The hurricane house, the seismograph camera, the forest-fire-fighting dirigible, and more technologies developed for reducing the consequences of natural disasters
May 1933
In the wake of Japan's horrific earthquake and tsunami, we can at least acknowledge that if it weren't for the country's superior technology, the rising death toll would be a lot higher than it is now.
Sturdy skyscrapers, a capable warning system and disaster training didn't come from nowhere, though. As sad as it is to admit, most disaster-prone countries had to learn from destruction in order to improve their technology. We've collected several examples of early disaster-fighting tech from the Popular Science archives.
Click to launch the photo gallery.
We begin in the fall of 1919, just after World War I, when dirigibles glided across national forests in search of fires. After the war, scores of airplanes and zeppelins were commissioned to join horseback-riding firefighters to extinguish the flames consuming our trees. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Japan was about to suffer an earthquake that would kill an estimated 140,000 people. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and tsunami destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, scientists collaborated to devise methods that would reduce the body count in future disasters. Japanese scientists simulated earthquakes on scale models of buildings to see what kind of engineering held up, while an American professor proposed installing ball bearings within houses for stabilization.
Meanwhile, laypeople did everything they could to protect themselves from disasters. One architect built a teardrop-shaped "hurricane house" that turned with the wind during a storm, while businesses sold the all-steel cyclone cellar, which could be delivered in one piece, no assembly required. Simply dig a hole in your front yard, embed the cellar below, and hop in when the winds begin to stir.
See more technologies by browsing through our gallery.
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