- Necessity is the mother of invention,
and the life or death situations of wartime
put that necessity into hyperdrive,
leading to a ton of inventions that civilians use today.
Here are the top ten military inventions we use every day.
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If you imagine freeze-drying involves spraying things
with a fire extinguisher type device,
you're not that far off.
The process was developed independently
in the late 1800s and 1900s
by several European scientists,
including Richard Altmann in Germany,
and Jacques-Arsene d'Arsonval in France.
Basically, frozen foods and liquids are dried out
in a low-pressure vacuum chamber.
The key step is sublimation--
the direct transition of water from solid to gas,
without melting,
which saves the item from physical damage,
preserving taste, color, etcetera.
Freeze-dried items don't need to be refrigerated,
and can be reconstituted by adding water.
It was first widely used during World War II,
after blood plasma and penicillin being sent
to Europe from the US to treat wounded soldiers
kept spoiling due to inconsistent refrigeration.
Today, freeze-drying is used to preserve
and transport foods, biological materials,
and pharmaceuticals.
The process is very expensive,
but you really can't put a price
on the taste of ice cream in outer space.
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The idea for the first sliding fastener was in 1851,
by Elias Howe,
who also invented the modern lock stitch sewing machine.
In 1893, Whitcomb L. Judson patented the clasp hooker,
marketed with the slogan "a pull, and it's done."
Then, in 1917,
Gideon Sundback patented the first fastener
that resembles our modern zipper.
The fast, reliable fastener interested the US military,
first on money belts, then on clothing and equipment.
The zipper went mainstream in 1923,
on a pair of rubber boots,
and first named the "zipper" after the sound it makes.
From there, it steadily gained popularity in fashion,
and in 1937, "Esquire" dubbed it the winner
over buttons in the battle of the fly on men's trousers,
saying it excluded the possibility
of unintentional and embarrassing disarray.
Although we often look down to check,
we haven't looked back since.
Blood transfusions were first attempted in the 17th century,
and first widely used during World War I.
The problem was that transfusions were performed
by connecting the donor directly to the recipient,
like the human version of jumping a car.
But this was impossible on the front lines of battle.
Then, US Army doctor Oswald H. Robertson,
and his scientist colleagues discovered a way
to preserve blood
with a sodium citrate solution
and refrigeration, making drawn blood usable
for up to four weeks.
In 1917, Robertson set up the first blood bank
on the Western Front in Europe,
transfusing blood from refrigerated flasks
directly into wounded soldiers.
The practice caught on, and saved thousands of lives.
The first sight of a non-military blood bank
was in Leningrad in Russia in 1932.
And the US government initiated
a national blood collection program in 1940.
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Another invention out of World War I
that sparked a true societal shift is sanitary napkins.
Cotton was the primary material
for dressing wounds on battlefields in World War I,
but due to the extensive carnage,
supplies were running low.
Allied doctors experimented with a number of alternatives,
even shipping in moss from Canada,
until the Kimberly-Clark company developed a material
from wood pulp that they named
cellu-cotton,
which was highly absorbent and inexpensive to produce.
The company claims that during the war,
it produced 380 to 500 feet of cellu-cotton per minute.
After the war, the company was searching for a use
for their sudden surplus of the material.
They began receiving letters from Red Cross nurses,
who had been using the disposable cellu-cotton
during their periods-- replacing the
hand-sewn cotton pads they used.
In 1920,
Kimberly-Clark produced its first consumer product,
Kotex sanitary napkins.
Kotex being a nickname for the cotton-like texture.
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As America settled back into postwar life,
Kimberly-Clark continued experimenting
with uses for its cellu-cotton.
In 1924, they ironed out the weighty material
into thin sheets, tweaked the ingredients
and used different pulps
to produce a thinner, softer tissue.
It was marketed as a disposable cold cream
and makeup remover that was endorsed
by Hollywood and Broadway stars.
The product was called Kleenex,
to be associated with its popular older sibling Kotex.
In 1926, they began receiving letters from people
who were using Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief.
A newspaper ran a poll asking what people's
primary use for Kleenex was,
and over 60% responded that they used it
for their runny noses.
By 1930, the marketing for Kleenex had fully shifted
to noses, and sales doubled in the first year.
Although, they would have tripled
if they had used my slogan--
"Forgetting your Kleenex? It's snot a good idea."
Many great inventions were created by accident;
penicillin, chocolate peanut butter cups, superglue.
During World War II,
a team of chemists were trying to create
a clear plastic for precision gun sights.
One substance they concocted was extremely sticky,
bonding to almost any substance.
It was useless for their project,
but one of the chemists,
Harry Coover, didn't forget it.
In 1951,
Coover was working on jet plane canopies,
and upon resurrecting the substance,
discovered it didn't require heat or pressure
to permanently bond
virtually any two items together.
He immediately began developing it
for commercialization, and it went to market in 1958--
later named superglue.
It made its way to the battlefield during
the Vietnam War, where medics sprayed it
to seal open wounds, veins, arteries and more
to stop heavy bleeding, saving thousands of lives,
making it, arguably,
the world's first inanimate superhero.
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Finally, an answer to the age-old question,
is it duck tape or duct tape?
Turns out, it's both.
During World War II, Vesta Stout was working
in an ammunition plant,
and noticed that the paper tape used
to seal ammo boxes were difficult to open,
a big problem for soldiers trying to open them
in the heat of combat.
She suggested a cloth-based waterproof tape,
but her superiors ignored her.
So she wrote a letter to President Roosevelt
about the issue, including diagrams of her tape idea.
Convinced, FDR ordered Johnson & Johnson
to develop the tape right away.
It was an immediate hit with the soldiers,
and was initially named duck tape,
because it incorporated a type of canvas
called cotton duck.
During peacetime, it was used so often to seal duct work,
that it was renamed duct tape,
and the color was changed to match HVAC systems.
It makes sense that the computer was invented
for military purposes.
There were actually several computing machines
developed during World War II,
including the Colossus,
a code-breaking machine in England.
But the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,
or ENIAC, is widely regarded as the first computer
because it could be reprogrammed
to perform different tasks.
Invented in 1943 by John Presper Eckert Jr.
and John Mauchly-- the initial task was
making speedy calculations for artillery settings.
Calculations that take soldiers days to work out,
could be completed in one second by the ENIAC.
You thought your old laptop was heavy?
The ENIAC filled a 30x50 foot room with 40 cabinets,
each 9 feet high, packed with vacuum tubes,
capacitors and switches.
It all weighed 30 tons.
The 5,000 instructions it could execute per second
should make you appreciate your smartphone.
The iPhone 12 executes about
11 trillion instructions per second.
Nice.
Where would we be without GPS?
Nobody knows.
The forefathers of GPS,
Global Positioning Service,
were scientists at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s,
who realized that, through sound frequencies,
the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked,
based on their distance from Sputnik,
the world's first man-made satellite.
Knowing this, the Navy developed
a satellite navigation system to locate submarines.
In 1978, the military launched the first 24-hour
navigation system, called NavStar.
This technology would evolve into the GPS we know today.
Everything changed in 1983,
when a Korean passenger plane
accidentally flew into Soviet airspace
and was shot down.
Ronald Reagan claimed the GPS could have
prevented the tragedy, and declared
GPS should become available for civilian use.
Worried that nations with bad intentions
would take advantage of the technology,
GPS signals were purposely degraded until 2000,
when the military leveled the playing field,
and personal GPS got ten times better overnight,
to the horror of paper maps.
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No, the EpiPen was not invented for soldiers
with peanut allergies.
Sheldon Kaplan invented the ComboPen for the
US military in the 1970s,
as an auto-injector for a nerve gas antidote.
At the same time, he was designing a civilian use
for the ComboPen to inject epinephrine--
science for adrenaline--
to save people in anaphylactic shock.
Prior to the pen, doctors prescribed
epinephrine kits, with a vial of medicine and syringes.
The problem being, that properly filling a syringe
and injecting oneself can be pretty difficult
for an untrained person whose throat is swelling shut.
The EpiPen was fast and easy to use,
preloaded with a dose of medicine,
and spring-loaded to pierce through clothing.
The price and accessibility of EpiPens have been a topic
of much scrutiny over the past 15 years,
but there is no question that this is the most epic pen.
It will be fascinating to see what inventions emerge
from the military the way they operate in the 21st century.
In the meantime, let's celebrate what it's given us.
Did we miss a key invention?
Sound off in the comments.
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