A military invention is an invention that was first created by a military. There are many inventions that were originally created by the military and subsequently found civilian uses. Many have found dual usage in both sectors.
Name | Date invented | Invented by | Original purpose | Civilian uses |
---|---|---|---|---|
ASDIC | 1910s | United Kingdom | Submarine detection | Sonar |
Radar | mid-1930s | United Kingdom [1] [2] | Early warning radar, air defence systems | Air traffic control systems, microwave oven |
Walkie-talkie | 1930s | Canada (Donald Hings) [3] | Portable two-way radio communications system for military | Portable radio communications – business, public safety, marine, amateur radio, CB radio |
Night vision | 1939 - 1940s | Nazi Germany | Visibility for military personnel in low light situations | Low light photography, surveillance |
Duct tape | 1942 | United States | Sealing ammunition cases | Multiple uses |
Ballistic missiles | 1940s | Nazi Germany | Long range attack | Space exploration, launch of communication, weather and global positioning satellites |
Darknet | 1990s | United States | Anonymous/protected computer networking | Used by journalists, political activists, scientists, etc. |
Nuclear technology | 1940s | United States | Nuclear weapons | Nuclear medicine, nuclear power |
Jet engine | 1940s | Nazi Germany (Hans von Ohain) | Jet fighters, jet bombers | Airliners |
Digital photography | 1960s | United States | Spy satellites, eliminated the need to recover deorbited film canisters | Digital cameras |
Compiler | 1952 | United States | Allow programs to be written for multiple target computers by different vendors without needing to rewrite the assembly for each of them. | Compiler |
Internet | 1960s - 1970s | United States (ARPANET) [4] | Reliable computer networking | Led to invention of the World Wide Web by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee; subsequently widespread availability of information, telecommunication and electronic commerce |
Rodriguez well | 1960s | United States Army | Nuclear weapons and logistics, provide water supply for bases hidden in polar regions | Colonization of Mars |
Satellite navigation | 1970s | United States Air Force | Nuclear weapons force multiplier, increased warhead accuracy through precise navigation | Navigation, personal tracking |
Sanitary napkins | 1920s | United Kingdom | Prevent bleeding using cellulose in bandages. | British & American nurses picked up the bandages and started using them as Sanitary Napkins. |
The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks are called an internetwork, or simply an internet.
The cavity magnetron is a high-power vacuum tube used in early radar systems and subsequently in microwave ovens and in linear particle accelerators. A cavity magnetron generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field, while moving past a series of cavity resonators, which are small, open cavities in a metal block. Electrons pass by the cavities and cause microwaves to oscillate within, similar to the functioning of a whistle producing a tone when excited by an air stream blown past its opening. The resonant frequency of the arrangement is determined by the cavities' physical dimensions. Unlike other vacuum tubes, such as a klystron or a traveling-wave tube (TWT), the magnetron cannot function as an amplifier for increasing the intensity of an applied microwave signal; the magnetron serves solely as an electronic oscillator generating a microwave signal from direct current electricity supplied to the vacuum tube.
In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.
Raytheon BBN is an American research and development company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
The history of radar started with experiments by Heinrich Hertz in the late 19th century that showed that radio waves were reflected by metallic objects. This possibility was suggested in James Clerk Maxwell's seminal work on electromagnetism. However, it was not until the early 20th century that systems able to use these principles were becoming widely available, and it was German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer who first used them to build a simple ship detection device intended to help avoid collisions in fog. True radar, such as the British Chain Home early warning system provided directional information to objects over short ranges, were developed over the next two decades.
The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a delegation from the United Kingdom that visited the United States during World War II to share secret research and development (R&D) work that had military applications. It received its popular name from the programme's instigator, Henry Tizard, a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, which had orchestrated the development of radar.
Henry Albert Howard Boot was an English physicist who with Sir John Randall and James Sayers developed the cavity magnetron, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War.
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002.
Peter Thomas Kirstein was a British computer scientist who played a role in the creation of the Internet. He made the first internetworking connection on the ARPANET in 1973, by providing a link to British academic networks, and was instrumental in defining and implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
The Defense Data Network (DDN) was a computer networking effort of the United States Department of Defense from 1983 through 1995. It was based on ARPANET technology.
The United Kingdom has been involved with the Internet throughout its origins and development. The telecommunications infrastructure in the United Kingdom provides Internet access to homes and businesses mainly through fibre, cable, mobile and fixed wireless networks, with the UK's 140-year-old copper network, maintained by Openreach, set to be withdrawn by December 2025.
The Radiation Laboratory, commonly called the Rad Lab, was a microwave and radar research laboratory located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was first created in October 1940 and operated until 31 December 1945 when its functions were dispersed to industry, other departments within MIT, and in 1951, the newly formed MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Sir John Turton Randall, was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.
Frank Evans Heart was an American computer engineer influential in computer networking. After nearly 15 years working for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Heart worked for Bolt, Beranek and Newman from 1966 to 1994, during which he led a team that designed the first routing computer for the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet.
SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) was a set of early, experimental mobile ad hoc networks whose technologies evolved over time. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Major participants in the project included BBN Technologies, Hazeltine Corporation, Rockwell International's Collins division, and SRI International.
The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol through rapid adoption of the Internet.
It not only changed the course of the war by allowing us to develop airborne radar systems, it remains the key piece of technology that lies at the heart of your microwave oven today. The cavity magnetron's invention changed the world.
But by 1940, it was the British who had made a spectacular breakthrough: the resonant cavity magnetron, a radar transmitter far more powerful than its predecessors.... The magnetron stunned the Americans. Their research was years off the pace.
We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.; "The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today's Internet". SRI International. 27 October 2009. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019. Retrieved 25 September 2017.
But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking.