Today, we ask how to care for a wounded soldier.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
We're in the Smithsonian
Institution. We see an odd item. It looks like an
old Western chuck wagon with its canvas top and
squarish shape. It has a small red cross painted on
the side.
This wagon is important. To see why, we go back to
Solferino, Italy -- to a little-known battle in a
little-known war in 1859. After the battle, a young
Swiss named Jean Dunant worked with other
bystanders to help thousands of wounded French,
Italian, and Austrian soldiers. He wrote a book
about that ghastly experience and used it to call
for the creation of an international group to give
relief in war. The world responded by creating the
International Red Cross in 1863.
A few years later the German army started painting
the Red Cross symbol on horse-drawn ambulances. But
historian Herbert Collins tells us that the Red
Cross first provided its own ambulances in the
Spanish-American War.
When Cubans revolted against Spanish domination in
1897, Clara Barton -- head of the American Red
Cross -- asked President McKinley to help her raise
public money for Red Cross relief to Cuba. The
government finally joined the effort, but only
after the conflict had turned into the
Spanish-American War in 1898.
The Red Cross raised $36,000. Most of it was spent
on eleven mule-drawn ambulances. Each carried four
stretchers and a water cask under the driver's
seat. Two of the stretchers could be mounted as
bench seats inside. The ambulances were made by the
Studebaker company -- before it began making
automobiles.
Only two of the eleven ambulances saw action. Those
were ones that had gone, not to Cuba, but to Puerto
Rico. And they were very useful there. Later,
Clara Barton found that
the Army hadn't even unloaded the six that were
shipped to Cuba.
Two more ambulances were used in New York City, and
one saw service with the Army at Camp Thomas,
Georgia. It was sent back to Clara Barton in
Washington after the war. Eventually a vegetable
peddler bought it. The Smithsonian finally located
it in 1962. When they restored it, they found that
it had originally been painted Prussian blue and
chrome yellow.
You might not see anything special when you first
look at this simple ambulance. But then its meaning
comes clear. You see Jean Dunant's flash of
ingenuity after the suffering at Solferino. You see
Clara Barton's organizational ingenuity. This
humble little wagon represented the first real
action by a world relief organization that owed
nothing to national interests.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
