What are some major inventions that came out of war? Inventions which improved our daily lives, in particular, medicine and technologies. I know that canned foods and canning came out of the Napoleonic wars. Give me examples similar to that.
This topic is for more "positive" inventions. The nuclear bomb is an invention of war as well, and while it may be argued that the nuclear bomb helps prevent conflicts due to MAD, I still wouldn't call it a positive invention since things like the Cuban Missile Crisis shows that nuclear bombs don't improve our daily lives, but puts everyone on the edge of their seat.
You can't really separate the nuclear bomb from the nuclear reactor, and nuclear power DOES improve our lives in many ways.
Kevin Peterson
World War II produced notable marvels such as radar, the modern computer (the enigma code cracker), Synthetic oil and rubber, and made great strikes in rocketry on both sides, with the German V2 and the Soviet Katyusha rocket.
Another cool one is that penicillin came from World War I battlefield hospitals, but wouldn't be put to full patented use until 1928.
Aaron Garcia
>antibiotics Mind posting some good links / texts explaining how antibiotics came out of war?
True, but was the nuclear reactor invented during the Manhattan Project alongside the nuclear bomb? I thought the reactor came before the war even started, but I'm probably wrong. Please post some good links / texts as well.
Charles Bailey
>penicillin came from World War I battlefield hospitals
Every time I read about the history of penicillin, I read that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin "by accident." Was he inspired by witnessing the injuries occurring in the first world war to go out and seek penicillin?
Nathaniel Flores
super glue not major but...
Gavin Bailey
electrical tape as well I think.
Juan Thomas
>True, but was the nuclear reactor invented during the Manhattan Project alongside the nuclear bomb?
The first self-sustaining reactor I know of was Fermi's, which was part of the Manhattan project, in late 1942.
>The idea for what became duct tape came from Vesta Stoudt, an ordnance-factory worker and mother of two Navy sailors, who worried that problems with ammunition box seals would cost soldiers precious time in battle. She wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 with the idea to seal the boxes with a fabric tape, which she had tested at her factory. The letter was forwarded to the War Production Board, who put Johnson & Johnson on the job. The Revolite division of Johnson & Johnson had made medical adhesive tapes from duck cloth from 1927 and a team headed by Revolite's Johnny Denoye and Johnson & Johnson's Bill Gross developed the new adhesive tape, designed to be ripped by hand, not cut with scissors.
Truly war is a necessary evil.
James Thomas
A lot of modern reconstructive surgery and the attendant psychological care comes from one guy who worked on Allied pilots in WWII. Fascinating stuff
With things like canned foods, penicillin, and the internet, do you guys think these things would have existed at some point anyway, regardless of the war from which they originate occurring? Like would canned foods eventually be created even without the Napoleonic wars occurring? What in particular is a thing that was invented because of some war and would likely only have existed because of that war? I think I read once how Nazi scientists discovered some medicine due to their messed up experiments.
Colton King
The man was literally so disgusting his trash rebelled.
That's how he discovered penicillin.
Isaiah Hernandez
The Appert canning process came about because of a cash prize offered by the French military in the late 1700s.
Freeze drying processes (eg, Mountain House Food) were developed in WWII because the allies needed to figure out how to better ship blood serum to far off battlefields.
Carbon arc gouging was developed to allow large stainless-steel welds on ship hulls to be cut out and replaced if the weld had flaws.
Electrical discharge machining was originally developed for "tap busting" to save aircraft parts that had thread taps break in them, because it's cheaper and more efficient to burn out the tap instead of scrapping the entire part.
NC and CNC machining was originally developed with Air Force funding after WWII because the Air Force both needed more advanced aircraft/helicopter shapes/part shapes, and feared that communist agitators would disrupt workers unions at aircraft plants. However it wasn't until the 80s that computer power was cheap enough for widespread CNC usage.
Inversely I've heard that pretty much all of the Nazi and Japanese "science" turned out to have very limited value because the subjects were mainly half-dead concentration camp victims and Chinese peasants, and the experiments were stupid shit like "can gypsies survive longer than slavs on salt water?"
Samuel Johnson
>Mind posting some good links / texts explaining how antibiotics came out of war? Fleming's research was partially caused by the need to cure syphilis epidemic after WW1.
Gavin Anderson
The microwave was basucally invented in ww2 I think they were trying to build a radar or some shit and the radiation used melted some chocolate
Connor Russell
It also resulted in weather radar because military radar operators noticed they could pick up rain, snow, etc. And the radar and radio technology ended up being used for radio telescopes and so on as well, Sea-Cliff Interferometry for example was developed only a few months after the war ended by a bunch of Australian scientists using surplus radio gear.
Xavier Ortiz
>nuclear bombs don't improve our daily lives
MAYBE NOT YOURS YOU PINKO SISSIE
Joshua Barnes
I mean fuck imagine if nobody thought up duct tape, I can't actually understand a world where we don't have it being possible, I use a roll every year at least
