The 6 Most Surprising, Important Inventions From World War I

Just over 100 years ago, on the 28th of June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo. That set into motion a chain of events that, within several weeks, culminated in the European great powers declaring war on each other. The resulting conflict killed 37 million people.

Once the fighting started, a stalemate emerged on the Western Front, between Germany on the east and the Allies on the west. Both sides hunkered down in trenches, and it was nearly impossible for either side to make any significant progress against the other. With machine guns and artillery on both sides defending the trenches, attackers were quickly mowed down before they could cross “no-man’s-land,” the short distance between the opposing lines.

“The deadlock on the Western Front forced armies to develop new technologies to overcome it,” says Paul Cornish, a historian at