This morning I was looking at swords online (not a rare occurrence) and Wildcat and I started wondering how people come up with those sorts of things. I will now describe almost exactly how it happened, summarizing thousands of years of history.
Those of us that watched
Beast Wars know that originally, our ancient ancestors were under the protection of the Maximals who inadvertently ended up on earth after going through a wormhole in pursuit of the Predacons who were searching for a location filled with
Energon (the principle energy source for Cybertronians) as prophesied by the
Golden Disk. I won't tell you the whole plot because you should already know it, but essentially the Maximals and Predacons exist after the war on Earth between the Autobots and the Decepticons, but the wormhole has transported them into the past. The Predacons attempt to destroy the pre-humans in order to ensure that the Autobots of the future will not have human assistance, while the Maximals try to protect them so as to preserve the time stream. The
valiant Dinobot gives his life to protect them, making a rudimentary club to protect the pre-humans and fight
Megatron (Megatron later uses part of Dinobot's spark to animate a Transmetal 2 killing machine that operates without its own will and without Dinobot's sense of honor or personality). Thus marks the beginning of humanities constant advancement in tools and weapons.
Naturally, thousands of years later, two guys were pursuing another man in a volcanic area. In order to deter pursuit the man picked up a chunk of obsidian because there was nothing else around. Unfortunately, he dropped it and it broke, but he picked up a chunk and stabbed one of his pursuers. Voila! A knife. He was then clubbed to death by the other guy, but the clubber made a fortune selling obsidian knives to people. Because he had a corner on the market, other people began experimenting with different materials, like stone, flint, etc. in order to find their way into the market. More of this later.
Then some dudes were sitting in the tavern, drinking their recently invented drink involving
barley and hops, and they sat around talking about this and that. One of them said something like "Dude, remember how we used to poke mammoths with sharp sticks?" Another said, "Yeah, that was stupid. We had to run them off a cliff in order to kill them and feast on their delicious meat." The third said, "Wait a second, I wonder if we could stick a knife on the end of a stick and it would be sharper." Naturally they tried it, but because of their inebriation, two of them were seriously wounded in the process. Word spread and people began making better spears. Then they said, "Wait, why are we even getting close at all? Let's figure out a way to throw these things really far." Thus the bow.
Later, two guys got into a knife fight, and a spectator thought, "It would be unfair if one of them had a spear, but what if they had larger knives? That'd be cool." He happened to work with copper, but found that he could only make the knife so big, and it wasn't very good. He thought, "Man, I wish this copper were harder. Maybe if I mix it in its molten state with the a different molten metal, it will create a stronger alloy." Thus the bronze age was born.
Naturally right about now everyone is like, "Holy smokes, Cymru has lots of tin. Someone there could make a killing exporting tin." So they did, which shows that civilization would have stagnated in the stone age without Wales. Point for Wales.
So at this point the guy who smelted some copper and tin and made bronze finally got his chance to make his bigger knife. He went a bit overboard and decided that maybe it had ceased to be a knife. He named it a sword. He was Sumerian, and so he armed his Sumerian buddies, and they started conquering stuff, because spears tipped with bronze spearheads and swords made of bronze beat stones and volcanic glass any day. However, some of his buddies kept getting stabbed, so he took some of his bronze and made the first bronze breastplate. Pretty soon everyone was fighting with bronze weapons and wearing bronze armor, and no one really had any sort of advantage.
Then an Anatolian dude was sitting around and thinking about smelting, as Anatolians often did. He thought, "Well, we can smelt copper from rocks, and we can smelt tin from rocks. I wonder what we could get out of rocks if we got the fire hotter. There seems to be a shortage of tin right now, but I refuse to let use return to the stone age." Quite by accident he smelted the first iron. He could tell that it was slightly harder than bronze, and did not require additional mixing with other metals. He finagled with the process, increasing carbon levels, changing heat of the fire, stuff like that, and also managed to whip out some steel. He allowed his methods to diffuse through the world, and the Iron Age began.
Through this time empires rose and fell. The Greeks beat the Persians. The Romans beat the Greeks and Carthaginians. The Goths beat the Romans (over and over again). No one beat the Welsh. Charlemagne united the barbarians and conquered Europe. There were some conflicts with the Muslims, a handful of crusades, some popes tried to get more power than they needed. Meanwhile in the east, the Asians were doing their thing. The Russians decided they'd rather be European than Asian, a choice clearly not based on which arbitrarily defined continent the majority of their land was on. Across the ocean in the far west there were all sorts of empires and nations. Leif Ericson showed up sometime in the late 900s, then Madoc ap Owain Gwynedd came in 1170, then Columbus straggled over three hundred years later (slowpoke). Then Vespucci stole Columbus's thunder (though I'd rather it be America instead of Columbia, and neither Leifia nor Madocia works better).
During this time (like, after 500 B.C.) there were huge advancements. One guy said, "I don't want to get chopped in two by that iron sword, but I also want to be able to move a bit. I wonder if I can make a shirt out of little tiny rings and use that to keep from being killed." It worked, and he made chainmail. Oh, and he was a Celt (probably Welsh). At the same time a Greek dude thought a similar thing but continued to make plate armour like the dude who made the breastplate. Later, a Roman thought, "Dang, this one single plate is cool, but what if it was multiple plates? I bet I could move better." Shazaam, Lorica segmentata. The someone complained about the price of plate armor, so it fell out of use until the middle ages.
Naturally, with all this armor being developed, people started thinking about ways to kill people in armor. What fun is a war if all you do is hit each other a bit and then go home without casualties? One man's train of thought was, "If I can't chop a man in two, I wonder if I could stab him to death." Things got a lot pointier. Another guy thought, "Okay, so stabbing people seems to be working all right, but I do miss chopping things, and the peasants without armor can totally be chopped." Enter the halberd. Then someone who remembered his history lessons said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Clubs seemed to work well, and you need to train someone almost not at all to use them. Let's update those." Maces, war hammers, and other bludgeoning instruments followed. Meanwhile a dude who liked to fight on horseback thought, "Okay, so all this plate armor is making it harder to stab people. Maybe I could stab harder. And maybe my horse could give me the momentum to stab harder. My spear would need to be a bit heftier." Lance. A kid with a bow thought, "So Agincourt proved that the longbow is almost entirely ineffective against heavy plate armor, and plate armor slows people down to the point where you can knife them at the weak spots, but I really don't like getting that close to the fighting. I wonder if I could figure out a way to make a bow shoot harder." Crossbow.
Then the Chinese one-upped him and made a repeating crossbow. The west was not about to have the Chinese one-upping them, so they sent Marco Polo to spy on the Chinese. He did a fine job and told people about rockets that could fire into the air using explosive powders. There were a lot of trials, and possibly more errors. A lot of kids lost their fingers. But finally they made a cannon. Suddenly all of that time spent building castles seemed like a waste. Yeah, giant rocks being hurled at your walls isn't great, but metal balls being fired out of cannons was an entirely different ball game (Oliver Cromwell did a stand up job proving this as he cannoned the bejeebers out of castles all across Great Britain).
Then someone else thought, "Yeah, that cannon is cool, but I wish we had cannons that could be carried by one person." Hand cannon, anyone? This further developed in muskets and handguns. A hunter was hanging out in the woods with his buddy when a bear showed up. They missed it with their muskets and the hunter was mangled beyond recognition. The buddy vowed to make something more reliable. Rifling and bullets.
Later, after the American Revolution when everyone had gotten pretty good at killing other people, someone decided that one shot at a time just was not killing people fast enough. Revolvers, then magazines were developed and gun technology kept pace. Eventually someone said, "So, now that we have these guns, our swords aren't really that useful. I mean they're great for killing Indians, but I can just do that with my gun." Swords became obsolete, followed by horses.
Around this time someone said, "I bet it would be easier to build railroads if we used explosives." So they did. Then Nobel invented dynamite to do it better. Then someone took that idea and figured that if you could blow up rocks, you could blow up people. Then they wanted a way to deliver explosives to their targets. Airplanes (this is an erroneous linkage. They just took the already existent airplane and turned it into a death machine). Sometime around the first world war, someone decided that guns weren't killing people fast enough. There had to be a way to fire more shots faster. Machine guns. Then someone said, "Holy smokes, we're getting killed out there. Back in the day they had armor, let's get us some of that." Tanks. Next someone decided that there had to be a way to destroy the armor. More explosives (landmines, etc.). Somewhere in this history Tesla invented a death ray, but that can neither be confirmed nor denied by the government, although the Tesla coils in Command & Conquer seem quite effective against infantry.
Then some scientists game along and said, "Atoms." This blew peoples minds. Yeah, killing thousands of people, cool. But potentially being able to kill hundreds of thousands? Yep, cooler. Atomic bombs. Then the Soviets ruined everything by making their own atomic bomb, and America can't just share, so we developed the Hydrogen bomb. Then they figured it out, so Ronald Reagan decided we needed space lasers (this might have just been a scare tactic to freak out the Soviets, and it totally worked). Unfortunately, we still don't have space lasers (unless it's just super classified).
Somewhere in here a group of people called "Fantasy Writers" decided that the Medieval times were pretty cool, so they made medieval weaponry cool again. Also, people never really gave up the possibility of killing people in hand-to-hand combat, so knives still remain standard issue for military personnel. Hunting kept the bow and crossbow alive, because if you think you're manly killing a polar bear with a gun, try doing it with a bow. Just ask victims of police brutality if clubs are still being used. Axes have been completely turned back into tools, though
Jumanji showed us that they can still be weapons.
And finally, after many millenia, the world came full circle, and the Autobots and Decepticons, ancestors to the Maximals and the Predacons, came to earth and shared with us their technology as shown in the
documentary trilogy of Michael Bay.
And there you have it, the whole of history (up to this point) contained in Transformer bookends. As we can see, from Dinobot to Optimus Prime, we owe all weapons technology to the Cybertronians. I did leave out a discussion of magic, mainly because there have not been many developments in magic technology in recent years, and most people think I'm crazier for believing in magic than I am for believing in Transformers. Also, I only discussed the beginning ideas for many weapons because after they were first invented, people just tried to make them better. I also did not talk about the
atlatl or other early-American technologies, even though they're super cool. The thought processes were probably the same ("Let's figure out a way to get this sharp thing into that guy over there."). I also did not mention a lot of Asian developments because I refuse to believe they beat us to any major technologies, though I do have to admit they won on the gunpowder thing (as previously shown in the article) and on pizza. Luckily the Italians dominated the pizza thing and made it their own. I do like the Japanese though, and it has been through their technology that most people even know what a halberd is, or a mace, or the different classifications of armor (thank you video games). They also turned swords into works of art, and I appreciate that. However, if I base all of my evaluations on
Deadliest Warrior, then no Asian warrior could ever beat a Western Warrior (though I feel the Sun Tzu vs. Vlad the Impaler episode was incorrect).
Also, as you have noticed, Wales played a central role the advancement of civilization. I would not be surprised if the Maximals originally crash landed in Wales (or thereabouts, because originally Wales was pretty much all of Britain), a theory supported by the Stone Circle found by the Maximals in the episode
Chain of Command (And did I mention that it was built by Aliens? That's another entry entirely). This would also explain Welsh involvement in the whole of history. It would also explain the story of King Arthur (If King Arthur were a transformer, then of course, according to the Golden Discs, everyone would know that he would return again, [as Optimus Prime, who, as we all know, came at a time when the world needed him most to lead humanity in the greatest struggle we have ever known]).
And for those that don't want to read all of that, I have found this, which pretty much says everything I just said.
