in 1883, Pilates was a sickly child, bullied and suffering from rickets, asthma and rheumatic fever.
He was encouraged by his father, a metal-worker and fitness fanatic, to take up body-building and gymnastics.
By the age of 14 Pilates was fit and found work as a model for anatomical drawings.
He came to Britain aged 28, working as a boxer, circus performer and police self-defence trainer at Scotland Yard.
Locked up with other Germans in poor conditions at an internment camp on the Isle of Man, Pilates developed Contrologogy, a system of mind and body improvement through exercise.
He persuaded fellow inmates to keep healthy using his techniques.
Bed-bound internees used springs and straps, a forerunner of today’s apparatus, for resistance training.
Pilates went back to Germany after the war and in 1925 emigrated to the US, where he set up his Body Contrology Studio in Manhattan.
He worked into the 1960s and died in 1967 aged 83.
Sun lamps
Dr Kurt Huldschinsky was shocked by the number of children suffering from rickets in post-war Berlin.
In the winter of 1918-1919, half the city’s undernourished youngsters had the condition.
The paediatrician, a former army medic, began experimenting with ultraviolet light.
Concerned that the children were strikingly pale-skinned, he put four of them in welding goggles under mercury-quartz lamps, gave them doses of calcium and saw immediate improvements.
It was known that rickets was caused by calcium deficiency but using ultraviolet light to prompt the body to produce Vitamin D to get the mineral into bones was unheard of.
Huldschinsky’s discovery led to a surge in treatment, with clinics springing up across Germany, and brought him awards and world renown.
Sunlamps have since been used to treat skin, sleep and psychiatric disorders, burns and jaundice.
Huldschinsky, who was Jewish, fled Germany in 1934.
His work was removed from medical chronicles by the Nazis. He died in Egypt in 1940.
Daylight saving time
The idea of changing the time to get more hours of daylight was not new; but in 1905, builder William Willett began campaigning for clocks to go forward in April and back in September.
Willett – great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin whose Kent firm built hundreds of upmarket houses in London – was annoyed that his after-work rounds of golf were cut short in summer.
In July 1908, a few hundred residents of Port Arthur, Ontario, put their clocks forward an hour to start the world's first period of daylight saving time.
Several other Canadian regions did the same.
In Britain, Willett’s campaign was enthusiastically backed but in 1909 a parliamentary bill failed after opposition from farmers.
By 1916, in the midst of war, it became obvious that daylight saving time would help conserve vital electricity.
On April 30 Germany and its ally Austria beat everyone to it, turning their clocks forward by an hour.
A few weeks later Britain passed the Summer Time Act and France and many other countries followed.
After the war, most European nations reverted to standard time but in Britain it was kept, becoming known as British Summer Time.
During the Second World War, Britain adopted double summer time, two hours ahead of GMT. William Willett did not live to see his dream realised. He died of flu in 1915 aged 58.
Tea bags
The tea bag was inadvertently invented in 1908 by New York merchant Thomas Sullivan.
As a sales gimmick he sent samples of his leaves in small silk bags to customers, who wrongly assumed they were meant to be popped into a cup of hot water.
It worked; people loved the idea but some complained the silk did not allow tea to infuse quickly enough.
During the war, Dresden tea firm Teekanne adapted the idea, sending hand-made gauze teabags to the front.
Soldiers called them “tea bombs”.
ommercial production began in Germany and the US in the 1920s and gauze was replaced by perforated paper.
But the idea took decades to catch on in Britain.
Pioneered by Tetley in 1953, tea bags made slow progress, with just three per cent of tea sold in bags by 1960.
Today it is 96 per cent.
Wristwatches
Watches for the wrist had been around since the 18th century but were almost exclusively used by women.
Any man wearing one would be seen as “effeminate”.
The war banished that sexual stereotype for ever, turning them into a mass market product.
British army officers began using wristwatches on colonial service in the late 19th century but they were essentially pocket watches secured with a strap.
Purpose-built wristwatches known as “wristlet watches” began to appear in the early 20th century.
In 1914 it was still considered “improper” for civilian men to wear a wristwatch.
But synchronization of military action made knowing the right time essential and the wristwatch was too practical to ignore.
They were designed to withstand the rigours of combat, with luminous dials and “unbreakable” glass.
By 1916 the phrase “a proper wristwatch” was often used to describe a smart-looking officer.
One manufacturer even produced a “Trench Watch” and from 1917 the army issued them to lieutenants and captains.
Soldiers returning home normalised the wristwatch for civilians.
In 1917 the British Horological Institute said: “The wristlet watch was little used by the sterner sex before the war, but now is seen on the wrist of nearly every man in uniform and of many men in civilian attire.”
The era of the pocket watch was over. By 1930, the wrist-to-pocket-watch ratio was 50 to 1.
Vegetarian sausages
The deputy mayor of Cologne was desperate to help the food crisis that gripped Germany in 1916 – so he created a vegetarian sausage.
Baker’s grandson Konrad Adenauer had no meat to work with, so took soya, flour, corn, barley and ground rice and came up with the Kölner Wurst. Adenauer's creation was later named the Friedenswurst or “peace sausage”.
Adenauer became Germany’s legendary post-war leader, restoring the country as a world power with his brand of market-driven liberal democracy.
As an opponent of the Nazis he lived in seclusion for much of the Second World War, using political skills to avoid being sent to a concentration camp.
Stainless steel
Steelworker’s son Harry Brearley was on a mission – to create a metal that could resist heat.
In 1912, a small arms manufacturer asked his company to find a material for rifle barrels that would not be eroded by high temperatures.
Luckily, Brearley was a metallurgy obsessive.
After leaving school aged 12 to become a laboratory bottle washer at the Sheffield steelworks where his father worked, he went to night classes to learn his trade.
At the time cutlery was made from silver or plated with nickel and had to be polished. Sharp knives were made from carbon steel and would rust.
Brearley found his new alloy was not just rust- and heat-resistant but also repelled household acids such as vinegar and lemon juice.
He immediately realised the implications for the cutlery industry.
After months of experiments adding chromium to steel in August 1913 he created a new alloy, which he called Rustless Steel.
An old school friend who had been helping him at Brown Firth Research lab suggested he call it Stainless Steel.
It was quickly adopted by the British military for use in guns.
Similar alloys were developed in Germany and the US, but Brearley is regarded as the father of stainless steel.
After falling out with his employers over patent rights, he became a director of another steel firm. He died in 1948 aged 77.
Military and medical advances
The war saw many military and medical advances.
They included aircraft carriers, steel helmets, flare pistols, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, flame throwers, poison gas, tracer bullets, interrupter guns (to shoot through aircraft propellers), depth charges, two-way ground-to-air radios, hydrophones (for listening for submarines) and geophones (for listening to tunnelling).
In medicine, blood banks, mobile X-rays, inoculations, new surgical techniques and the Thomas splint for shattered limbs rose to prominence.
Source: Read Full Article