Is there a good reason for Bessemer to be in this list?

Factual Questions
1

“Bessemer, Gatling, and Von Neumann all thought they could end the horror of war by the horror of a weapon. They have all been proven wrong.”

This is, as far as I can tell, a quote from nowhere that can be attributed to nobody. I got it from this absurdly long list of quotes and Google doesn’t know another thing about it.

Now that the provenance has been nailed down, is there some historical reference I’m missing? Gatling’s easy: He invented the Gatling gun, the first really popular rapid fire weapon, and thought (so the legend goes) that it would never be used in battle because nobody could be that inhumane. (He obviously never read the Old Testament.)

(As it turns out, that’s bogus. He actually said “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.” [Cite: Paul Wahl and Don Toppel, The Gatling Gun, Arco Publishing, 1971.])

Von Neumann’s place on the list is sketchier, but he did do important work creating nuclear bombs, another ‘war-ending’ weapon. However, it’s hardly the work he’s best known for and he certainly didn’t take the most active role in its development. (To his credit, he achieved more success: The nuclear bomb has only been used in one war and it prevented the Allied invasion of Japan, not to mention preventing the Cold War from turning into a massive conventional war.)

Bessmer, though, seems like a really off-the-wall pick. He invented the Bessemer process to make cheap steel which, to be sure, can be used to make much better weapons than iron, and cheap steel makes those better weapons cheaper. The problem, of course, is that steel also helps you build bridges that don’t fall down, buildings that don’t fall down, and other hallmarks of the latter half of the 19th Century. He also invented a process to make artillery projectiles spin without rifling in the bore of the gun but, really, how the hell does that compare to someone who invented a substantially new kind of gun?

2

From his autobiographyI get the impression that while his steel was used in all manner of industry as you say, a personal obsession of his was winning a contract from the english government to use his steel in the manufacture of various ordinance including The Bessemer Steel Gun. I would assume this was considered, at least by him, to be a substantially new kind of gun due to low cost of manufacture and strength. He never succeeded and was obviously bitter about it, maybe to the point he said something like if they had only used his gun it could have ended war. Although I can’t find anything that specific.

“With regard to the reasons assigned by Sir William Armstrong, in his evidence before the Ordnance Select Committee, for persisting in the use of welded-iron gun-tubes, I must remain absolutely silent; such admissions and declarations as he there made do not admit of discussion, and hence I dismiss for ever this unsatisfactory episode in the long struggle I had maintained to induce the British Government to avail themselves of the immense advantages which my invention offered.”

3

“Put a shoggoth in your tank - Dark Texaco”
“It’s sulfuric acid. You’re soaking in it. - Dark Madge”

That list of quotes is ridiculous.

4

Von Neumann is sometimes considered the inventor of the computer. In so far as the quotation makes sense, it’s referring to him supposedly inventing the computer, not anything to do with the Manhattan Project and nuclear bombs. Frankly, I don’t think you should waste any time on this stupid quotation. It mentions three almost randomly chosen people who aren’t equivalent in any useful way.

5

Alfred Nobel belongs on that list – he reportedly said that one of his hopes was to make war too horrible to contemplate with dynamight, which was, of course, not the result. But I’d put him before Bessemer. Or von Neumann.

6

I believe that was cordite. Dynamite is too unstable to use in a gun, as far as I know.

7

No, it was dynamite. There were repeated attempts to make an effective dynamite gun, but without sucess.

There is some question as to whether Nobel actually said anything like this, however, given that he turned the Bofors iron and steel foundry into one of the world’s foremost arms manufacturers, and provided encouragement to inventors trying to make a successful dynamite gun.

8

He developed the fundamental architectural style of most computers in widespread use. (As you probably know.)

This doesn’t make sense. Calling the computer a weapon makes just as much sense as calling a pencil a weapon. (Less, actually, once you have a really big, sharp pencil in your hands.)

I’m beginning to see my initial skepticism was well-founded.

Indeed. He even wrote this:

The Wright Brothers also deserve to be on the list, or at least Orville does:

And after WWI he said this:

This article by Cracked is actually quite relevant to this thread.

9

Derleth, you’re trying to make the quotation (which in case comes from nobody, so who cares?) make sense, but the problem is that it doesn’t make any real sense. Von Neumann didn’t have that much to do with the nuclear bomb. He did, in some significant sense, have something to do with the computer. Incidentally, I wouldn’t rely on the article by Cracked. It’s sloppy. It claims, for instance, that the classic symbol of the women’s liberation movement is burning bras. That’s been debunked many times. There was only women’s liberation rally when someone was considering burning a bra (but in fact it wasn’t burned at all):

10

Thomas Edison wrote in 1922:

I think that was an extremely common idea at the time.

The quote is from an essay “On Atomic Energy.” Edison properly thought that it much too early to say anythig on the subject, except that it had vast possibilities.

And you could argue that atomic weaponry has indeed made world wars unthinkable and therefore impossible, which were the kind of wars that these people were thinking of.

11

It mentions in the article that it never happened.