Inventors and The Uses of Their Inventions

Here is a short essay I had to write for school today. The topic was interesting but I had a surprisingly hard time coming up with data for it!

Inventors and the Uses of Their Inventions

Kelpie Fly

November 2014

Most of us humans are exceedingly proud of our accomplishments. The greater they are the more big headed we get. But what if our accomplishment had a massive negative impact on mankind? Let us look at two examples.

 1 In a letter to Lester Gardener  in August of 1946, Orville Wright wrote that he “once thought the aeroplane would end wars.”  He, as well as many others, assumed that flight would prove such a devastating ability wars would practically be ended before they started. Three years after receiving their official patent Wilber and Orville Wright tested their machine for the U.S. Army. Later the brothers even provided airplanes and trained pilots for WWI. They worked diligently for what they hoped would bring world peace. Those of us who were at that time still the future generation can read our history books and see this was not the case.

Close to the end of WWII, Orville’s peace bringing bird dropped a highly controversial and hugely  devastating capsule called “the atomic bomb”. 2 In the same letter that Wright spoke of his earlier optimism  he wrote, “I now wonder whether the aeroplane and the atomic bomb can do it [end wars].” The note of sorrow rings with a tinge of regret that his world changing invention did not bring about the calm he had imagined.

3There was another man who dreamed that his invention would put and end to wars. His name was Alfred Nobel. We know him best as the founder of the Nobel peace prize but with out studying much further we find a seeming contradiction. Nobel was the man who first concocted dynamite. Though this explosive was originally designed for blasting in mines we are not surprised to read history and find it quickly used for war. At first Nobel did not seem to mind this. In fact he told Austrian Countess Bertha von Sutter in 1891, 4 “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses; on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Alfred Nobel did not live to see WWI or to understand just how mistaken he was.

These two men were very gifted but did they make a mistake? I do not believe we can lay the blame of higher military (and civilian) casualties on these brilliant men who hoped to bring something the greater portion of the world also longs for, peace.  However, we can learn the lesson that they too must have realized: our actions can have uncontrollable repercussions. After all, “5With great power comes great responsibility.”

 

      1.  www.wrightstories.com  2.www.wrightstories.com   3. www.nobelprize.org

4. www.nobelprize.org  5.  The movie Spiderman 

My writing book  said to use the last paragraph to sum up my point. I did not really have a point so this assignment was difficult. In the end I gave up and used the above but I do not care for it. Any ideas?