Technology in the Crimean War

In an important article published in 2017, Yakup Bektas argued that the persistent narratives of the negative aspects of the Crimean War have shrouded history from the war’s ‘exuberant technological enterprise’, in which entrepreneurs, inventors and businessmen seized the opportunities that the war permitted to enhance technological advancement for their own gain and prestige. Less than two years after Consort Prince Albert’s epic Crystal Palace Great Exhibition that showcased the world’s entrepreneurialism, the Crimean War proved to be an ideal testing ground for significant by-products of the British Industrial revolution – technologies such as railways, telegraphy, photography, medicine, and of course weaponry. Equally as important was the publicity that the war gave to such technological advancements, which further enhanced commercial interest and subsequent dissemination of the technologies on display. Moreover, the governments of the respective belligerents encouraged the use of such technologies, especially in the hope that it may solve some of the logistical and military failures that have plagued histories of the Crimean War ever since.

The Crystal Palace, built especially for the 1851 Great Exhibition, source: https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Ever since the invention by Thomas Newcomen of his steam-driven Atmospheric Engine in 1712, steam had become the primary mode of power. By the time of the Crimean War, therefore, technology powered by steam was all the rage. The Royal Navy encouraged immense industry in steam-powered ships, gunboats and frigates in order that the British naval superiority (sealed at Trafalgar in 1805) remained unchallengeable. The Crimean War therefore inspired great enterprise in the construction of steam ships, which the Royal Navy either commissioned for purchase, or simply hired for the purpose of transportation of troops and patrol of the respective seas – Mediterranean, Black and Sea of Azov. Transporting men, horses and supplies from Britain to the Crimean Peninsular was not in issue yet, as was confirmed in the winter of 1854, transportation of the required men and equipment from the port of Balaclava to the make-shift trenches outside the walls of Sebastopol (some six miles away) was hugely problematic due to the rugged terrain and despicable weather conditions. Reading of these difficulties through the unprecedented war correspondence of William Russell in The Times newspaper, three British railway entrepreneurs – Samuel Peto, Edward Betts and Thomas Brassey – offered their services to the British government in the autumn of 1854 to construct at cost a railway spanning the approximate seven-mile distance from port to front.

The Railway at Balaclava (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Shipping the railway supplies and locomotives began in December, construction of the railway commenced in February 1855, and it was roughly completed by April. As Bektas argued: ‘Although this railway was quickly and simply built, it proved vital, especially in the rainy season when the ground was muddy’. Indeed, it has been claimed by historian Brian Cooke as ‘the railway that won the war’, although this is rather a bold claim given that the railway was often put out of action because of the weather, accidental damage, and repeated destruction of the trucks by Russian guns.

French Army Map of Crimean Peninsula (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Russell’s fascinating and often gripping eye-witness reports proved to be the making of an illustrious pioneering career in war journalism. But, as Bektas has argued, neither Russell’s reports nor the counterpart Crimean War photography by Roger Fenton hindered the impressive extent of reproductions through the mediums of wood engravings and lithography. The reports – for all their graphic literary marvel – could not truly replicate the visual reality, while the newspaper companies still did not possess the capability of reproducing photographs (although the images were replicated in lithograph and printed almost weekly in the Illustrated London News). Nevertheless, these mediums in themselves highlighted the extensive use of the latest technological innovations of the time – telegraphy, and the camera. Although these technologies did have their limitations, for telegraphy was solely for military purposes, while cameras and film processing equipment were bulky and costly, they both created a scenario for what has been described as the ‘first armchair war’ in which distant voyeurs crave for the latest war news and imagery.

The first working telegraph using static electricity was invented in 1816 by Francis Ronalds. Interestingly, Ronalds then offered his invention to the British Admiralty, which promptly rejected it on the grounds that it was ‘wholly unnecessary’. Yet it was two inventions across the Atlantic – Samuel Morse’s ‘code’ of communication, and the first electrical machine to utilise ‘Morse Code’, designed in 1838 by American inventor, Alfred Vail – that made electric telegraphy a viable business and military enterprise from 1837. The first telegraph system to be put into commercial service in Britain was designed by inventor William Fothergill Cooke and scientist Charles Wheatstone Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. This was a form of needle telegraph, first utilised in 1838 by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

Wheatstone (left) and Cooke (right). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By the time of the Crimean War, telegraphy as a revolutionary means of communication had spread throughout North America and across Europe. It therefore took approximately five days for a telegraph message to reach London from Crimea. Even though transmission of messages via the cables was swift, the messages could only be sent from a transmitting station, and these were still relatively sparse, especially in the Mediterranean- Black Sea region. Thus a message from Crimea first had to be transported by ship (in the old traditional way) to Varna, then despatched by horse (in the old traditional way) to Bucharest, where the message could then be transmitted direct to London. Bektas reveals that Russian transmissions were much quicker, not just because of geographical advantage, but because the Russian Empire had constructed 220 stations each staffed by six operators from the Austrian border to the Russian capital of St Petersburg. With war looming, the Russian government also contracted the Berlin company Siemens & Halske to expand the Russian telegraph network from Warsaw to St Petersburg. A message during the war therefore only took two days for the Russians, compared to the average five for the Allies. This deficiency raised serious concerns within the British and French governments, and led to extensive activity in expanding their telegraph capabilities in and around the Crimean Peninsula. In December 1854, the British government contracted the major manufacturer and layer of submarine cables, R.S. Newell & Company, to connect Balaclava to Varna, which they completed by April 1855. The French in turn extended the existing telegraph network from Bucharest some 125 miles to Varna. So London and Paris were directly connected by telegraph to the Crimean Peninsula as a direct consequence of the war in what was heralded in the influential magazine Scientific American as ‘an important triumph of modern engineering enterprise’.

Latimer Clark’s Cable-laying Plough, 1855 (Source: Stephen Roberts, Distant Writing at http://distantwriting.co.uk/telegraphwar.html)

An interesting novelty from all this expansion of telegraph technology was a ‘terrestrial cable-laying plough’ designed by Josiah Latimer Clark, Chief Engineer for the Electric Telegraph Company. This invention was inspired by the concern that ‘telegraph poles’ (that raised the telegraph cables above the ground) would reveal the whereabouts of communication apparatus to the enemy, and so could be easily destroyed. Laying the cables underground did negate this concern, although it did mean that they had to be dug up again when the cables failed due to the lack of insulation. Another interesting development was the founding in 1855 of the newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which promptly sent its own war correspondents and artists to report eye-witness accounts of the war. Therefore, as Bektas rightly argued, the war ‘brought together different telegraph systems [using] lines above ground and underwater’, with ‘military and civilian engineers’ working together as well as ‘operators transmitting to each other in several languages’. However, the telegraph also created tensions between governments and their military officers in the field, for the latter lost their autonomy for they were now having to respond to commands from officials who were many miles away from the combat zone.

Bektas argued that these technologies were, and still are, widely exaggerated. For example, telegraphy was mostly used by the military and respective governments for intelligence purposes only. Other ‘intelligence’ (for that was what ‘news’ was then called) and any general lengthy intelligence reports were shipped by steamers and transported over land by railway, taking up to two weeks to reach London before it could be published in newspapers. The best example of this is William Russell’s famous report on the Charge of the Light Brigade – the even took place on 25 October 1854, but The Times editorial detailing the notorious event was published on 13 November. That said, however, telegraphic and photographic technology did help to make the war a public spectacle, while the ‘media’ for the first time in history was able to exploit a war for monetary gain. The war therefore was not only an entrepreneurial opportunity, but a business enterprise.

News reports also spurred laissez-faire governments into action, vividly demonstrated by the rapidity with which the telegraphic network was expanded, but also by the response to the concerns regarding the woeful medical care of sick and wounded soldiers. The British public had been made aware of such issues another correspondent of The Times newspaper, Thomas Cheney, whose reports on the unsanitary conditions and inefficient organisation of the military ‘hospital’ in Scutari (on the northern coast of Turkey) inspired the then Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert, to despatch a team of 38 nurses led by Florence Nightingale to ease the suffering and improve the conditions of hospitalisation of British soldiers in the field. Nightingale’s arrival on 4 November (the day before the Battle of Inkerman) proved to be too little too late to save Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen, who was replaced by Lord Palmerston in January 1855. The new Secretary of State for War, Lord Panmure, promptly despatched to Scutari a Sanitary Commission headed by Colonel Alexander Tulloch (a War Office administrative expert) and Scottish Surgeon Sir John McNeill, to investigate the Scutari embarrassment. These stories are well known; less well known is that Cheney’s reports also led the War Office to seek the assistance of the great railway baron and engineering marvel, Sir Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The mission Brunel was tasked with was to design and construct pre-fabricated buildings to use as temporary hospital wards that could be shipped from Britain to the Dardanelles Straits to ease improve the hospitalisation of British soldiers.

Brunel’s pioneering prefabricated building at Renkioi (Source: Wikitours)

After extensive study of reports from medical experts and hospital managers (including a detailed report from Florence Nightingale on the problems of sanitation in Scutari), Brunel had an experimental model of his design displayed by his railway company, the Great Western Railway, for all to see on Paddington Station. The pre-fabricated buildings were constructed of wood, and then shipped in May 1855 at great expense and with much energy (some 24 shipments in all) ‘flatpack’ to Renkioi, the place designated for erection. By January 1856, this temporary hospital was ready for patients, but it remained a civilian hospital – still under War Office jurisdiction, but independent of the Army Medical Department, and so excluded from Nightingale’s management. It admitted a total of 1,408 patients before its closure in July 1856.

Plan of a ward for Renkioi Hospital by Mark Isambard Brunel (Source: Wikitours)

The Crimean War was therefore the first truly ‘modern’ war, essentially because it was the proving ground for a range of products of the first great Industrial Revolution that had transformed Britain into the ‘workshop of the world’. From rifles to railways, cameras to communications technology, steamships to pre-fabricated hospitals – this war was a technological showcase for the industriousness upon which the British Empire had depended. Yet this war also proved to be an early warning to all witnesses that advanced technology does not necessarily guarantee swift victory. For varying reasons, the Crimean War dragged on for much longer that any of the belligerent four great empires had planned. This war of empires was a classic case of the clash between the old and the new, in which the respective imperial armies persevered with traditional orthodox strategies and battlefield tactics, irrespective of technological innovations and modern ideas. That these warning signs were not heeded is wholly evident in the British struggle against the Boers some fifty years later, and especially on the epic battlefields of the First World War.