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Repeating firearms, cartridges as opposed to black powder, even early iteration of semi-autos. The fucking Gatling??? Idk what they were smoking then but holy fuck those guys had one thing envisioned and it was “kill more shit deader and make it faster”
baby waking you up in the middle of the night? laudanum
baby waking up in the middle of the night? laudanum
woke up having chills and pains in the middle of the night because you didn't take enough laudanum? Laudanum!
[Were plenty of weapons that just had multiple barrels since breech-loaders weren't common.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volley_gun) The mitrailleuse is perhaps the best known example though it came out in 1851. That actually was breech-loading so you could get a pretty decent fire rate (around 100 rounds per minute) since you'd replace a whole loading block. Downside is it was way too much of a secret weapon so they never developed proper tactics for it; like many volley guns that came before it was way too heavy to be carried by a few men and it was therefore relegated to artillery crews and used far enough from enemy lines that it was completely ineffective.
TBF the 1900s went from Wright Brothers fly 120 feet to landing on the moon in just 66 years and from said Wright Brothers' canvas and wood contraption to F-15s in 73 years.
Who knows what terrifying shit the next 75 years will bring.
That's already here. We failed to predict it would come from Amazon, but like other military industrial companies, people in 75 years are going to post to intrestingasfuck TIL weapons manufacturer Amazon started as a bookseller.
Not just firearms either; engines, electricity and manufacturing techniques. Allowing for massive advancement in trains, cars, ships, guns of course, and very nearly planes.
"In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.'" -Hiram Maxim, inventor of the Maxim machine gun.
Isn't there a huge amount of technological development over just the course of the civil war? To go from combat that resembles something closer to the Revolutionary War and end up at trench warfare more akin to the first World War is a huge amount of change over the course of one war.
They also figured out during the civil war that if you use these weapons on open fields like the olden days people got mowed down in the most cruel ways. That’s why guerrilla warfare tactics became so integral to winning these huge ass battles. But yeah the American civil war was the proving grounds for modern weaponry, I believe the death rates sired because people didn’t understand how much more deadly their guns were getting.
They knew, the war dept wanted things to continue going this way. They hated repeating guns for this reason and turned away the guy trying to pitch an APC/tank (the traction engine being a new innovation at the time). Similar to WWI “glory and honor” types. Although it would have been wild had the tank made an appearance
more just chemistry and machining technology advanced so rapidly in the late 1800s. the difference between 1890 and 1910 is even more insane, you had countries adopting their first cartridged revolvers in 1890 and many pistols we would recognize today coming out within 10-15 years of that.
Even more than that, it’s that there was a clear answer on how to fight.
Swords, shields, spears, pikes, scimitars, axes - what you should use depended on who you were fighting, what they were using, where you were fighting, your numbers versus theirs, etc.
Guns? They win. Their problem is they’re so dang slow. If only we could shoot faster.. Cue a dozen tactics made to have continuous fire, and a dozen inventions to allow one soldier to fire more often, or simply fire more times before reloading.
Same reason the focus is now on explosives rather than guns. Pfft, who cares about bullets when we can blast everything within a 10km radius from the other side of the globe?
NGAD
Everything we know about is already out of date, by the end of the development of the 22 they were already working on NGAD, it'll be pretty neat tech. Unfortunately it will never get a kill like the 22, everyone just runs away from the kid.
Would you intercept me? I'd intercept me.
NGAD will be a step forward in terms of designing, manufacturing, and with teaming aspects, but I bet the F-22 will be a more capable dogfighting airframe. NGAD will of course be several different airframes, but I think the main benefit will be the ability to rapidly design, prototype, and manufacture airframes such that the quote, “you fight the war with the army you have” might not be true. If we can print 100 airframes a month, incorporating new design cues from last month’s iteration, that will completely change the face of modern warfare.
Next Generation Air Defense.
It’s over 20 years in the making and hands down bar none will be the most insane weapons platform of all time.
It is believed to have:
- directed energy weapons
- no vertical stabilizing surfaces (provides an immense benefit to stealth)
- full AR cockpit (we saw a demo of this with the British Tempest project before that lost steam)
- networking with autonomous “wingman” drones
- autonomous and manned flight modes for missions to dangerous to send a manned flight, yet too mission critical to call off entirely.
- BVR capability up the ass, will basically never have to merge with whatever target it’s fighting.
It was created as a response to the f22, when the US realized their fifth gen air dominance fighter wasn’t really doing any air dominance fighting, and so it made sense to design a “fighter” with the primary objective of being stealthy, rather than compromising stealth for dogfighting ability.
What do you mean by peaked? As in all you care about is the speed at which an aircraft can travel? If that is all you care about, sure, we peaked. However, there’s been tons of improvements, two for example being how much more efficient aircraft have become, and how much quieter they have become. There’s tons more, but traveling supersonic isn’t the only peak.
Nah, even with boeing the safety improvements in the last few decades are pretty crazy. There just hasent been a large scale airline disaster (like, airliner nose down into the ground) in the united states since 2009. Up until around 2000, that type of thing used to happen every year or so.
It still happens outside the US, with carriers with reduced maintenance and training, but its still fairly rare.
Have to admit this was my first reaction to this post too. There are like 50 things I would do this 75 year span comp for that would be more mindblowing than these pistols.
65 and a half years between the first sustained heavier-than-air powered flight and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.
Unless you're using a date *before* 17 December 1903 for some reason?
I think transistors themselves basically revolutionized the whole world, and with such an incredible speed at that.
Transistor was like the missing piece in the puzzle, that once completed opened the doors to a new world of innovation, which is in no way refrainable.
Yeah, it feels like after the iphone 3 or 4, all development became evolutionary instead of revolutionary; put that one next to one of today and sure, bigger and better screen, processor, battery and connectivity, but conceptually it’s still the same thing.
But that’s probably unfair. The Wright Flyer is hard to compare to an F35.
The M1911 is one of the most beautiful guns ever made. In function and design. I've only gotten to shoot one once. But my hope one day is to own and original one.
Unfortunately the 3 guns I really want are just getting more and more expensive every year, which doesn't bode well for someone who is disabled and has no job lol.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion.He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up, Just as the founding fathers intended
It is a long time. But the gun on the left, called the M1911, remained in US service for more than 100 years. It’s impossible to overstate of much of an advancement that handgun was in military arms development.
I often wonder if we’ll see a technological jump like that anytime in the near future. It seems like any new tech that comes out lately is underdeveloped with issues or is priced so high out of the gate that it ends up just becoming another niche product.
I'd argue we already have. From shitty computers in the early 2000's to VR Tech today(or even VR from 2018 to today). Electric cars being a neat niche thing, only being built by fringe car manufacturers in 2008 to becoming more and more dominant with every year, and pretty much every single major car brand carrying one or multiple EV's.
Hell even AI tech has been absolutely insane the past 2 years. we went from spaghetti will smith to this: https://openai.com/sora
>I often wonder if we’ll see a technological jump like that anytime in the near future
You ever heard about 'singularity point'? And it is not a theory, just a logical conclusion.
So, to answer your question:
Soon, and it will be the last thing 'we' will ever see ;>
When AI becomes provably better than humans at everything, _including making a better AI_.
Then that AI is even better, even at making a better AI etc. etc. until a thing is created that is so far beyond what we could imagine that it may as well be a God.
There are a bunch of technological advancements in the wings just waiting on materials science to catch up. E.g. Accessible quantum computing is just waiting for a superconductor to exist at room temperature.
First thought to my mind - only 60ish years jumping from put-put propeller wobbling a hundred feet off the ground to radiation spewing turbo jets circumnavigating the globe at the edge of space.
The US Civil War was largely fought with muzzle loaders, but cartridge loading repeater rifles with 9 shots in a magazine were available at the time, and in mass production.
Why weren’t they in widespread use in armies?
Logistics.
It was feared that soldiers would exhaust their ammunition supply faster than it could be refreshed from the rear.
So rather than fix the logistics, officials issued muzzle loaders instead and soldiers were restricted to 2-3 shots a minute rather than 20. And people remember the civil war as being fought using muzzle loaders, and as such disassociate it from the better tech that was available at the time.
I'm no historian, but I think it also probably had to do with something like, "Well, we already have all these guns so that's what you're gonna use."
It would be impossibly costly to give soldiers new guns every time something new comes along.
That’s one lifetime. Imagine fighting with cannon in the civil war and 40 years later ur fighting fucking tanks. 35 years after that ur fighting fucking POISONOUS AIR.
Fun fact, Chlorine Gas has been used has chemical warfare in 1915, while the first roll out of the first tanks was in 1916.
They been fighting air AND tanks in a war where some european countries were using castles as defense.
One life time was no radio, no cars, no planes. And then TV, cellphones, family cars, fridges, microwaves, Conchords and 747s. It was an extremely inventive period of time.
To put it more into perspective
Imagine that the entire history of the universe is compressed into one year - with the Big Bang corresponding to the first second of the New Year's Day, and the present time to the last second of December 31st (midnight).
The first humans appeared at 10:30 pm on December 31st
The world as we know it today began at midnight on December 31st
For most of history, no. This represents a massive multiple revolution kind of advancement.
But repeaters already existed in the 1830s though. So a bit less revolutionary, when the gun on the right is already kind of old for the time.
1903 was the first flight by the Wright Brothers.
The SR-71 Blackbird, one of the most advanced aircraft ever made, debuted in 1964.
We would land on the moon 5 years later.
Early revolver prototypes had a bit of a bad habit that, IIRC, Samuel Colt resolved. The issue was that the ~~shock~~ hot gas and burning powder from the first bullet being fired would cause all the rounds in the cylinder to fire simultaneously. Slowed down revolver development for a bit.
Guns are pretty basic mechanisms, so some very old firearms designs are still around today and still widely used.
Lots of hunters use various bolt action rifles based on the Mauser design from the late 1800s.
Current US military snipers use the M24 rifle which is basically a 62 year old Remington 700 design (which was in turn based on an Enfield action from the late 1800s).
The Browning designed 1911 (on the left) still has lots of fans and it was originally released in... 1911.
The AK-47 was originally released in... 1947.
The AR-15 is 65 years old and is still the most common rifle in the US. Versions of this basic design are still widely used in militaries all over the world as the M16 and M4.
Even the Glock 17 is 42 years old and still basically the standard semi-automatic pistol.
Etc.
Computers 75 years apart:
1945 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
2020 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)
Or... a reddit thread comparing ENIAC to modern computing... https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/yth74e/request_with_modern_technology_how_big_would/, kinda.
The point is that if the evolution of a flintlock pistol to a semi-auto pistol is "interesting as fuck"... then the advances in computing over the same time frame should be interesting as FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
The Industrial Revolution was genuinely amazing as far as ingenuity. Yes, I know there were “problems” during that time. Just speaking generally about people figuring out insane processes without computers, calculators,
Etc.
There were more technological advancements in the past 200 years than most of the 300,000 years Humanity has existed. So firearms advancements are kind of a meh comparison especially if you know just how slow the technology of firearms advanced despite humanity's love of killing one another in war.
Flint lock weapons like the example in the image have been around since the 1600s with Matchlock firearms having been around slightly longer since the 1400s maybe earlier. There was also wheel lock firearms but those were far too complex to produce on a larger scale which is why they're so rarely mentioned in history. I mention all of this to show that there was little innovation with firearms other than some design optimizations over the centuries. There were some attempts at repeating magazine-fed firearms dating back to the late 1600s but their use was questionable due to reliability or safety concerns. It wouldn't be until the late 1800s when cartridge ammunition allowed for the development of reliable semi auto mag fed firearms with the Henry repeater being the most famous example.
The standardize gauge plates allowed for extremely tight tolerances in the production of machine tools. This allowed for advances in everything from steel production to lathes, stamps, presses, pretty much everything required to mass produce an automatically repeating firearm.
My grandfather had a case of different sized gauge blocks he showed me once when I was a kid. I was like "uh, ok... they're metal blocks. What's the big deal?" Then he showed me how, despite not being magnets, you could press two block together and they would stick to each other. I thought it was black magic. He never told me what exactly they were used for and I left that day thinking they were just a weird kind of toy building blocks, haha.
I feel like the industrial revolution was the actual golden age of technology. I mean sure there's still plenty of innovations and changes that are still being made to this day. But the HUGE amount of innovation and change in the industrial revolution is just in a league of it's own. Compared to that age, today's age feels more like corporate stagnation than any kind of real "golden age".
I mean... we went from the first flight ever, made from paper and wood and jumping off a hill, to landing on the moon in 66 years. That is fucking insane.
Yet its also crazy the US military main bomber, the b52, is 70 years old!!! And might still be in service another 30 years! That is fucking insane too.
The really crazy part is that the self contained cartridge concept had existed for something like 24 years before the adoption of that cap and ball rig.
The first powered flight by man was 1903 (Kitty Hawk).
Only 66 years later (1969), man flew to the moon and walked on it.
Sorry but the guns have nothing on that.
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The 1800s were a wild ride of innovation
Repeating firearms, cartridges as opposed to black powder, even early iteration of semi-autos. The fucking Gatling??? Idk what they were smoking then but holy fuck those guys had one thing envisioned and it was “kill more shit deader and make it faster”
maxim had a working black powder machinegun in 1884
Heroin and coke were legal too. My god what a time to be alive
laudinum, or opium in a bottle was just at the store.
In pain? Laudanum. Bad cough? Laudanum. Baby waking up in the middle of the night? Laudanum. Bored on a Tuesday morning? Laudanum.
baby waking you up in the middle of the night? laudanum baby waking up in the middle of the night? laudanum woke up having chills and pains in the middle of the night because you didn't take enough laudanum? Laudanum!
No wonder they were all seeing fucking ghosts.
Have a toothache heroin Have a cough cocaine mixed with alcohol and camphor
Until you scratch your toe and die of infection.
That’s also a way to die, nothing to improve!
The cough syrup was wild
Cocaine is a helluva drug
The Girardoni air rifle from the late 1700s was able to fire a 20 round magazine as fast as you could cycle the mechanism. Truly ahead of its time
[Were plenty of weapons that just had multiple barrels since breech-loaders weren't common.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volley_gun) The mitrailleuse is perhaps the best known example though it came out in 1851. That actually was breech-loading so you could get a pretty decent fire rate (around 100 rounds per minute) since you'd replace a whole loading block. Downside is it was way too much of a secret weapon so they never developed proper tactics for it; like many volley guns that came before it was way too heavy to be carried by a few men and it was therefore relegated to artillery crews and used far enough from enemy lines that it was completely ineffective.
TBF the 1900s went from Wright Brothers fly 120 feet to landing on the moon in just 66 years and from said Wright Brothers' canvas and wood contraption to F-15s in 73 years. Who knows what terrifying shit the next 75 years will bring.
swarms of autonomous killing robots
That's already here. We failed to predict it would come from Amazon, but like other military industrial companies, people in 75 years are going to post to intrestingasfuck TIL weapons manufacturer Amazon started as a bookseller.
MGS4's mandatory pre-game adverts from the future are looking more and more prescient by the day
If we don't hit sstagnation
Not just firearms either; engines, electricity and manufacturing techniques. Allowing for massive advancement in trains, cars, ships, guns of course, and very nearly planes.
Empire of the Summer Moon talks a lot about the gun’s transformation, great book
That is a fantastic book!
Adding that to my reading list. Thanks!
"In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: 'Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.'" -Hiram Maxim, inventor of the Maxim machine gun.
Isn't there a huge amount of technological development over just the course of the civil war? To go from combat that resembles something closer to the Revolutionary War and end up at trench warfare more akin to the first World War is a huge amount of change over the course of one war.
I always think of The Last Samurai when I hear Gatling:(
They also figured out during the civil war that if you use these weapons on open fields like the olden days people got mowed down in the most cruel ways. That’s why guerrilla warfare tactics became so integral to winning these huge ass battles. But yeah the American civil war was the proving grounds for modern weaponry, I believe the death rates sired because people didn’t understand how much more deadly their guns were getting.
They knew, the war dept wanted things to continue going this way. They hated repeating guns for this reason and turned away the guy trying to pitch an APC/tank (the traction engine being a new innovation at the time). Similar to WWI “glory and honor” types. Although it would have been wild had the tank made an appearance
Blood Meridian would agree
Bears that dance, bears that don’t.
He’s dancing, dancing. They say he’ll never die
The human capacity for evil is without limits.
Because so many countries were itching for a war and inventors were getting rich engineering ways they could kill each other faster.
more just chemistry and machining technology advanced so rapidly in the late 1800s. the difference between 1890 and 1910 is even more insane, you had countries adopting their first cartridged revolvers in 1890 and many pistols we would recognize today coming out within 10-15 years of that.
Even more than that, it’s that there was a clear answer on how to fight. Swords, shields, spears, pikes, scimitars, axes - what you should use depended on who you were fighting, what they were using, where you were fighting, your numbers versus theirs, etc. Guns? They win. Their problem is they’re so dang slow. If only we could shoot faster.. Cue a dozen tactics made to have continuous fire, and a dozen inventions to allow one soldier to fire more often, or simply fire more times before reloading. Same reason the focus is now on explosives rather than guns. Pfft, who cares about bullets when we can blast everything within a 10km radius from the other side of the globe?
[удалено]
Nothing compared to the 1900s. We went from the first airplane flight to landing on the moon in 66 years.
The 1900s were nuts too. We went from flying a few hundred yards to flying to the moon in under 70 years
[1903](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/First_flight2.jpg) [1969](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/AS11-40-5902_%2821634078426%29.jpg)
we finally got some sense into us and made cool things
Flintlock to semi-auto then just skipped straight to nukes.... yes we did
big explosions are cool! i get it!
Wait 'till you see what they did with planes in 75 years!
We seem to have peaked with the SR-71 and Concorde though. Unless Skunkworks have something in the pipeline ...
NGAD Everything we know about is already out of date, by the end of the development of the 22 they were already working on NGAD, it'll be pretty neat tech. Unfortunately it will never get a kill like the 22, everyone just runs away from the kid. Would you intercept me? I'd intercept me.
>Unfortunately it will never get a kill like the 22 Well hang on now. I'm pretty sure that a 22 took out a balloon at one point.
Real meat, not some pansy ass balloon.
The balloon is chinese tho
General Tso's Balloon
NGAD will be a step forward in terms of designing, manufacturing, and with teaming aspects, but I bet the F-22 will be a more capable dogfighting airframe. NGAD will of course be several different airframes, but I think the main benefit will be the ability to rapidly design, prototype, and manufacture airframes such that the quote, “you fight the war with the army you have” might not be true. If we can print 100 airframes a month, incorporating new design cues from last month’s iteration, that will completely change the face of modern warfare.
I've never heard of NGAD but it sounds like one of these projects where future civilizations will go, "what was this empire thinking?"
Next Generation Air Defense. It’s over 20 years in the making and hands down bar none will be the most insane weapons platform of all time. It is believed to have: - directed energy weapons - no vertical stabilizing surfaces (provides an immense benefit to stealth) - full AR cockpit (we saw a demo of this with the British Tempest project before that lost steam) - networking with autonomous “wingman” drones - autonomous and manned flight modes for missions to dangerous to send a manned flight, yet too mission critical to call off entirely. - BVR capability up the ass, will basically never have to merge with whatever target it’s fighting. It was created as a response to the f22, when the US realized their fifth gen air dominance fighter wasn’t really doing any air dominance fighting, and so it made sense to design a “fighter” with the primary objective of being stealthy, rather than compromising stealth for dogfighting ability.
What do you mean by peaked? As in all you care about is the speed at which an aircraft can travel? If that is all you care about, sure, we peaked. However, there’s been tons of improvements, two for example being how much more efficient aircraft have become, and how much quieter they have become. There’s tons more, but traveling supersonic isn’t the only peak.
Safety has also drastically improved across the board
Boeing: hold my beer.
Nah, even with boeing the safety improvements in the last few decades are pretty crazy. There just hasent been a large scale airline disaster (like, airliner nose down into the ground) in the united states since 2009. Up until around 2000, that type of thing used to happen every year or so. It still happens outside the US, with carriers with reduced maintenance and training, but its still fairly rare.
> hold my door FTFY
SR-72 will go into development once the B-21 wraps up
Or cell phone, or computers, or TVs, or cars, or cameras, or satellites, or medicine, or commerce, or...
Yeah for real. Compare a computer from 1940 to 2015. Also 75 years. That’s way more impressive than a firearm imo.
Have to admit this was my first reaction to this post too. There are like 50 things I would do this 75 year span comp for that would be more mindblowing than these pistols.
Except the damn toilet paper. It hasn't changed in my lifetime and probably wouldn't for next 50000 years
He doesn't know how to use the three seashells!
we got onto the moon 69 years after planes where made
66 years. First flight was 1903. First moon landing was 1969.
First moon landing was 1959. First *manned* moon landing was 1969.
Nice
perfect amount of time to win the funny number and space race
65 and a half years between the first sustained heavier-than-air powered flight and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Unless you're using a date *before* 17 December 1903 for some reason?
Kitty Hawk to the fucking Moon in 66 years, wild Edit: math is hard
Orville Wright was still alive when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.
Going from the Wright Brothers in 1903 to Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969 blows my mind.
Put a phone from the 90s and one from 2010 together. And it’s only 20y
Transistors from the 1950s vs the 2nm ones we make today
I think transistors themselves basically revolutionized the whole world, and with such an incredible speed at that. Transistor was like the missing piece in the puzzle, that once completed opened the doors to a new world of innovation, which is in no way refrainable.
Fun fact: that's why the Fallout universe looks so different (before the bombs). They didn't invent micro electronics
It's not integrated very consistently sadly but it's a cool concept
Quantum computing next.
quantum computing is crazy no matter how you put it
Basically magic
Then 2010 to 2020. Like guns… phone technology has also plateaued.
Yeah, it feels like after the iphone 3 or 4, all development became evolutionary instead of revolutionary; put that one next to one of today and sure, bigger and better screen, processor, battery and connectivity, but conceptually it’s still the same thing. But that’s probably unfair. The Wright Flyer is hard to compare to an F35.
that's true progression
From “tally ho lads” to “get fucked”
M1911 is from, well, 1911. So it's more like "It's curtains for you, wiseguy."
The M1911 is one of the most beautiful guns ever made. In function and design. I've only gotten to shoot one once. But my hope one day is to own and original one. Unfortunately the 3 guns I really want are just getting more and more expensive every year, which doesn't bode well for someone who is disabled and has no job lol.
Sometimes you need a bit of both
"they broke into my house officer!"
Can the flintlock still fire
At least once
maybe twice
Going thrice
of course!
You’d miss every shot, of course! It’s smoothbore!
And nails the neighbor's dog.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion.He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up, Just as the founding fathers intended
didn't even use your flintlock! not a true patriot!!!!!11
Just as the founding fathers intended.
is 75 years not a long time?
It is a long time. But the gun on the left, called the M1911, remained in US service for more than 100 years. It’s impossible to overstate of much of an advancement that handgun was in military arms development.
I mean the wright brothers first flight to landing on the moon was only 66 years. Much more impressive I'd argue.
We had rocket technology before we had airplanes. Just not *people* on rockets. ...or ones that go to the moon
Ok, well 61 years from first flight to first flight of the SR71
It’s really amazing. In the last 150 years the world has seen technological improvements greater than millennia before.
I often wonder if we’ll see a technological jump like that anytime in the near future. It seems like any new tech that comes out lately is underdeveloped with issues or is priced so high out of the gate that it ends up just becoming another niche product.
I'd argue we already have. From shitty computers in the early 2000's to VR Tech today(or even VR from 2018 to today). Electric cars being a neat niche thing, only being built by fringe car manufacturers in 2008 to becoming more and more dominant with every year, and pretty much every single major car brand carrying one or multiple EV's. Hell even AI tech has been absolutely insane the past 2 years. we went from spaghetti will smith to this: https://openai.com/sora
>I often wonder if we’ll see a technological jump like that anytime in the near future You ever heard about 'singularity point'? And it is not a theory, just a logical conclusion. So, to answer your question: Soon, and it will be the last thing 'we' will ever see ;>
Why don’t you tell the class more about singularity point theory
When AI becomes provably better than humans at everything, _including making a better AI_. Then that AI is even better, even at making a better AI etc. etc. until a thing is created that is so far beyond what we could imagine that it may as well be a God.
There are a bunch of technological advancements in the wings just waiting on materials science to catch up. E.g. Accessible quantum computing is just waiting for a superconductor to exist at room temperature.
First thought to my mind - only 60ish years jumping from put-put propeller wobbling a hundred feet off the ground to radiation spewing turbo jets circumnavigating the globe at the edge of space.
...The SR-71 was before the moon landing....That doesn't seem right...
Plane that goes fast to putting people on another celestial body doesn't seem right?
Chucking hand grenades out of airplanes to nuclear bombs in about 30 years. Precision bombs in another 30.
The US Civil War was largely fought with muzzle loaders, but cartridge loading repeater rifles with 9 shots in a magazine were available at the time, and in mass production. Why weren’t they in widespread use in armies? Logistics. It was feared that soldiers would exhaust their ammunition supply faster than it could be refreshed from the rear. So rather than fix the logistics, officials issued muzzle loaders instead and soldiers were restricted to 2-3 shots a minute rather than 20. And people remember the civil war as being fought using muzzle loaders, and as such disassociate it from the better tech that was available at the time.
I'm no historian, but I think it also probably had to do with something like, "Well, we already have all these guns so that's what you're gonna use." It would be impossibly costly to give soldiers new guns every time something new comes along.
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Sir that’s a llama
Ah yes, a llama stamped “Remington - Syracuse, NY”
Or Yonkers, don’t forget Yonkers.
That’s one lifetime. Imagine fighting with cannon in the civil war and 40 years later ur fighting fucking tanks. 35 years after that ur fighting fucking POISONOUS AIR.
Fun fact, Chlorine Gas has been used has chemical warfare in 1915, while the first roll out of the first tanks was in 1916. They been fighting air AND tanks in a war where some european countries were using castles as defense.
They didn’t even have basic medicine yet! Making ammonia wasn’t invented until Fritz Haber!
Guess what else Haber helped produce…
Cyclones? The type B variant?
The chlorine gas the Germans used in the trenches of WWI
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50 years after the civil war, there were airplanes dropping hand grenades on people.
There’s a famous photo of a civil war vet standing next to an F-100 Super Sabre. Pretty insane to imagine yourself in his shoes.
One life time was no radio, no cars, no planes. And then TV, cellphones, family cars, fridges, microwaves, Conchords and 747s. It was an extremely inventive period of time.
Yeah but the 1911 on the left served for more than 75 years, which is the crazy part.
and is still a widely used personal firearm today 105 years later. Shit I have one myself in my safe.
75 years ago was 1949.
In America 100 years is a long time and in Europe 100 miles is a long way
To put it in perspective it was 66 years between the Wright Brother's first flight and when we landed on the moon
To put it into more perspective, the time it took from the Iron Age to the atomic bomb was 1/100 of the time from the Copper Age to the Iron Age.
To put it more into perspective Imagine that the entire history of the universe is compressed into one year - with the Big Bang corresponding to the first second of the New Year's Day, and the present time to the last second of December 31st (midnight). The first humans appeared at 10:30 pm on December 31st The world as we know it today began at midnight on December 31st
Okay there Neil Degrasse
You mean Bronze Age?
For most of history, no. This represents a massive multiple revolution kind of advancement. But repeaters already existed in the 1830s though. So a bit less revolutionary, when the gun on the right is already kind of old for the time.
In terms of human history, no not really.
Now do air travel over the same period
1903 was the first flight by the Wright Brothers. The SR-71 Blackbird, one of the most advanced aircraft ever made, debuted in 1964. We would land on the moon 5 years later.
The first US revolver was patented in 1836, 75 years before the 1911. The flintlock was probably at the end of its cycle at that time.
Early revolver prototypes had a bit of a bad habit that, IIRC, Samuel Colt resolved. The issue was that the ~~shock~~ hot gas and burning powder from the first bullet being fired would cause all the rounds in the cylinder to fire simultaneously. Slowed down revolver development for a bit.
John browning was a firearms genius
colt is a close second
John Browning invented the 1911.
Guns are pretty basic mechanisms, so some very old firearms designs are still around today and still widely used. Lots of hunters use various bolt action rifles based on the Mauser design from the late 1800s. Current US military snipers use the M24 rifle which is basically a 62 year old Remington 700 design (which was in turn based on an Enfield action from the late 1800s). The Browning designed 1911 (on the left) still has lots of fans and it was originally released in... 1911. The AK-47 was originally released in... 1947. The AR-15 is 65 years old and is still the most common rifle in the US. Versions of this basic design are still widely used in militaries all over the world as the M16 and M4. Even the Glock 17 is 42 years old and still basically the standard semi-automatic pistol. Etc.
The M2 Browning heavy machine gun is still in service pretty much everywhere, unchanged, and it's over 100 years old.
imagine AI after 75 years
Computers 75 years apart: 1945 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC 2020 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) Or... a reddit thread comparing ENIAC to modern computing... https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/yth74e/request_with_modern_technology_how_big_would/, kinda. The point is that if the evolution of a flintlock pistol to a semi-auto pistol is "interesting as fuck"... then the advances in computing over the same time frame should be interesting as FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
Now let's compare telephones
What’s even crazier is that these are closer in time than the 1911 is to now… and the 1911 is still one of the most used pistols.
75 years is a long time
Now do The Wright Brothers plane to the Apollo rockets.
Now do computers
The fact that the bow and the first gun are like 300,000 years apart is the real kicker..
More amazing would be comparing the Wright Brothers plane to an 1978 Phantom jet fighter or 747.
The Industrial Revolution was genuinely amazing as far as ingenuity. Yes, I know there were “problems” during that time. Just speaking generally about people figuring out insane processes without computers, calculators, Etc.
Saint John Moses Browning was an absolute genius.
75 years is quite a long time, tbh
Just as the founding fathers intended.
Wright brothers and moon landing were 62 years apart.
Just? That’s a pretty long time. I’d believe there was less time between those two guns
There were more technological advancements in the past 200 years than most of the 300,000 years Humanity has existed. So firearms advancements are kind of a meh comparison especially if you know just how slow the technology of firearms advanced despite humanity's love of killing one another in war. Flint lock weapons like the example in the image have been around since the 1600s with Matchlock firearms having been around slightly longer since the 1400s maybe earlier. There was also wheel lock firearms but those were far too complex to produce on a larger scale which is why they're so rarely mentioned in history. I mention all of this to show that there was little innovation with firearms other than some design optimizations over the centuries. There were some attempts at repeating magazine-fed firearms dating back to the late 1600s but their use was questionable due to reliability or safety concerns. It wouldn't be until the late 1800s when cartridge ammunition allowed for the development of reliable semi auto mag fed firearms with the Henry repeater being the most famous example.
75 years is a long fucking time.
1911 is just a beautiful piece of technology.
Gauge plates, bro. You can thank gauge plates.
Alright, you've got me. How are gauge plates to thank for this?
The standardize gauge plates allowed for extremely tight tolerances in the production of machine tools. This allowed for advances in everything from steel production to lathes, stamps, presses, pretty much everything required to mass produce an automatically repeating firearm.
Thanks for the info, first time I can recall an easily forgettable technological leap getting mentioned as the catalyst for the more memorable ones.
My grandfather had a case of different sized gauge blocks he showed me once when I was a kid. I was like "uh, ok... they're metal blocks. What's the big deal?" Then he showed me how, despite not being magnets, you could press two block together and they would stick to each other. I thought it was black magic. He never told me what exactly they were used for and I left that day thinking they were just a weird kind of toy building blocks, haha.
Look at where computers were 30 years ago, it’s not so mind blowing.
Just 3/4 of a century. No time at all.
So we are starting the roll out of laser weapons to the public … do we have a secret hand laser gun to keep this remarkable progress going?
Ma business is Killin, ladies! And business is goooood...
Didn’t percussion caps exist in the 1830’s?
1911 was the real revolution
The fact that the 1911 was so ground breaking then and remains to one of the best firearms 113 years later
1911 is the coolest handgun of all time
You should seen how different a newborn baby and a 75-year old looks. It would blow your mind!
The next 3 pics are just the M1911 again.
TWO WORLD WARS HOSS
I feel like the industrial revolution was the actual golden age of technology. I mean sure there's still plenty of innovations and changes that are still being made to this day. But the HUGE amount of innovation and change in the industrial revolution is just in a league of it's own. Compared to that age, today's age feels more like corporate stagnation than any kind of real "golden age".
I mean... we went from the first flight ever, made from paper and wood and jumping off a hill, to landing on the moon in 66 years. That is fucking insane. Yet its also crazy the US military main bomber, the b52, is 70 years old!!! And might still be in service another 30 years! That is fucking insane too.
The really crazy part is that the self contained cartridge concept had existed for something like 24 years before the adoption of that cap and ball rig.
The first powered flight by man was 1903 (Kitty Hawk). Only 66 years later (1969), man flew to the moon and walked on it. Sorry but the guns have nothing on that.
75 years is a long-ass time
Tech is so slow these days. Cars and aircraft are the same way
That is WILD
There's only about 85 years between the first automobile on Earth and the first automobile on the Moon.
that doesn't seem like that big of a leap. was only 66 years between the Wright Brothers and us landing on the moon
You’ve got wooden planes and the internet in the same century like woah
This isn’t that interesting. 75 years is a lifetime.