Technology Impact On Civil War

The basis for my research paper is to illuminate the ways in which new (for the time period) technologies changed the way the American Civil war was fought. Similar to technology used in any other field, war technology is constantly being processed and innovated towards a more advanced ,and or effective way of operating the proposed task. Some innovations at this time were from the north and another portion were from the south yet, they all played a part for either side to the way in which the battle was fought and ultimately won. These technologies were in the fields of weaponry, transportation, communication and health each one of these categories impacted the way America fought it’s Civil War.

Starting with the most conspicuous

Communication in the nineteenth century involved physically moving from point A to point B. Most communication came in the form of handwritten letters. Some would be transported. If the letter was to be captured or never make it the sender may never find out and the message could be seen by the enemy leaving them with an upper hand. This remained so until the eighteen forties when Samuel F.B Morse sent the first code along a telegraph system. The message that he sent was “What hath God wrought?” which derives from the christian bible in the book of John, due to Morses religious affiliations.The telegraph is an arrangement of wires from the person sending the message and all the way to the person needing to receive the message. Along the wire the sender can put out electrical impulses that create an impression on a paper that is with the receiver. These impressions are an arrangement of dots and dashes, which could then be translated into letters and further into a message. Stations would be set up on either side of the wire where translators would wait and translate the incoming messages. They had charts the depicted what letter each arrangement symbolised. Not long after the war broke out many of the translators became so familiar with the code’s translations that they could read the message without the assistance of the guide. With this advancement people could send messages miles away and

The treatment of other nonsurgical illness were also primitive as the doctors had just started to veer away from the practice of bloodletting to clear out ones system. One of the ways physicians were encouraged to treat diseases like syphilis with mercury. It was trials like this that came to educate the medical staff of these hospitals, even though many were lost through this trial and error.

The constant need for advancements in medicine is what drove so many “practicing” physicians to explore more into the human body. All these advancements in health during the civil war has helped to pave the way for how we practice medicine today.

Conclusion

Overall war technologies shaped the way the Americans engaged in warfare in the American Civil war. With more advanced weaponry, transportation, ports of communication and better ways to save their mens health the Civil war would have been completely different without such technologies. For American the Civil war can be referred to as the first modern war incorporation the tactics that still hold today. Altogether these advancements have pulled America from the days of full hand to hand combat to what we have today where a war doesn’t even mandatorily require men or woman on the front