War and Technology

[atpollard]

It has been suggested (on another Topic) that war promotes technological development and peace creates a stagnant climate for innovation. While there may be some merit to the argument that war promotes technology, a quick look at history suggests that the relationship is greatly exaggerated.

Steam Engines:
In modern times, the greatest change in human society occurred around TL 3 or TL 4 when people substituted mechanical power for human muscle. While the steam engine quickly found a place in warships, it was not invented for that purpose. The first use of steam engines was to remove water from mines to allow greater efficiency in industrial processes and make more money for the owners (it had the secondary benefit of improving safety, but the history of mining suggests that safety has not been the absolute first concern). Before there were steam powered ships of war, there were steam powered trains for commerce.

Automobiles:
The automobile, another technology which has radically shaped modern society, is not a peace time dividend of the quest to create an armored war machine. The private car (created to meet the basic need for transportation and earn a profit for the manufacturer) predates the tank. Here we have another example of a commercial technology being adapted to serve military purposes.

Jets and Rockets:
Now to be fair, the cold war military has virtually monopolized the development of Jet and Rocket technologies from their inception. The first dreamers envisioned commercial uses, but the military has funded all of the significant development. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether we owe the rapid development in these fields to the cold war, or whether we would have an orbital colony and industry today if the military had not monopolized the research and development for missiles and fighter jets.

Electronics:
While electronics are integral to both the military and civilian economy. I would argue that the development rate of civilian electronics surpasses the rate of development in military electronics. I see commercial CPUs and Memory growing at a rate that renders SOTA outdated in less than 2 years, while items regulated by the military, like night vision, advance at a much slower pace. I recently read about the new integrated technology to ‘network’ soldiers in the field. They created an expensive system to allow soldiers on the battlefield to communicate and share images, which the soldiers complain is too heavy and dramatically decreases their mobility. In the private sector, we have a device that allows people to share images, text and communicate verbally – it is called a cell phone and it comes free with a 1 year service contract. Granted, the military version has a lot of special bells and whistles, but is it THAT much better if the soldiers think that it is going to get them killed. I say the development of electronics goes to the civilian sector over the military sector. Perhaps someone more familiar with military equipment could convince me otherwise.

Those are my thoughts.
What are yours?

 

[Pickles]

Aircraft: While modern warfare is virtually built around the projection of air power, all early developments in flight were civilian. Adoption into the military was often against very strong opposition from the powers that be. The military can be an extremely conservative and innovation-suppressing monolith.

 

[mbrinkhues]

Steam engines count twice:

The Royal Navy had to be "convinced" by Mr. Parsons of the superiority of the Steam Turbine by an action that amounts to "Cluebricking" the Admirals.

The Diesel engine is another civilian classic. It made a rather late apperance in military ships and even then was restricted to specialist crafts (U-Boat, S-Boat, Pocket Battleships) when it was already resonably common in civilian crafts. "Diesel only" warships are mostly post WWII

Same for Diesels in tanks. They only took off during/post WWII except in Russia. NATO switched to Diesel in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

Military Electronics lack severely. This is partially due to the long livecycles involved and partially due to the extensive tests for EMP and Jamming resistance necessary. One will find similar developments in civilian installations that need high reliabilities (Nuclear Power plants i.e)

And the military in general has a good track record of NOT picking up new technologies. Like repeating rifles ("The soldier will waste his ammo"), Camouflage ("Indecend") or Parachutes ("Will get the flyers to give up planes early")

 

[Vargas]

I recently read about the new integrated technology to ‘network’ soldiers in the field. They created an expensive system to allow soldiers on the battlefield to communicate and share images, which the soldiers complain is too heavy and dramatically decreases their mobility. In the private sector, we have a device that allows people to share images, text and communicate verbally – it is called a cell phone and it comes free with a 1 year service contract. Granted, the military version has a lot of special bells and whistles, but is it THAT much better if the soldiers think that it is going to get them killed.

Keep in mind that cell phones are dependent on an extensive supporting infrastructure, the cell network, are not fault tolerant in in a noisy RF environment and are not ruggedized for rough handling. Further, the need to communicate classified information means that some form of military grade security needs to be incorporated into the device.

One of the glaring errors of modern military electonics procurement is the concept that commercial off the shelf products can be easily adapted to military uses. And the manufacturers encourage this thinking in order to win contracts which later require costly mods to actually produce what's needed.

 

[The Hinterworlds Rambler]

The other hinderance to productive innovation would be misappropriation and generally bad ideas/sloppy engineering.

Consider the three plane designs arounf the Skyraider, by all accounts an effective multi role aircraft, but around that sucessful design were several crappy designs, The Skyshark, The Destroyer, and the Turkey. Innovation can go astray without careful monitoring. Designs gt coopted by a loss of focus.

Consider also the Bradley AFV, which at a finalized stage cost in the order of 11 Billion dollars to develop, and 14 years to complete. When sold to the Israelis, they would not accept it with its inadequate armor. The "A" in AFV stands for Armored.

Sure, during wartime you had incredible manufacturing strides being taken, but to what end ultimately? The Liberty Ship was a model of modular subassembly work, but still ended up as razorblades in the long run. Most military hardware has a finite operational life, and then it hits the scrap heap. Maybe to be turned into something else through recycling, but since the construction of these devices costs money and so does the recycling, the return is pretty dubious.

"Peace hindering progress" is a very erroneous notion. Yes, the original outset of the internet was a military communication network, but the strides taken during peacetime have made it one of the most powerful technological entities the world has ever seen. We still don't really know how far it is going to change us as a species yet.

 

[ravells]

Umm....I hear that computer development is driven in a large part by gaming and pron.

Ravs

 

[atpollard]

An important lesson, Ravs:
Never underesitmate the contribution of human 'vices' in generating the revenues that make innovation possible.

Professional automobile racing (in america) was born out of 'bootlegging' and the need to smuggle alcoholic beverages during prohibition.

 

[BillDowns]

Going back to atpollard's original post, it's really sort of Yes and sort of No. No one develops a technology without a vision of some sort of return. And technology myopia is notthe exclusive province of the military. Remember, Jobs and Woz started Apple because HP rejected their garage-built computer as a toy.

Military investment has often started a technology that the commercial world has overtaken. For instance, computers. Of the 5 candidates for the first digital computer, 3 were funded entirely by the military (ENIAC, Colossus, Harvard Mark I) while the other two really weren't in the same ballpark. When the founders of TI came up with Small Scale Integration, it was for the guidance system for the Regulus missle. When Intel's founders came up with single chip computers, it was for one of Hughes Aviation's missles (Sidewinder, I think??). The Navy began working on a "wireless network" in 1962 - NTDS. The Navy also had the first wide-spread usage of icons and pointing devices with the Aegis system which had been in development since 1969. Microsoft or Apple wasn't a gleam in anyone's eyes back then. Oracle was developed with Air Force money, GPS with Navy money, and the foreunner of cell phone network with NASA money.

Commercial developments since have often raised above the military's, but without the military's investment,... well, where would it be?

 

[atpollard]

BillDowns: Very good points.

It sort of leads to the issue of the ‘Nasa calculator’. The argument states that the hand held calculator is an offshoot of NASA funded research and the Space Program. Critics ask: is spending millions of dollars (a large sum of money at the time) to put a man on the moon the best way to develop a hand held calculator?

Is military funded research the ‘best’ way to lay the foundation for technologies like GPS, Computers and the Internet? We live in a balkanized world full of fear and long standing conflicts – high military spending is inevitable under the current world climate. Traveller postulates other ‘world orders’.

Military spending is often accused of waste and inefficiency. Government programs, like NASA, have different but no less severe problems. Academic research at the great universities has promised much and often failed to deliver (fusion power comes to mind). Historically, great accomplishment have been done by small groups or individuals working against popular conceptions (my favorite description is “a monomaniac with a mission”) - Edison in his lab, the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk, Robert Goddard. Is there a way to encourage visionaries without crushing creativity under institutional bureaucracy? How do we avoid funding “perpetual motion machines” in the process?

 

[Anthony]

The problem is that, while you need the visionaries, you also really do need the large number of other people just grinding away.

 

[BlackBat242]

Classic examples of the "grinding away"... Teflon... Penicillin.


The first was an accident... the researcher was creating a large number of compounds, looking for something quite different from what he found.


The second was discovered originally (in the modern, western world) by a French medical student, Ernest Duchesne, in 1896. Penicillin was re-discovered by bacteriologist Alexander Fleming working at St. Mary's Hospital in London in 1928. He observed that a plate culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold and that colonies of bacteria adjacent to the mold were being dissolved.

It took 10 more years before a team of researchers from Oxford managed to isolate the most effective strain (from a cantaloupe) and the highest volume method of production (pumping air into deep vats containing corn steep liquor and the mold), enabling it to be used on a large scale.

There are reports of healers in a number of earlier cultures using bread & fruit molds in poultices for wounds, to reduce infection and speed healing.


That said, directed research is usually more reliable and quicker... once a viable concept and research direction have been identified.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by atpollard:
Historically, great accomplishment have been done by small groups or individuals working against popular conceptions (my favorite description is “a monomaniac with a mission”) - Edison in his lab, the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk, Robert Goddard.

AT,

There have been many great points made in this thread, but I'm afraid I'll have to correct the one I snipped above. Of the three efforts you listed, only one was a monomaniac with a mission; Goddard. Early on the Edison and Wright Bros. stories were mythologized all out of recognition. The 'common knowledge' regarding their work is nearly always false.

Edison's most important 'invention' was the one that led directly to the majority of his patented inventions. In both structure and procedure, Edison created the world's first industrial research lab. He 'invented' things only after he'd determined that a market for such a certain device existed and only after gathering funds for the research effort toward said device.

Yes, several of his early inventions were the result of tinkering around. Those inventions, mainly having to do with telegraphy, could have been 'discovered' by any reasonably inventive telegraph operator, which is what Edison was. In many cases Edison is listed as the inventor because he finished his patent application first(1) and not because he had developed something completely unimagined at the time.

Edison's real genius lay in taking the money earned from is early efforts and creating his industrial research facility. That's when his patent count exploded. While being paid by other to research towards devices already known to have a market, Edison could keep all the 'happy accidents' such research uncovered and examine/develop them on his own nickel and to his own benefit. A rough analogy of this would have Edison being paid to dig up all the iron ore on a piece of land while being allowed to keep anything else he may find; lumber, other ores, useful plants, furs, etc.

Edison's 'trick' may be obscure to us in 2007, but it wasn't to people, industries, and governments at the time. It was copied the world over, most notably by the German chemcial industry.

The Wright Brothers are usually referred to as 'only bicycle mechanics. That is true, but it also reflects our cultural blindspot regarding bicycles. They're just toys, right?

Wrong.

In the late 1800s, bicycles represented the bleeding edge of manufacturing. They had to be light so that people could pedal them. They had to be strong so that people couldn't break them easily. They use new and outre materials, like aluminum and rubber, in unheard of quantities. Saying the Wrights were 'only' bicycle mechanics is like saying Spaceship One's Rutan & Co. are 'only' model rocket builders.

The Wrights were also part of an international effort full of people, in Anthony’s very accurate phrase, ‘grinding away’. The brothers routinely corresponded with other HTA flight enthusiasts from around the world. It was only after the Wrights made their great realization regarding powered HTA flight(2), that they became more reticent, if not down right secretive.

So, their ‘bicycle shop’ actually meant the Wrights were cutting edge technologists (they routinely rebuilt factory IC engines to make them more powerful and lighter), the same shop also provided them with most of their experimental funds, and the brothers were part of a worldwide network sharing (up to a point!) experimental data and engineering information. They may have been ‘monomaniacs’, but they were in the cross-pollinated company of many other monomaniacs. The Wrights simply realized something ahead of the others and that gave them one hell of a head start.

(Like Edison and Bell, the Wrights had competitors who could have easily beaten them to their invention. An Austrian naval officer’s attempt to launch a floatplane failed when he received the wrong IC engine from the factory. There are also claims of pre-1903 flight by inventors in Cornwall, New Zealand, France, and the US just to name a few. Anyone of those people could have made the same jump regarding instability the Wright’s did but, because the Wrights did so first, they “quantum leaped” the competition. When the Wrights showed off their latest Flyer in France in 1908, the many French inventors realized they would need to throw out all their previous work. The Flyer was simply that much better.)

Is there a way to encourage visionaries without crushing creativity under institutional bureaucracy? How do we avoid funding “perpetual motion machines” in the process?

Invention isn’t just about visionaries. In fact, it is rarely about visionaries. The visionary angle is just a myth we tell ourselves. Get a hold of James Burke’s many Connections series and books to develop a real understanding about the actual invention process. I should also recommend Connie Willis’ book Bellweather for a deceptively humorous depiction of just how breakthroughs occur in research.

The ‘death’ of facilities like Bell Labs has much more to do with changes in the tax code and how government funding is granted than with creativity being crushed under institutional controls. Bureaucracy can stifle progress, but we also have real world examples of bureaucracy assisting and even sparking progress too.


Have fun,
Bill

1 - Edison was not the only one to benefit from this. Bell is the inventor of the telephone because his application arrived at the Patent Office a few hours ahead of his competitor.

2 – The Wrights, mainly on the strength of their many tethered glider experiments, realized well ahead of anyone else that a flying vehicle was inherently unstable and that constant corrections by the pilot would be necessary to control such a vehicle. Everyone else was fixated on the belief that the vehicle would essentially be stable, much like a boat you’d simply set whatever controls were at hand and let the vehicle fly. This belief was widespread even despite the growing experimental experience with gliders.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
The Wrights, mainly on the strength of their many tethered glider experiments, realized well ahead of anyone else that a flying vehicle was inherently unstable and that constant corrections by the pilot would be necessary to control such a vehicle.

Just like a bicycle!

 

[atpollard]

Bill:
Good for you! Keep me honest.

Concerning Edison, I agree completely concerning his ‘famous’ inventions - like the light bulb, phonograph and motion picture. I would propose that while his quadruplex telegraph could have been invented by someone else (and would have if he had not), his ‘attitude’ – like that of the era – was one of a monomaniac with a mission. From what I learned about Edison while visiting Menlo Park, NJ and his home in Florida, I believe that he maintained this spirit even when he became part of the Edison “research machine”. He appears to have remained a very hands-on manager throughout his life. As an architect, you can tell a lot about people from where they live and work. (you have got to like a guy who can nap in his roll top desk).

While everything that you wrote about the Wright Brothers is correct (to the best of my limited knowledge), I would still propose that their effort and achievement is better described as “a pair of monomaniacs with a mission” than “the collaborative effort of an international consortium of aeronautical scholars” (like our modern ‘fusion’ research).

Would Ben Franklin (the inventor not the statesman) or the founders of Apple Computer (Jobs and Wozniak – another pair of inventors) have been better examples?

Concerning the invention process, I understand and agree with the point you referenced through the recommended books (I am familiar with Connections, but the other book is unfamiliar to me). I also have some personal experiences to draw upon. My grandfather was a production chemist for the Bakelite Corporation and eventually retired as a chief production chemist for Union Carbide Corporation. I grew up on stories of his work on the Bakelite domes for WW2 aircraft radar. My father is a research chemist (who started out playing ‘catch-up-chemistry’ for Union Carbide [1] ) and I learned more about chemistry and research and corporate politics than anyone ought to know – sort of like knowing how sausage is made. Corporate funded research allows significant resources to be brought to bear on a potential area, but corporate preconceptions and market niches sharply focus that research along narrow lines. No corporation would have funded the Wright Brothers research, since no companies were already in the aircraft business – “How will this help us sell more bicycles?” You are probably aware of the story of how researchers at 3M had to carefully illustrate the prototype disk media to emphasize the thinness since the board at 3M that approves new products was well aware that 3M makes ‘film products’ like tapes (magnetic and sticky).

In the end, collective research is best for product development, but appears to stifle (or at least slow) completely new industries. Determined individuals seem better equipped to prod the niches and find completely new products. The fact that there are many individuals prodding the same niches, subtracts nothing from their collective accomplishments – it merely requires that “a monomaniac with a mission” must also be quick and lucky to make a lot of money.

[1] cool, I get to post a footnote Catch up Chemistry is/was the industry term for developing a new chemical compound that will allow competition with an existing product without violating another company's patents.

 

[BlackBat242]

A note to the Edison legend... quite a number of the employees of his research lab described him as "claiming credit for what we invented", but could not get past the propaganda machine to get heard.

Some had documentation to prove it (the entire process, from first documentation of the idea to sucessful tests, occurred while he was out of the state in at least one case), but their employment contract stated that Edison owned everything developed in his lab, so he got the patents.

 

[atpollard]

re: stolen ideas
It still works that way.

 

[BillDowns]

Well, that's not the only way to steal patents. I'm thinking of James (IIRC) Sperry, who worked in the US Patent Office and substituted his name for Herman Hollerith's on several punch card patents.

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

It's an old source, but this has an excellent treatise on R&D in TRAVELLER terms...
Alternative World Generation System

 

[Raibert]

JFK proved that it did not take a war (hot or cold) to push science and technology to very rapid advancements. His commitment to landing on the moon by the end of the decade focus the US on that goal giving us all those spin off benefits we now take for granted.

In the past the only way to get that kind focus from a nation was to be at war.

Can we continue to find other "Grant Project" to push science forward?? A cure for AIDS- some push but how much really? The Mars mission - is it still a go?

 

[Kenposan]

Originally posted by Raibert MacArthur:
JFK proved that it did not take a war (hot or cold) to push science and technology to very rapid advancements. His commitment to landing on the moon by the end of the decade focus the US on that goal giving us all those spin off benefits we now take for granted.

In the past the only way to get that kind focus from a nation was to be at war.

Can we continue to find other "Grant Project" to push science forward?? A cure for AIDS- some push but how much really? The Mars mission - is it still a go?

I may be wrong, but JFK's push to the moon was very much a cold war program. The goal was to beat the Russians.

In terms of tech advancing during war vs. peace, I think a more accurate position is that those technologies that relate to warfare advance faster.