A few years ago I discovered that less than a generation after the Battle of Waterloo, a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre invented the Daguerreotype Camera in 1839. It got me thinking, not as a camera buff, though I can defocus important family celebrations with the best. It is more along the lines that, but for a finger-click in the timeline of human history, we might have had photographs of stark and unimaginable intensity of the battle and the men who altered European history . On reflection it's perhaps just as well we don't.
I do find it interesting how slender the margins of timing are when it comes to human invention and the impact on wars.
There are lots and lots of examples to pick from but here's another one. The Gatling gun, forerunner of the machine gun was invented by Richard Jordan Gatling, (an American physician.) A wee touch of irony there, I feel. First put to use in 1864 during the American Civil War it narrowly missed Gettysburg in 1863 by only few months; one of those narrow margins. What price Pickett's Charge would have more resembled the first day of the Somme had it been present?
Custer had the opportunity to take Gatling guns with him on his march to entrap the Sioux encampment on the Little Big Horn. He declined on the basis that transporting the wheeled gun(s) would slow his march down, or at least be more trouble than he deemed it worth. It's ironic that one of the reasons for the swiftness of the subsequent massacre was the use of repeating rifles by the combined warriors which effectively swept aside the single shot cavalry carbine defence.
Later, in 1879, the gun was present in Southern Africa at the final battle of the Anglo/Zulu War, Ulundi. Its horrific rate of fire of between 350- 400 rounds per minute via rotating, hand cranked, barrels made the confrontation a short one. Had it been present a few months earlier, Isandlhwana and Rorke's Drift might be remembered differently. It was overtaken within a few years by more destructively reliable iterations of the machine gun such as the Spandau (Maxim).
Which brings us back to the Daguerreotype. There seems to be no image so shocking or compelling to make us finally "Breaketh the bow and snappeth the spear " - forever. Perhaps a single 'black and white' of Waterloo's field would have been enough.
A finger-click in time.
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