Figure 1 – German soldiers using a field telephone during World War I. From NARA and in the public domain in the United States.

As a follow-up to my post of yesterday commemorating the US entry into World War I, I was perusing on the web today field photographs of the conflict. One sequence contained images of the technology of the day. This was a hybrid. The world was rapidly moving out of a mechanical to an electrical and electronic age. Hence, we have the image of Figure 1 that contrasts so profoundly with modern times that it looks like something out of a Flintstones cartoon. Here a German soldier speaks on a portable telephone as the soldiers with him slowly unwind the cable that presumably connects them back to base. While it may seem prosaic and archaic it truly connects us with cellphones and the internet of today. After all, fifty years previous, during the Crimean and American Civil Wars none of this was possible.