Gallery: Indispensable Vehicles That Got Their Start in WWI
THREE LIONS/GETTY01French Tanks
[The Tank](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/08/this-puny-french-vehicle-was-the-first-great-tank/) - The first great tank was arguably France's Renault FT. Cheap, lightweight and maneuverable, it was designed to overwhelm enemy firing positions through sheer numbers. It's impact may have been mostly psychological, with the mere appearance of tanks giving demoralized German infantry an excuse to surrender, but it showed how important armor would be.
dpa/picture-alliance/dpa/AP02World War I - Submarine
[The Submarine](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/09/wwis-u-boats-launched-age-unrestricted-warfare/) - For British merchant vessels, few things were as terrifying as the submarine. German U-Boats sunk 5,000 ships during World War I, as part of a war of attrition meant to literally starve the British into submission. Submarines today, with their nuclear-tipped missiles, have only gotten scarier---and remain just as hard to find.
U.S. Air Force03Fokker Dr. I
[The Airplane](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/09/ww1-fokker-triplane/) - Though the Allies won the war, the Germans gave us the Fokker Dr.1 triplane, one of the most recognizable aircraft in the early twentieth century (think Red Baron) and one that helped launch dogfighting as a new form of combat. Less famous than the Red Baron's Fokker Dr.1, the [Curtiss JN-4 (Jenny) biplane](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/08/the-humble-wwi-biplane-that-helped-launch-commercial-flight/) helped kick-off civil aviation in post-war America. The Jenny was used to train a new generation of pilots following the war.
U.S. Naval Historical Center0413874985831797531829hms-dreadnought-1906-h61017-duomegapixel
[The Battleship](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/08/the-wwi-battleships-that-saved-and-doomed-the-british-empire/) - Unlike airplanes and the tank, naval warfare had thousands of years of history behind it when World War I started. Britain poured its resources into building huge ships that helped it win the war and eventually lose its empire. They spent a ton of money building more than two dozen Battleships that soon faced significant threats from torpedo ships operated by even tiny navies. Whoops.
VAUXHALL05Vauxhall D-Type Staff Car at The Cloth Hall, Ypres, Belgium
[The Car](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/07/world-war-one-automobile/) - By the beginning of the war, automobiles had begun to pop up in the hands of the wealthy and Henry Ford was pioneering mass production of the Model T. The Vauxhall D-Type crossed battlefields all over the continent, an appealing alternative to traversing conflict zones by horse for military higher-ups. With skinny tires and a 25 horsepower engine, it helped usher out the age of the horse.
US NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER06USS-Los-Angeles-moored-to-USS-Patoka,-1931
[The Zeppelin](http://stag4.wired.com/2014/10/world-war-i-zeppelins/) - Unlike the submarine and the airplane, which continue to be vital instruments of war today, lighter-than-air craft have turned out to be little more than a way to get aerial shots of sporting events. Still, the German zeppelins helped bring about the concept of "strategic bombing"---targeted airstrikes on a particular location---and allowed the Germans to scare the hell out of people, even if they didn't do too much damage.
