Today, a fleet of sunken ships. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. I t is a widely accepted but seldom supported claim that war drives invention.
War is a time of intense action, no doubt.
But completing the process of invention takes delicate interactions among inventors, builders, and users. That synergy gets terribly compressed in time of war, and strange things happen. There, in those obscure marshy waters, are outlines of countless ship hulls. Everything above water is gone, and aquatic shrubbery grows out of the decaying wood that defines the old hulks at the waterline. Suddenly we needed to build ten times the shipping capacity we'd produced so far in the 20th century.