the very first tanks

I don't think the tanks was quite the revolution it is often regarded. The Russians made some beautiful designs prior to wwi. Britain use armoured steampowered trators in the Crimean and surely armoured trains were just tanks that ran on tracks. And if you want to go before engines there is of course the Hussites and Thai elephants with cannons mounted on their backs.

Originally posted by aghart Hold on a minute, a tank is an armoured fighting vehicle, powered by an engine and armed with a gun or guns.� So what is this rubbish about Elephants and trains.� It is a matter of accepted and recorded History that Great Britain invented the tank and was the first country to�produce them in numbers and commit them to the battlefield.

If a tank is "an armoured fighting vehicle, powered by an engine and armed with a gun or guns", then what's your problem with trains?

After all .... the basic idea behind the first tanks was to create a vehicle that lays its own tracks while it moves, that literally takes the tracks with it and lays them down as it goes. That was what was really revolutionary about tanks - tracked vehicles had been around since 1770, but not on the battlefield. There had been self-propelled, armoured vehicles with guns around before that. But the tank was a powerful synthesis of the two ideas.

Nothing wrong with exploring predecessors to the tank or the technologies that led up to them. Britain was heavily involved in these, using (as Paul notes) steam tractors in the Crimean as well as, I believe, some sort of armoured, steam-powered wagon or train of wagons in the Boer war. I don't think Paul was trying to imply that Britain was not the first to use armoured, self-propelled, tracked fighting vehicles.

"Tank", of course, is originally slang - dating from some poor attempt to pass off the manufacture and deployment of the first British tanks in WW1 as being vehicles for carrying water to the front lines across the mud, etc. Nobody believed it, and the name was originally used in jest. The technical term at the time was "mechanized armour".

The first use of a non-mechanized application of the same principle may well be the wooden "turtle" used in the Battle of Tenochtitlan, prior to the Noche Triste, to help the Spaniards escape. We don't know much about it. Diaz writes that a large wooden shell was constructed and used to protect the muskets, carried by allied natives.