Kyle Blizzard

HIST 153

Digital Portfolio Reflection:

Technology was one of the biggest development in the 20th century, factories started popping up

all over major cities and electricity was starting to become a major player in the American

household. Electric lights were starting to light up the night. Electricity was being used to power

machines, the electric generators were being powered by various forms of power plants,

primarily coal burning power plants to heat steam to turn the turbines to create electricity though

American cities were still using direct current which was favored by famous inventor Thomas

Edison who depending who you talk to either invented the light bulb or just improved the design.

Technology has been helpful or destructive throughout history, the three most notable are the

automobile, airplane, and the nuclear bomb. The automobile was created by Carl Benz and then

it really took off when Henry Ford improved the assembly process for the Model T and made

automobile more affordable for the up and coming middle class America powered by an

improved internal combustion engine. The automobile is what allowed the American people to

leave the crowded cities and to move into what we now know as the suburbs granted the rise of

the automobile caused the decline of the use of the railway transportation but also created the

necessity of better quality of roads in and out of city limits. The creation of the freeways under

FDRs administration served two goals, the first one was to get America back to work and the

other was to provide emergency runways for our Airforce or at the time the Army Air Corps.

These freeways allowed for Americans to travel greater distances faster in their cars with the

freeways and interstates.

The first successful flight was conducted by the Wright brothers with the combustion engine it

allowed powered flight to be possible. The first airplanes to be used by the military were based
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HIST 153

of their design, then other companies started to improve on their design to create faster and more

powerful aircraft. If you think about it the evolution of the airplane was a fast one, the Wright

brothers first plane was a rear engine biplane then by World War I most planes were biplanes

that were single engine. The bombers during this period were huge compared to the actual bomb

load they carried. The first planes carried a Flechette a small metallic arrow that was dropped

from above by, passing airplanes on infantryman then later in the war they figured out how to

use machine guns in the planes and how to prevent the guns from shooting the propellers. After

World War I air travel started to take hold, the first trans-Atlantic flights where done with large

float planes or tri-engine biplanes. Then World War II took off and then you saw the final

evolution of the airplane using a propeller, because towards the wars end Germany debuted their

answer to the P-51 mustang and the British spitfire, the ME-262 jet interceptor and now the jet

age kicked off. The first jet engines were not very fuel efficient but that changed after the wars

end. Using the engineers that designed the ME-262 and captured aircraft America began

developing their own jet fighters, Boeing and other aircraft manufactures start working on a way

to bring the jet age to civilian flights. Thus, making air travel the fastest way to get to long

distances. This was the final nail in the rail travels coffin, and it would be gone today if it wasnt

for government intervention and the creation of Amtrak but I am getting ahead of myself. The

first truly successful long-distance plane was the Boeing 707 the predecessor to the 747 a version

of the 707 is still used by the United States Airforce as the KC-135 stratotanker proving the

reliability of the air frame.

The nuclear age was a sudden one, with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world

knew that America had a terrible weapon. With the end of World War II after the surrender of

Japan, America continued research with nuclear weapons and decided to use the awesome power
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HIST 153

of the atomic reaction to create power plants for ships and powerplants for generating electricity

but the understanding of radiation and its effects on people. This was a new science and not

much was known. The nuclear reaction was used to heat water to create steam and the steam is

used to turn turbines that generated electricity with no pollution other than the radioactive rods

that no longer provided the necessary reaction needed. The fears of nuclear meltdown after the

Chernobyl, Three Mile island and Fermi, lead to many people fearing the building of more

nuclear power plants even though most of these accidents were the cause of poor safety

procedures or failures of these systems. Even though these accidents are incredibly rare the fear

of this dangerous technology has lead for no new powerplants to be built in the last 30 plus

years. Despite that the United States have been using nuclear reactors in their aircraft carriers and

submarines and have not had a nuclear incident with these ships that we know of, many

Americans despite that many safeguards are in place to prevent a meltdown but the main issue is

not wither or not nuclear energy is safe, its what to do with the waste by product of the spent

rods.

Nuclear power ended World War II, but it was part of what kicked off the Cold War and the

threat of total annihilation of life on earth as we know it kept the powers from using on each

other because they knew if they were to launch their weapons they knew it would end the world.

Despite the great potential of this technology, the development has been stalled due to the fear of

the power and destructiveness that there hasnt been much new research beyond making smaller

and more powerful reactors.

Technology was one of the driving forces for the development of American way of life from the

automobile to the airplane and finally nuclear power, a force so powerful it is still being

developed today.