← Quora archive  ·  2010 Dec 20, 2010 06:32 AM PST

Question

What consumer technologies started in the military?

Answer

  1. Microwave ovens came out of radio research
  2. GPS as Ryan already mentioned
  3. Jet engines (and therefore most modern air travel)
  4. Arguably, all of computing (Turing and his team cracking the Enigma code, targeting systems for AA fire)
  5. The Internet (DARPANET to ARPANET to Internet), which you already mentioned
  6. Communication satellites which enable TV (via space programs, which themselves were enabled by WW II rocketry/missile research)
  7. SUVs (via WW II Jeeps)
  8. Sonar for fisherman (via anti-submarine warfare)

This is biased to mech/aero/CS engineering. I am sure those who are familiar with the history of medicine, materials and civil engineering will have a whole bunch more examples.

Things that might go consumer based on current military tech?

I am not so sure about UAVs outside of toy applications. The regulatory issues over mixed autonomous/non-autonomous airspaces seem nearly intractable. Ella Atkins at U. Michigan studies these carefully, and progress has been painfully slow. Just like personal "air cars" have been possible for decades, but have been held up by the difficulty of putting the infrastructure together...

I think a lot of the stuff is in areas I am not familiar with, like materials, so I am excited to see what might jump out and surprise us. For instance, the other day I saw a documentary that estimated that the Navy loses like $20 billion a year or something to rust, and is funding a huge amount of research in anti-corrosion research. If some of that makes it out to the civilian world, the effects would be amazing, though not very sexy perhaps.

Another area is the so-called "nanobots" area. Super-tiny robots and machines are getting more practical all the time. Not quite nano perhaps, but extremely small. There's got to be some very cool things to be done with these.

In more traditional areas, the military is actually lagging (and consciously choosing to in some cases) where it used to lead. These days the military is as likely to jump on hot consumer tech and harden it for the military than the other direction, especially in software, electronics, etc.