I’m really fascinated by the progress which is very visible in military technologies. Even ‘simple’ technology, such as radar, baffle me when you think of just how the pioneer devices were made, I.e. how did they manage to make the devices used to process the information/data collected.
In: Technology
A lot is repurposing previously discovered research.
* radar – in the late 1800s, a physicist discovered sound waves reflected off solid objects. Then someone in the Russian Navy was trying to reuse it to talk between ships, when it showed a third ship, and he realized it could be used for tracking objects. Military went from there
* lasers – designed in the 1960s to cut hard to work with materials like diamonds and titanium. Military looked at them and went “hot damn, we could probably use those to cut down missiles!”, and so it began decades of research into lasers as defensive weapons.
* night vision – discovered by an early TV designer who was testing out different potential designs for TVs. He realized infared light could be used in conjuction with a screen to see in the dark. Military went “oh damn, we want that!”
* GPS – scientists were studying sputnik, when they realized they could determine exactly where it was just from its radio signals. They then theorized they could then determine the location of a person based off satellites. These scientists happened to work in conjuction with the US military, and presented their research to the military
etc etc.
some are completely independent designs, but a lot is repurposed research
Money determines the pace of most research as PhD’s gotta pay bills like everyone else. The military has traditionally been able to throw oodles of money at anything they fancied, so when some discovery is made in a lab somewhere (to my knowledge, the military has _never_ done anything ‘from scratch;’ I’ve studied the history of technology to some degree – note that organizations like DARPA has funded _civilian_ research from ‘scratch’ from time to time) that might languish for years/decades due to lack of money will be ‘drowned’ in money and expertise.
There’s also the secondary, but no less relevant issue that the military can expedite testing to a degree typically not available to the civilian world, meaning they have access to resources that are simply not available to anyone else, plus the ability to… ‘waive’ certain legal/ethical issues to get the data that’s necessary to take a given concept and put it into a form that a private who doesn’t give a damn can operate it while under fire.
The “developed from scratch” part of your question is what baffles me. Almost all evolutionary developments – often with both military and non-military applications driving the development. It is not a single process ether – thermal imaging has a lot of “civilian” applications, lasers are used in research, communications and other tasks.
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