Was the machine gun the most revolutionary weapon?

[dead0man]

Good points, both of you.  I'll add some more options.....

Gunpowder, totally changed how wars are fought....but the change was fairly slow.

Quality roads, Rome could move men and sh**t around their empire at speeds contemporary powers could only dream of.

Rail, played huge roles in the US Civil War, WWI and to a lesser extent WWII.

Flight, obvious.

E=mc², also obvious.

Iron working, the saddle, the stirrup, the bow/arrow, hygiene, rifling, domestication of the horse/camel/elephant, math...so many good options.

[dead0man]

I would say the gun itself.

Let me put it this way: It's objectively easier for a random person to learn how to use a gun effectively then to sword-fight effectively. This created a dynamic where any peasant could kill a trained and experienced knight with relative ease. This in turn created the need for vast conscript armies in which the elite troops weren't that much better then the recruits.

You can see how this leads into other political changes as the governments become more dependent on the will of the average citizen to fight the war.

The funny part is that the people that thought you had to spend a lot less time training soldiers 'cause now they all got guns were so freaking wrong.  Sure, it's fairly easy to train somebody how to load and fire a gun, but it's pretty easy to teach a dude to swing a sword too.  You train that dude with a gun and his 9 buddies for several months, they can now take on 50 dudes that know how to point and shoot and not much else and win.  No matter how well trained 10 dudes with swords were, they were going to have hard time beating 50 dudes with swords.  10 dudes with guns and training can take on a force 10 times their size.

It's kind of stupid that it took us several hundred years to figure that out (and many places still haven't figured that out).

[dead0man]

Compared to a bow and arrow, working a gun is relatively simple. Comparing a ranged weapon to a melee weapon doesn't make much sense.

The second part, sure.  The first part, I'm not so sure of.  Go to the deepest darkest Amazon (assume someplace that's never used the bow), hand several of them bows and arrows, hand another group a bunch of modern assault rifles and magazines.  Explain that these are weapons and the first group to figure theirs out gets some white women and soda pop.  It seems to me the bow/arrow would be much easier to deduce it's use.  Sure, if you give them both a tiny bit of training the gun group would be much more effective, but that doesn't make it "simple".

[dead0man]

Indeed, good points both.  The telegraph and the radio were huge, more so the second I think, especially if you put more weight towards tactics over strategy.  Computers/internet is coming into it's own, but it's all really just an extension of the two you mentioned.

and they're all just an extension of electricity.  So maybe that should be mentioned too.



and everything starts with language, so throw verbal communication on the pile as well....but that started before we were even Homos, hell before we were mammals...so take that back off the pile I guess.