World War I Era Communication Technology

   In our history class we started studying World War I. For this project I am writing about the communication technology used during the World War I era. At this time many breakthroughs in technology occurred. During the war, the military needed the fastest way to communicate possible. They started using anyway they could, whether it was airplanes or telegrams.

                                        http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/images/history0106.jpg

   During the period of the war, airplanes just came around. I found, by reading World War I Primary Sources, that because airplanes were so basic they were mostly used for scouting and delivering messages. They were used much differently then we use them today, for fighting. In a letter I found in the  book, a pilot says he just received his first duty, to take photographs of the enemy's second-line trenches. He also says that the plane he was using, the BE2c, was a plane that was unsuited for the job.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Avro_BE2C_ExCC.jpg

    I wanted to find out about the other way airplanes were used during the war era, for messengers. The pilots of the airplanes had to either land, or drop the messages from their airplanes. This posed a problem because it made the process of delivering messages very difficult. Later they started making progress in using tele-communications in the planes. Towards the end of the war, a lot of the planes used for messengers had radios in them.

http://www.afhra.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/web/080129-f-3927s-242.jpg

    The radio was one of the earliest forms communication that uses electrical signaling. When I read an article from 1919, i found it interesting that they thought the wireless radio telephone will never out-do the wired telephone. During the 1914s many experiments were conducted to try and create a radio telephone, none of these succeeded. One problem with radio communication was at the time, they were non-secret. Anyone was able to listen in on the conversation, even enemies of war!

http://rpmedia.ask.com/ts?u=/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Marconi_Type_106_crystal_radio_receiver.jpg/100px-Marconi_Type_106_crystal_radio_receiver.jpg

            

    Although radios played a huge role in the war, they also changed things back home in the US. After researching I found out radios were used for many different things. During this time period there were accounts of soldiers transmitting songs for entertainment during the war. Back in the US people also used radio broadcasts to promote the war. The U.S.S. George Washington, in 1919, played concerts on it's radio to the passengers. 

http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/marconi/exhibition/images/In%20the%20trenches%20sml.jpg

                                                                                                                                          

     Another important source of communication during the war was the telegram. I knew that the telegram played a big role during the war, but i did not know how big it was. The most famous use of this technology is arguably one of the reasons the US got involved in the war, the Zimmerman Telegram. The German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman sent a telegram to Mexico, promising lost territories that belonged to the United States if they joined the German side. President Wilson released the telegram to the press, completely changing the public opinion to become against the Germans. This helped make the decision easier for the United states to enter World War I. 

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann/images/decoded-message-m.jpg