Drones, jeeps, GPS—you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that those inventions
had military origins and were later adapted for civilian use.
But today, we’re going to sift through medicine cabinets, pantries, and junk drawers to talk
about the everyday things we use that were originally developed for the frontlines, from
bug spray to Epipens.
I’m Erin McCarthy, and this is the List Show.
Let’s get started!
DEET Bug Spray The next time you’re enjoying a mosquito-free
afternoon outside, take a moment to thank the military.
During the early 1940s, the armed forces were using a repellant that had to be reapplied
every two hours—not exactly convenient when you’re in life-or-death situations.
The USDA worked for a decade before they came up with a solution that repelled bugs for
10 hours.
The Army put the stuff to use immediately and by 1957 it was available for commercial
use.
Today we know it as “DEET,” the compound that’s found in a large number of insect
repellents.
Contrary to popular belief, Deet doesn’t actually kill mosquitoes; it interferes with
their neurons and receptors so they don’t detect human-smelling chemicals like lactic
acid and carbon dioxide.
Silly Putty During WWII, certain resources were pretty
scarce.
Some of these materials, like metal and paper, were being reserved for the war effort.
Others faced supply issues.
When the United States’ rubber supply from Southeast Asia was cut off, the U.S. War Production
Board put out the call for potential substitutes—and in 1943, a scientist named James Wright experimented
his way into the original fidget toy: Silly Putty.
Created by dropping boric acid into silicone oil, it was a non-Newtonian substance, something
which “change[s] [its] viscosity or flow behavior under stress.”
It bounced 25 percent higher than rubber, flowed slowly when not contained, and broke
apart when struck.
But as fascinating as it was, the government had no use for it.
Around 1950, Peter Hodgson helped Silly Putty go mainstream when he realized the unusual
stuff could bounce right into toy boxes everywhere.
He filled plastic eggs with putty and sold them for a dollar right around Easter time.
Eventually, after the Putty got some positive press, sales took off, hitting a quarter of
a million orders in just three days.
The Slinky What classic kids’ toy rivals Silly Putty
as one of the most enduring diversions invented?
Everyone knows it’s Slinky!
In 1943, the same year James Wright was conducting his Silly Putty experiments, Richard James,
a mechanical engineer with the Navy, was working on a device to help keep equipment secure
at sea.
One day, as he was working, he dropped a coil of wires on the floor.
He watched, fascinated, as they tumbled over themselves in a perfectly fluid motion and
rhythm.
The slinky sprung from James’s happy accident; he and his wife Betty invested $500 to produce
and sell the invention as a toy.
It was rough going at first, but after they held a demonstration at Gimbel’s department
store in Philadelphia during the 1945 holiday shopping season, business improved.
When Richard later abandoned his family to join a remote religious group in Bolivia—that’s
another show entirely—Betty threw herself into marketing the Slinky and helped it achieve
the legendary status it holds today.
Interestingly enough, the Slinky did eventually find its way back to military use.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, during the Vietnam War soldiers would use Slinkies
to get a better radio signal by fastening one end to the antenna and slinging the other
over a tree branch.
Fun fact: There’s 80 feet of wire coiled up in the original metal Slinky.
Cheetos Of course, the invention of the Cheeto itself
belongs to what’s now Frito-Lay.
But without a key little innovation from the military, the world’s fingers might be tragically
free of cheese dust stains.
Scientists had long been searching for a way to better preserve cheese so it held up better
in warmer months and climates.
But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people like Walter Gerber and Fritz Stettler
in Switzerland and James Kraft in America figured it out.
They melted cheese, then mixed it with emulsifying salts to create a cheese-like product that
could handle high temps and long-term storage.
When the U.S. military caught wind of the new processed cheese creation, they were all
in.
They placed an order for 25 million quarter-pound tins from Kraft to sustain troops during World
War I and continued to acquire the faux fromage in the following decades, buying 100 million
pounds in 1944 alone.
The initial investment, as well as the military’s continued patronage, helped set Kraft up for
the success they continue to experience today.
But shipping all that water was pricey, so the Quartermaster Corps’ Subsistence Research
Laboratory invested in further cheese dehydration research.
But then, WWII ended.
Great news for most of the world—not-so-great news for the surplus of powdered cheese product
sitting around in government warehouses.
The government ended up selling the cheese dust to grocery manufacturers at an extremely
low cost: companies like General Foods, Quaker Oats, Kellogg’s, and Pillsbury.
As a result, all of these companies rolled out products made with powdered cheese … including
the company that would eventually become Frito-Lay.
It’s a bit of a long road to get from military cheese dust to Cheetos, but in the words of
Chester Cheetah, “It ain’t easy bein’ cheesy.”
Frozen Juice Concentrate World War II helped spark a different orange
food innovation.
While efforts had been made since the 1920s to sell concentrated orange juice, the reviews
weren’t particularly positive.
When World War II began, it became a matter of national importance to get American armed
forces some vitamin C. As food historian Andrew Smith explains, canned juice was bulky and
not a great use of valuable metal, while vitamin C pills probably couldn’t handle military
requirements.
Frozen orange juice concentrate seemed promising but tasted horrific.
So, scientists at the Florida Citrus Commission came up with a new method where they vacuum-evaporated
juice and then mixed it with the fresh stuff before freezing it.
It was less bulky than the original canned product, and the inclusion of fresh juice
made the taste tolerable.
Following the war, a combination of factors—from the baby boom to increased freezer sections
in supermarkets—helped cement concentrated orange juice’s place on the country’s
breakfast table.
WD-40 Around the same time some scientists were
revolutionizing the juice game, others were starting to work on the project that would
eventually develop Atlas, the U.S. Air Force’s first working ICBM, or Intercontinental Ballistic
Missile.
The Atlas missile began development in 1945.
But when you have a missile that’s just sitting there, rust is a serious concern,
so in 1953 a new business called Rocket Chemical Company “ . . . set out to create a line
of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for use in the aerospace industry.”
Thirty-nine water displacement formulas later, they came up with the product now known as
WD-40.
Super Glue Super Glue has long been the solution to many
an accident—but the sticky substance itself was also an accident.
During WWII, chemist Harry Coover of Eastman Kodak was working on developing a type of
clear plastic that could work for military gun sights.
He was experimenting with the chemical family known as cyanoACKrylates, but became frustrated
when he found the chemicals stuck to everything … permanently.
Since that wasn’t useful for gunsights, he put those particular compounds to the side.
Fast-forward to the 1950s: Coover is developing heat-resistant polymers for jet plane canopies.
A young chemist working for him messes around with those same super-sticky chemicals, ruining
a very expensive instrument in the process.
At that point, Coover recognized that what made the compound so annoying could be handy
in other situations, and Super Glue was born.
Like the Slinky, Super Glue went from military project to household staple and back.
During the Vietnam War, medics discovered that sealing a wound with Super Glue spray
could stop blood loss long enough to get the injured soldier to a base hospital, which
saved lots of lives.
It was non-FDA approved and meant risking skin irritation and infections, but that was
often better than the alternative.
Eventually, a medical-grade version of super glue was developed.
EpiPen Millions of people rely on EpiPens to save
them from potentially fatal allergic reactions to things like nuts and bee stings.
But before it was introduced to the masses, the auto-injecting pen saved the lives of
front-line military members and astronauts.
Let’s back up to the early 1970s.
It was around that time that NASA contacted a company called Survival Technology to ask
for help updating a device called the AtroPen, which contained medicine astronauts injected
themselves with if they had an irregular heartbeat while in space.
The pen was one of the first auto-injectors available; prior to its invention, users would
have to use a syringe to draw medicine from a vial and then inject themselves.
The auto-injectors packaged everything together—medicine, delivery method, and all.
Sheldon Kaplan, a scientist at Survival Technology, was assigned to work on the AtroPen redesign.
One of his goals was to find new material for the pen—glass was too fragile and steel
could interfere with the medicine.
He also needed to create a pen with higher capacity—the existing pens couldn’t always
hold the necessary amount of fluid, forcing users to rely on multiple pens and multiple
injections.
Kaplan delivered, coming up with a tempered glass pen and improved injection system that
could hold more medicine.
Not only did it work to deliver the medicine astronauts needed, the military quickly found
that it was a great vehicle to immediately deliver the antidote to nerve gas and other
chemical weapons.
Kaplan and his colleagues at Survival Technology continued to come up with additional revolutionary
uses for the pen.
The most well-known today is the EpiPen, a delivery system for epinephrine, used to counteract
severe allergic reactions.
This version received FDA approval for commercial use in 1987 and has saved untold lives since.
Duct Tape You might already know that duct tape has
military origins, but here’s the story behind the popularization of the world’s most versatile
invention.
The year was 1943, and a mother named Vesta Stoudt was working at an ammunition plant
in Illinois while her two sons served in the Navy.
Part of her job was to help package the ammo, and it didn’t take her long to notice how
inconvenient and potentially dangerous the seals on the boxes were.
Each box was closed with paper tape, and then the entire box was coated in wax to make it
waterproof for shipping.
The wax coating often made it extremely difficult to actually rip the tape off and get to the
precious ammunition inside—and every second counts when you’re under enemy fire.
Stoudt wondered why they didn’t just use tape made of fabric—a fabric like cotton
duck, for example, which is where this story will eventually end up.
But when she brought the idea to her supervisors, it went largely ignored.
Undeterred, she decided to go to the man in charge—the president himself, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
She wrote him a letter describing the problem and her solution, complete with diagrams and
sketches.
He received her letter and sent it to the War Production Board, who started looking
into her idea.
They turned to Johnson & Johnson to make the soon-to-be ubiquitous tape, and the rest is
history.
And although duct tape comes in every color of the rainbow today, the original color was—nope,
not silver—military green.
Soldiers called it “100-mile-an-hour tape” because it could hold up to just about any
condition, and that’s no lie: Duct tape has helped hold down parts of particle accelerators
and played a role in the survival of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
Speaking of names, is it duck tape, or duct tape?
Either could be correct.
It was originally called “duck” tape because it was made of cotton duck and able to repel
water like a duck’s feathers.
But later on, the tape was often used to wrap duct work - hence, duct tape.
That’s it for this episode of The List Show.
Thanks for watching; we’ll see you next time!