Defense or war technologies have always been at the cutting edge of technology, so much so that critics have often dubbed it as having a never-ending appetite for funds. But all said and done, many great inventions that have contributed to civilian comfort and efficiency have been thanks to military spin-offs. Computing itself is a prime example, having been born of wartime efforts in the US Army and Navy to calculate ballistic trajectories of munitions during the Second World War. Early efforts to calculate trajectories for Army firing tables by specially trained personnel nicknamed ‘computors’ using just a
calculator, pencil and paper later led to the development of huge machines like the Eniac. Computing was given a boost by the efforts of the US Navy and NASA in the post-war period and has never looked back since then. Fast forward to the 1970s, when the US military developed the ARPANET, the forerunner of today’s Internet. Even e-mail, the quintessential killer app that changed the way we communicate, was a spin-off from a military project. It started as Ray Tomlinson’s SNDMSG program to leave messages for his colleagues at defense contractor BBN’s labs.
Here are a few interesting spin-offs from military research.
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Satellite photography was originally for the military’s exclusive use. Both American and Russian ‘birds in space’ kept a sharp lookout on the other’s military assets, particularly nuclear missiles. The end of the Cold War resulted in the commercialisation of satellite-imaging technology. Today, remote-sensing satellites do everything from discovering new petroleum deposits in the sea bed, keeping an eye on the ozone hole to even taking aerial pictures for town planners. GIS to a great extent has developed as a new discipline only because of the availability of high-resolution satellite imagery of physical locations.
Telemedicine, which uses video conferencing and digital-imaging technologies to bring together doctors and patients who are separated by hundreds of miles, is another prime spinoff from NASA’s efforts to be in visual reach of astronauts. Remember NASA itself was set up as a corollary to US military ambitions in space.
Space programs the world over are a direct spin-off of the military usage of rockets in warfare. Tipu Sultan’s father Haider Ali is reputed to be the first person to have used rockets for warfare. Since then little had changed up to the time when Nazi Germany bombarded London with the famous V2 rockets, a technological marvel of the time. Once the Second World War ended, both US and Russia embarked on active space programs with the help of German scientists who had worked on the V2 rockets. On the other hand, computing, monitor technology and 3-D imaging all grew thanks to the space program.
Patient monitoring equipment that nurses use in hospitals is based on the technology first developed by NASA to monitor the health of astronauts. Of course, the sensors and displays have changed, but principles remain the same.
Benoy George Thomas