With the end of the war, it was as if the world had entered a new era.

Some people think that war has a boosting effect on the economy, and on the face of it it is, after the First and Second World Wars, the world economy quickly entered a long-term period of growth.

But this may only be an illusion, the so-called economic growth, is nothing more than the expansion of productivity and the improvement of efficiency, and the expansion of production and the improvement of efficiency, in the industrial age, mainly rely on three elements, one is the increase of labor, one is the improvement of technology, the other is the improvement of management level.

However, wars such as World War I and World War II will not increase the labor force, on the contrary, it will greatly reduce the labor supply. The main reliance can only be on the improvement of technology and management level, and the reduction of labor force has also increased the use of machines, and there is an objective demand for technological improvement.

During the war, various countries will also invest a lot of money in the study of military technology, and after the war, military technology will be converted to civilian use, and the technological level will be greatly improved; during the war, a large number of soldiers with rich military salaries will be demobilized, and the military salaries they have accumulated for several years will be turned into vigorous consumption power, and the market scale will be rapidly increased.

All of this seems to make sense, but it's likely that it's just a phenomenon, not an essence.

Zhou Lang also believed in the theory that war promotes the economy before, but he personally experienced this long large-scale war and came to a different conclusion from the analysis of a large amount of data in the war.

He found that during the war, China's civilian production, although it did not shrink significantly, did not maintain its previous growth momentum, and almost remained the same. From an economic point of view, during the war, the state issued a large number of bonds, which absorbed a large amount of money from the financial market, which led to an increase in the cost of obtaining funds for private industrial and commercial organizations, and thus a large-scale reduction in investment in the civilian economy.

During the war, the civilian economy stagnated, factories either shrank or remained in their original state, and few adopted new technologies to expand their scale, and few invested in new factories.

This means that civilian technology has stagnated for four years, and in these four years, under the impetus of the war, the military industry-related machinery manufacturing industry has developed rapidly, during the war they provided arms and materials, after the war turned to civilian use, mass production of machinery and equipment, at the same time the state began to pay off the war debt, and no longer siphoned off funds from the economy, the civilian economy began to be easier to obtain capital on the one hand, and on the other hand it was easier to get new technologies, and it is no wonder that the economy did not develop.

To put it bluntly, this growth is more likely to be a kind of compensation for the secular stagnation, and if there is no war, no one dares to say that the private economy will not grow to the same level during that time. It is true that military technology can be converted to civilian use, but if there is no war, civilian technology may not be developed during this time.

Whether it was a real boost to the economy or a compensatory phenomenon, China's economy did recover quickly after the war, and after a brief period of fluctuations, after the summer harvest, it quickly began to grow, the market boomed, many new factories began to be built, and large-scale recruitment began.

Many new technologies did emerge from the war, most notably propeller steamships and telegraphs.

Decades have passed since the invention of the steamboat, but it has not been popularized on a large scale, let alone used in the military. The main reason is that the new steam-powered boats do not have an advantage over the traditional sailing boats. In the early days, paddle wheels were used in steamships, and if they were used on warships, the exposed paddlewheels were easily damaged by cannonballs.

The propeller appeared relatively late, but it had already appeared before the war, but the technology was very immature. In 1804, the American Stephen was the first to start experimenting with power-driven propellers, he built a small boat more than seven meters long, directly driven by a steam engine, and did the first experimental voyage on the Hudson River, the experiment found that the power was insufficient, and it was replaced with a Watt steam engine, the experimental speed was 4 knots, and the maximum speed had reached 8 knots. This is completely unsatisfactory to the military.

As the most developed country in the shipbuilding industry, the UK has also been a pioneer in the application of propellers. In 1836, the British Archimedes used a screw, but the propeller at this time was not the same as the bladed propeller of later generations, but a long wooden screw like a screw, which was invented by Archimedes thousands of years ago, so it was called the Archimedes spiral, and Archimedes invented this spiral for the purpose of drawing water for irrigation.

When the British experimented with the Archimedes spiral, the ship was sailing at a speed of 4 knots per hour, and in the event of an accident, an obstacle in the water broke the screw, leaving only a small section, but the ship unexpectedly increased its speed to 13 knots per hour. This inspired the shipbuilding engineers to turn the long screw into a short screw and the short screw into a blade shape, and the propeller was born.

These new technologies that had just been born before the war apparently broke out before they could be applied, and then in the naval war, China and Britain found that the naval war had developed to the stage of mutual destruction, and the two sides stopped the suicidal naval war and exercised restraint from each other, but both began to study the new technology.

Propeller technology, in this case, was valued by the navies of both sides. China was also equipped with steamships before the war, and the four major commercial companies were equipped with steamships, most of which were paddle steamers, which were used as cruise ships and were responsible for transporting goods and mail, because the speed was relatively fast and the price was higher.

During the war, the navies of both China and Britain were experimenting with propeller-powered ships in large numbers, and the British shipbuilding industry was more technological, and they were already able to produce iron ships, but the protective effect of iron ships was even inferior to that of oak sailing ships, and it was difficult to use them as warships. Therefore, in the application of propellers, the two sides are half a catty, and the accumulation of technology is not enough to create an ironclad ship, but the speed has been greatly improved.

Both countries built a number of propeller sailing ships, which did not completely get rid of the wind, but in some small boats, which had begun to be driven purely by steam engines, as letter ships for the army.

Telegraph technology also matured rapidly under the impetus of the military, and in the thirties of the 19th century, the rapid development of railways urgently needed a communication tool that was not affected by the weather, had no time constraints, and ran faster than trains. In 1837, Cook and Wheatstone designed and manufactured the first cable telegraph, and continued to improve it, and the speed of transmission continued to increase. This telegraph was the first to gain application in railway communications. In 1836, Morse, an American, compiled Morse code, and the Americans were superior in coding.

These two technologies were quickly applied to the war, and the telegraph industry developed rapidly. The speed of communication increased dramatically in the latter part of the war week precisely because of the use of the telegraph. However, it was still very unstable, and both sides continued to improve their technology, and in the final year of the war, they were able to obtain stable high-speed transmission.

After the war, the telegraph lines that were invested and built during the war were quickly opened to the people, and China handed them over to the post stations to manage. In Britain and the United States, telegraph companies were established by the private sector and developed commercially.

A new technology also emerged during the war, called iron-ribbed wood-hulled shipbuilding, which was the transition from wooden to iron. It was still mainly done by the British, who had lost a lot of warships in naval battles and had always feared that the Chinese navy would fight a war of attrition with Britain regardless of casualties, so he needed to expand his navy quickly.

But the keel of the naval battleship was always available but not available, and on the basis of the world's leading steel industry, the British looked for a way to replace the keel with steel. The British have been building iron ships for some time, and their inventors developed pig iron hulls as early as the 1820s as a mature technology, but the outside of the green iron could not be clad with copper because it would cause corrosion (electrochemical corrosion) of unknown causes, which made the iron-hulled ships have a limited lifespan and could not be navigable in the tropical seas, otherwise they would soon be covered with seagrass. Therefore, the technology of using iron as ribs and wooden shells came into being, and the iron rib wooden hull ships can be clad in copper on the one hand, and have strong anti-twisting ability and large indoor space on the other hand.

Unfortunately, the technical level of the iron-ribbed wood-hulled ship still could not make the hull have the sturdiness of a pure oak battleship, and it could not be used as the main battleship. It was more than enough to be used as a merchant ship, so merchant ships began to rapidly become larger and steam-powered. And quickly occupy a place in ocean voyages, 5,000 tons of long-distance merchant ships began to popularize, so that the average freight of goods dropped significantly, originally unprofitable goods, began to be traded, such as the grain in the Americas used to be transported to China by sailing ships, the price of grain could not even afford the transportation costs, and now it has become a commodity that can be traded.

And after several years of research, the meditative naval officers have found the right way, they began to put iron armor on the steamship, as for who invented this design, both sides can find their own representatives, in fact, both sides sent a large number of military spies to the other, especially the British, this is a race to the death, if during the war, which country has more advanced technology, the last naval battle can be divided between the winner and the loser.

If there were no opponents, Britain and China both had a large number of wooden warships, and neither had the incentive to adopt new technologies, but after a brutal naval battle, both sides embarked on the era of technological arms race, and whoever fell behind would die, which was so cruel.

Ironclad ships are not a new thing, and the Koreans can also take out the turtle ships that fought against the Japanese in the Ming Dynasty to talk about things, strictly speaking, it is indeed an ironclad ship.

Both sides are experimenting with new ship types, new power, new firepower, and both are ambitious to design their own ironclad plans, and both hope to be ahead of each other as soon as possible. This made the naval era enter the era of ironclad ships twenty years ahead of schedule, but the ironclad technology of both sides was still immature, and it could not reach the level of equipping large warships, but it made wooden sailing ships quickly fall behind.

The huge fleets of the two old-school maritime hegemons began to be eliminated, and the sea power began to be reshuffled, and many ambitious countries also quickly entered the era of ironclads, starting from scratch, trying to occupy a place on the sea for them in the era of marine armament remodeling.

Therefore, the French Empire and the Austrian Empire have successively started their ironclad ship programs, and the ironclad arms race has broken out all over the world.

The technological competition between countries has intensified, and they have all begun to consciously engage in technological competition, and this change in thinking and consciousness is also the impact of this war.

A world war has pushed the world into an era of high competition, and the result of the war has made the world smaller than ever, and the Europeans are pushing the door to the Chinese.

Business is changing more rapidly than ever before, and the emergence of new technologies, new knowledge, and new cultures is multiplied, and the reason for this is the impact of China's entry into this competition.

In the original history, China and other traditional countries were out of the times, and Europeans enjoyed the dividends of the industrial revolution alone, although they had internal disputes, but between them and the outside world, it was almost binary, and they could calmly use the technological dividends of the industrial revolution to plunder other countries, like a small fish wandering in the pond, easy and comfortable rapid growth.

But in this era, China joined the competition of the industrial age, and a large fish entered the pond that was originally exclusive to Europeans, and the size of this big fish was like dolphins to European countries compared to whales, although it did not squeeze them out of the pond, but it made the pond crowded, so that the small fish needed to work harder to get food.

As a result, the European fish, which are absolutely inferior in size, began to swim harder, making the world's gears turn faster, and entering a new era after the Age of Discovery!