Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity

by Edward Tenner

  This uncomfortable, tactically limiting, and costly object remained in use for 250 years, perhaps because of the prestige of its form but also because strategy and tactics became well adapted to it. It was replaced in the fifth century by a smaller, circular head covering of bronze, and sometimes possibly of felt alone, called the pilos. Casualties increased; the change evidently marked a riskier, more mobile style of fighting. Other troops began to wear a Thracian helmet, modeled after a cloth cap from the region and also affording far better visibility and hearing, even with the unnecessary weight of simulating a felt hood in bronze.9

  The Greeks thus were paradoxically masters of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of helmets but unwilling to apply their analytical genius to shielding the brains that produced them. Jacques Ellul believes this attitude was not due to fear or indifference, but suspicion of the potential for brute force and immoderation the Greeks found in all technology. With no such qualms, the eclectic Romans adopted the powerful short sword (gladius) of the Spaniards and the bronze helmets and steel-edged shields of the Gauls. The French historian Victor Duruy marveled at the proud Romans learning from their conquered enemies, “ceaselessly improving the science by which they had subdued the world.”10

  The Romans actually used a variety of bronze and iron helmets in the course of the Republic and Empire, showing great attention to battlefield realities. From a kind of reversed metal jockey cap, they developed complex forms with reinforcements, hinged cheekpieces, and effective neck guards, including some of the greatest masterpieces of ancient armor. Even a simple design like the Montefortino helmet of the Republican period had cheek pieces combining side protection with unobstructed vision and hearing. Specialists disagree about just how the Romans used their weapons but admire the coherence of design.11

  The most common Roman legionary helmet of Hollywood films is known to specialists as the Imperial Gallic (also called Niederbieber from an important find) of bronze-clad iron. With its crossed ridges and brow and neck protection it is as much an icon as its Corinthian predecessor. One expert admirer, the German military historian and reenactor Marcus Junkelmann, calls it “the crowning conclusion, the synthesis and quintessence of the entire evolution of ancient helmets.” Junkelmann believes that at 2.5 kilograms it was less comfortable than earlier models but that it provided more protection to the wearer than any other.12

  The Roman helmet stayed at this high point for only a century or two before repeating the Greek experience of the fifth century B.C., the transition to a simpler, conical form later called the Spangenhelm (German scholars often have the last word when Roman texts are silent). It was made of iron riveted in segments rather than hammered from a single sheet of iron or brass; where they existed, cheek and neck pieces were attached with leather rather than with hinges. Private craftsmen had made the Imperial Gallic helmet; the Spangenhelm was produced by less skilled artisans in state workshops. It became the favorite of all the warriors of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages who had the means to buy one, including the Vikings. (Nineteenth-century Wagnerian production designers added the horns.)13

  THE HELMET BETWEEN EMPIRES

  European medieval warfare added a weapon relatively uncommon until late antiquity: the bow, which Eurasian steppe nomads had used so fearsomely. And hand-to-hand combat could be brutal. Some foot soldiers may often have had only soft head coverings, and a surprising number of head injuries appear in the remains found in a mass grave from the Battle of Tow-ton (1461) in the Wars of the Roses. Because armor was so valuable, none was found at the site. It is not clear whether helmets had been struck from the casualties’ heads or whether they were fighting with no head protection besides the soft hats shown in some depictions of medieval warfare.14

  Helmets protected the medieval combat elite—nobles, knights, and the professional fighters surrounding them—but probably few foot soldiers. Armor was not only a matter of life or death, but a source of prestige and hazardous recreation in the tournament. A royal warrior-connoisseur like Emperor Charles V of Spain and Austria wore 125 pounds of tilting armor with a helmet weighing forty pounds. Many surviving helmets show evidence of the forces and missiles they deflected; in single combat, a helmet and body armor could withstand blows from the strongest opponent armed with a combat ax that put the old Mesopotamian and Egyptian maces to shame: a three- to five-pound head mounted on a two-pound, five-foot shaft and swung with a two-handed grip.15

  How did the evolution of helmets interact with the weapons and tactics of medieval warfare? While innovations in helmet construction are well documented from surviving artifacts, the reasons for change are not always apparent. Who wore the single-piece barbute of the fifteenth century; why did it start out as an open-faced helmet and come more and more to resemble the Corinthian helmet? In any case, two medieval helmet styles were to become classics. The kettle hat or chapel-de-fer has a bowl with a wide brim. Taking less time and skill to make than more contoured cavalry models that enclosed the face, it was ideal for equipping foot soldiers in large numbers. The brim must have helped protect them from volleys of arrows, and from missiles hurled from walls during sieges. The chapel-de-fer also was relatively comfortable and did not interfere with vision or hearing. Many knights preferred it; the thirteenth-century Jean de Joinville wrote in his chronicle of lending his kettle hat to King Louis IX for fresh air after the king had spent hours in a massive helm.16

  Bashfor Dean, an outstanding ichthyologist of early-twentieth-century New York City, applied his evolutionary outlook to his other passion, arms and armor, preparing this tree of helmet morphology, one of a series of sixteen arms and armor developmental charts he designed in the 1920s. (Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Arms and Armor)

  The sallet was an equally versatile design. Its brim was contoured back over the neck for added protection, and it often had a pivoted visor with an eye slit, which could be raised and lowered; it also had a removable chin protector called the bevor. The sallet potentially offered the visibility of the kettle hat with the option of protective attachments. Originating in northern Italy, it became popular in England and Germany and appears in Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil. Some sallets had built-in eye slits. Others, like the plainer kettle hats, were made for men-at-arms and sweep back directly to the tail without contouring. Some were left unpolished (“rough from the hammer”) for economy, not for visual effect, but these “black sallets” now have a sinister look that helped inspire Darth Vader’s armor in George Lucas’s Star Wars series. Most sallets were relatively open, hence airy and popular. Like the Corinthian helmet, a very deep design could be so confining, hot, and disorienting that soldiers put it on at the last moment. Discomfort and thirst could be so unbearable that men removed them during battle, exposing their heads to fatal wounds.17

  By the early sixteenth century, armorers’ skills had reached a peak, but firearms were already starting to threaten their trade. First-class helmets could defy the most massive crossbow that demanding patrons sometimes brought for proving. Recent experiments have shown that a sixteenth-century musket with new-style corned (uniformly grained) powder could achieve a muzzle energy of 4,400 joules, an over twenty-fold increase over the 200 joules of a crossbow bolt and enough to penetrate milled sheet steel two millimeters thick. Bulletproof armor of the later sixteenth century was too heavy to be worn proudly and gracefully. Twentieth-century experiments have proved that late medieval armor had allowed flexibility and comfortable movement; heat, not weight, was its real problem. But the new equipment was often carried by servants as part of a baggage train and could not always be unpacked for unexpected combat. Educated opinion of the time held that the new armor could disable a man by the age of thirty-five.18

  GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE OF THE HELMET

  Not only firearms but new military ideas worked against body armor. Commanders of the early seventeenth century, led by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, sought maneuverability
and speed and willingly reduced their men’s armor. The helmet usually was the last piece to be abandoned. With its reinforcing crest or ridges, permanently mounted visor, nosepiece or face protector, and lobstertail neck protector of riveted plates, the pot helmet was the early modern European (and Ottoman) ancestor of the utilitarian metal helmets of the twentieth century. Homely but effective, it was popular with musketeers.19

  Arms and armor historians like to point out that protection never disappeared. Bashford Dean, an American ichthyologist and paleontologist who helped establish the technological history of armor as a scholarly field—and founded the Department of Arms and Armor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—observed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a number of military authorities still valued armor. A number of important eighteenth-century commanders are known to have worn it; helmets still protected against swords and low-velocity bullets. There is a portrait of Lord Jeffrey Amherst from 1760 with a gleaming helmet beside him. It was more common, though, for officers to wear a small metal skullcap called a secrète under their hats.20

  The contour of this sallet (ca. 1450–60), still formidable after fire and corrosion, was reborn spectacularly in the twentieth century: in the German steel helmet of World Wars I and II, in the Kevlar helmets of the United States and its allies, and in popular culture. (Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bashford Dean Memorial Collection, Bequest of Bashford Dean, 1928; 29.150.12)

  While less and less effective within Europe, helmets and body armor helped European armies conquer the world. The historian Geoffrey Parker has called violence the continent’s leading export in the early modern age, and the Western exoskeleton and exocranium made terrifying impressions. In the early twentieth century, a Solomon Island informant recalled stories of his ancestors’ first encounter with Europeans, probably Spaniards, who appeared to have a removable turtle shell on their bodies and heads and who laughed when spears glanced off their bellies. In the New World there is no known case of Indian arrows piercing European plate armor, and by the seventeenth century armor’s price was surprisingly low. After one raid, two thousand helmets were dispatched from English armories to Virginia colonists who had petitioned for help. But in the colonies, too, heat, fatigue, and Indians’ acquisition of firearms ultimately all but ended the use of helmets.21

  Even in Europe, helmets never entirely vanished. Sappers, digging under heavy fire to attack enemy fortifications, had their own head coverings. The French military continued diligently to develop new models, which weighed up to 6.7 kilograms. On the other hand, the cavalry helmets of the nineteenth century, the most glorious survivors of medieval and Renaissance tradition, were far less suitable for the demands of peacetime, let alone battle. In 1865 a correspondent of the Times of London called attention to the plight of an orderly of the heavy cavalry who was barely able to control his runaway horse because he had to use one hand to hold down his helmet with its “monstrous tail.” Calling for the present model to be retired to a museum, he repeated an “authentic story” of a regiment of heavy cavalry “charging with their swords dangling from their wrists while they held on their helmets.”22

  USER ENGINEERING

  Nineteenth-century military helmets may have been better designed than they now appear, but even at their best they did not point the way to the future of head protection. Twentieth-century helmets probably owe more to a popular tradition that had been developing over the centuries. From medieval times, soldiers, firemen, and others without access to prestigious armorers had headgear and other equipment made from leather processed for strength and durability, called cuir bouilli —“boiled leather”—and sometimes stitched together in sections to form protective combs or ridges.23

  A New York firefighter, Jacobus Turck, may have introduced a similar design in North America before 1740; we know only that it had a high crown and narrow brim. Later in the century, the volunteer companies of the newly formed United States of America were proudly civilian and wore what was becoming the mark of Western respectable manhood for most of the nineteenth century, a cylindrical hat. The firefighters’ model was made of leather. The most influential craftsman, a firefighter himself, was the New Yorker Henry T. Gratacap, who developed an improved formula for processing leather to hold its shape and withstand heat. He adapted the form with raised stitching and neck protection that had been used for sappers’ and fire helmets in Europe, curving the brim to channel water more efficiently and adding a front plate, held by an eagle, for company insignia. Gratacap remained in business from 1836 to 1868, selling up to a hundred helmets a week nationally, and the design remained the U.S. standard through most of the twentieth century.24

  Eighteenth-century English firefighters, employed by private insurance companies, used similar leather helmets, but ambitious officials in the nineteenth century were not satisfied with these serviceable hats. From the 1700s, French fire services dressed in a military style, and during the Empire and Restoration the sapeurs-pompiers of Paris have remained members of the French army. (Marseilles is protected by the battalion of marins-pompiers, part of the navy.) French firefighters had a succession of magnificent steel and brass helmets which even with insulation must have conducted heat all too well. The Metropolitan Fire Brigade of London wore a leather helmet in ancient Greek style until 1866, when its new chief officer, the charismatic Eyre Massey Shaw, introduced a French-inspired brass helmet of memorable panache that remained in service until the electrical fires and shock hazards of the twentieth century forced development of a new compacted cork model covered with special insulating cloth. European and American fire companies evoked two different kinds of tradition, one knightly and paramilitary, the other utilitarian and civic. But the glory of the European style may well have made up in morale and in images of popular culture what it lacked in insulation. (Today’s European firefighters are likelier than their more conservative American counterparts to have astronaut-style helmets with heat-reflective visors and built-in two-way radios.)25

  The nineteenth century’s villains, like its heroes, saw new possibilities for helmets. The New York City gang called the Plug Uglies earned their name by stuffing their high-crowned felt (plug) hats with cloth as primitive head protection. (The London police are believed to have reinforced their top hats similarly before the adoption of the high cork helmet.) Decades later, the Australian bandit Ned Kelly wore ninety-seven pounds of armor, said to have been made from old plowshares by outback blacksmiths. He capped it with a massive headpiece like a larger version of the medieval great helm. The armor was proof against the Martini rifles used by the police, and Kelly was able to keep them at bay for months. In the end he was shot in the legs, captured, and executed, but he was the only person in the century, civilian or military, to have given a public demonstration of the tactical value of a helmet. (There were many experiments with body armor, including some in the U.S. Civil War, and even a trade of European armorers supplying South America and Africa with chain mail garments, but their only other publicized use was in the Boer War, and few details were known by the time World War I broke out.)26

  What is surprising about the nineteenth century is the number of hazardous trades without hard headgear: miners, building laborers, workers in heavy industry. Only relatively late in the century did Western people develop the idea of an accident that was not just an individual’s misfortune but a symptom of social injustice. Early philanthropies like the Red Cross were intended for the military wounded, and many of their supporters bitterly opposed initiatives to extend help to civilian casualties. Gradually the law began to accept a principle of employer responsibility—without culpability—for worker injuries. Eventually governments, insurers, and other third parties would force or persuade employers to provide protective equipment, but before 1914 there is little evidence that even trade unions made this a high priority.27

  THE EXOCRANIUM RETURNS

  When World War I began, one military item that no nation had on hand in
large numbers, or even in planning, was the helmet. To withstand direct rifle fire, the armor of the time would have needed to be as ungainly as Ned Kelly’s, no doubt considered a bizarre atavism. But a big surprise in weaponry helped bring back metal headgear. In the 1890s, French officer-inventors showed how a blast’s energy could be used to return an artillery piece to its original position, so it could be aimed more accurately on every shot with the help of forward observers, and reloaded four times more often. England alone fired almost a million rounds on a single day in September 1917, and more than five million tons during the entire war. Wounds from artillery fragments accounted for more than half of all casualties, significantly more than rifle or machine-gun bullets. While machine guns and artillery could be equally deadly to troops going over the top in battles like the Somme, barrages were constantly menacing troops still in the trenches, devastating them psychologically as well as physically. Nervous breakdowns were called shell shock for good reason.28

  At the beginning of the war only the heavy cavalry of the major nations still wore a helmet and breastplate, but they could do little at the front. A French officer who had proposed a helmet was rebuffed by General Joseph Joffre, who did not believe the war would last long enough to put it into production. Like many other innovations we have seen, the first helmet arose by improvisation or lucky accident in the field. A wounded soldier told Intendant (Quartermaster) General August-Louis Adrian that a mess bowl in his hat had saved his life, and the general had a metal skullcap made like the old secrète that fit under the service cap. Its favorable reception encouraged him to develop Europe’s first new standard-issue helmet since the pot helmet of the early seventeenth century. But Adrian did not return to the pot; he and his staff modified the standard French fireman’s helmet of the time, giving it a slightly shallower brim and lower crest but leaving the bowl’s shape unchanged. This simplified the tooling for the manufacture of hundreds of thousands.29