It's most probably the first large-scale international industrial war.
We have the groundwork laid in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05.
You have the use of barbed wire, you have the use of machine guns, the use and
interception of telecommunications, including wireless communications.
I'm not sure if the British military actually learned lessons from that war.
Perhaps, at the beginning of the War, the British military didn't necessarily
realise the importance of scientists, and the contribution they could make to
the war effort.
It wasn't really until sort of about 1915 that they started to realise that
scientists should perhaps be held back from frontline service, and, indeed, that
unless they had some sort of core central management and a concentrated effort,
they just weren't going to be able to win the war.
The First World War is quite commonly referred to as 'the Chemists' War'.
I'd argue that it's the Chemists and Engineers' War, but chemistry did very
much come to the fore.
Most of what they were developing were either poisonous gases for use in warfare,
or explosives.
One side moves and the other side responds, so, while the Germans were the first to use
poison gas, the British very quickly responded, two-fold:
firstly, they started developing their own chemical weapons; secondly, they also
started to develop countermeasures.
The first, initial countermeasures were particularly crude --
soldiers would pee on a handkerchief and put that to their nose and face, and that
was a very, very, very rough antidote.
An Oxford physiologist, a medical researcher here,
John Scott Haldene was sent to the Western Front by Lord Kitchener to investigate what
gas was being used, and he identified it as chlorine gas pretty rapidly, and how
this might be countermeasured. He developed the first practical gas mask,
which was being used on the Western Front by late 1915 and early 1916.
He was an expert on ether gases, but apparently he tested on himself and he
also tested on his young son, who survived and went on to become a chemist himself.
The First World War was very much the birth of signals intelligence, or 'Sigint',
as it's sometimes called. We have the establishment of Room 40 in the Admiralty,
which is essentially a centre for intercepted messages, and for decrypting and codebreaking.
They were able to intercept the Zimmerman Telegram, which is quite well known,
which was Germany essentially offering that, if Mexico goes to war with the US, they would
give them back Arizona, Texas and New Mexico after the war.
It was intercepted by the British on supposedly neutral cables that went
through London. It was really the Zimmerman Telegram that led to the US entering into
World War One. And that was the result of work done by the British Admiralty
codebreakers in London.
Most of the codebreakers were classicists.
It's not really until the Second World War that you start to get mathematicians and
scientists working in codebreaking. But the information that they're receiving is a
result of scientific research and technological developments that
exist during the War. I think that is where you start to see the changing role of science:
science in society; science in industry; science in the military.
You start to see that maybe that complex division between pure and applied science
starts to lean more towards applied science, and starts to lean more towards a complex
and, perhaps not entirely ethical, relationship between science and industry,
and military needs.
A lot of the people who worked on the weapons didn't necessarily perhaps have
a chance to reflect upon what they had done until after the war.
Fritz Haber, known as the father of chemical weapons and chemical warfare,
didn't seem to have any concerns himself, personally, but his wife, who was also a
scientific researcher, killed herself a month after he'd first witnessed and supervised
the introduction of chlorine gas on the Western Front at the Second Battle of Ypres.
He died in the 1930s, so he didn't actually go on to live to see most of his extended
Jewish family being killed by the gases that his research institute had developed
during and after the First World War.
It's probably very much the end of the Edwardian Age, and the birthplace, maybe
not literally, the 20th century, and of the modern age:
most obviously, the military-industrial complex, concerns about security and
privacy in terms of communications, and ethical concerns about scientists working
for the military, or with the military, and working in industry.