The scientifically minded were constantly brainstorming during the Great War to devise ways of breaking the deadlock. The magazine The Electrical Experimenter was an outlet for some of these ideas. The blog Airminded has an outstanding article on WWI "Super Weapons" at:
http://airminded.org/2009/11/29/the-superweapon-and-the-anglo-american-imagination-iii/
The pictures on these covers are fascinating! What imaginations... David Beer
ReplyDeleteAwesome stuff.
ReplyDeleteHugo Gernsback was quite the visionary.
Big isn't always impossible. I've heard that Israeli combat engineers crossed the Suez Canal in the 1972 War with a huge rolling bridge.
ReplyDeleteThe Russians actually built a prototype 'tank' somewhat similar to the "Trench Destroyer" illustrated. It has become known as the "Tsar Tank" or "Netopyr" and either search term will produce numerous web site pages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the creature proved unworkable in practice and the project was abandoned.
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