War has always been the engine of progress. Many inventions and technologies that were created for military purposes are now successfully used by us in everyday life.
From rockets to pans
On April 6, 1938, the American inventor Roy Plunkett, unwillingly, discovered a new material that can be found in almost every kitchen today - polytetrafluoroethylene, or Teflon. Plunkett pumped gaseous tetrafluoroethylene into the tanks and found that in cooled cylinders it polymerized to a waxy state.
The new material had truly unique characteristics. It was chemically and thermally stable and also had a very low coefficient of friction. Everything went off the Teflon "like water off a duck's back." Interesting fact: American politician Patricia Schroeder called Ronald Reagan "Teflon President" because "nothing sticks to him."
Initially, the attitude towards Teflon was cool. He was not immediately recognized, at one time he was even mistaken for a consumable. Plunkett himself suggested using Teflon to cover skis and sleds, but history ordered otherwise. First of all, the material interested the military, who were in no hurry to open Teflon to the general public. Fluoroplastic (another name for the material) began to be used to cover radar antennas, in the production of bearings, high-frequency equipment and parts for military equipment.
In the late 1950s, Teflon finally came out of the shadows. It began to be actively used in industry, including aerospace. Teflon electrical insulation was used on the Columbia spacecraft, and the lunar landing module was covered with fluoroplastic. Further more. Having received civilian use, Teflon began to be used as a non-stick coating. True, disputes about his safety continue to this day.
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Metal memory
In 1958, scientists William Buhler and Frederick Wang created nitinol, a unique shape memory alloy, in the US Navy laboratory. Nitonol (an alloy of titanium and nickel) can be in two functional states - austenite and martensite. When nitonol is in martensite (at low temperatures), it easily deforms, but when heated (austenite), the nitonol part takes on its original shape. Developed in a military laboratory, nitonol has long been used only in military development. It has proven itself well as a bushing material for military aircraft hydraulic systems.
The essence of this technology is simple and ingenious. Projections are cut inside the bushings, then they are expanded in a cryostat. The sleeve put on the pipe at room temperature "remembers" its shape and the protrusions cut into the pipe, creating a very strong connection.
Proven by the military, Nitonol is widely used today, from medicine to super-springs to bras. The most common use of nitonol is in electric stove and kettle sensors. Every time you hear the kettle boil and turn off, you can remember the "metal memory" - this nitonol sensor turns off the heating.
The stove comes from the Navy
The history of the invention of the microwave oven is almost a legend. According to it, Percy Spencer, an American physicist who worked for the US Department of Defense, was designing a microwave emitter for an air defense radar. Standing in front of the emitter, Spencer felt the peanut bar in his pocket start to melt. This not only did not upset the physicist, but even provoked him. He immediately brought some corn kernels to the laboratory; before his eyes they became popcorn. At the same time, Spencer himself felt neither warmth nor heat.
He realized what was happening, and on October 8, 1945, he had already patented a device for cooking using electromagnetic waves. The first microwave oven weighed 340 kilograms and was almost two meters high. She was not popular among the people. Only in the 70s, when the American market was already flooded with Japanese microwave ovens, interest in them increased sharply. Interestingly, military development has returned to its "homeland" these days. Today microwave weapons are one of the most promising developments of military specialists, and during the war in Yugoslavia, conventional microwave ovens were even used to malfunction the missile guidance signal.
Drying
Sublimation of products allows not only to increase their shelf life, but also to minimize the weight of supplies. Initially, freeze-dried products were considered exclusively for the needs of the army. Sublimation was invented in 1921 by the Soviet scientist Lappa-Starzhenetsky. He patented a method for drying food, in which the water contained in them changes from the state of ice to the state of steam. Since this procedure takes place at low temperatures, biological processes are suspended, and molecular bonds are not broken.
The first use of sublimation was noted during the Second World War for the production of dry blood substitutes and antibiotics. The technology has shown its effectiveness, and already in the post-war period, the military continued to prepare freeze-dried products, which appeared in the food kits of the fleet and army.
Sublimation was widely developed with the "discovery" of space. To this day, freeze-dried food is perceived by many as "food for astronauts", although the technology of high-tech "drying" has become almost a mass phenomenon today. Freeze-dried food can be bought in shops, travelers and yachtsmen take it on expeditions. When sublimated, products do not lose their nutritional properties, so today they are increasingly used in everyday life. Fill it with water - and a full meal is ready.
Satellites for the world
The fact that GPS, like GLONASS, was originally created for military purposes is no secret to anyone. However, not everyone knows that the discovery of these technologies was facilitated by the incident with the South Korean Boeing, shot down by the USSR in September 1983. US President Ronald Reagan called the disaster a "crime against humanity" and promised that satellite navigation systems would be available for civilian purposes for security reasons.
Since then, global positioning systems have confidently begun to enter the life of "mere mortals". In addition to the traditional use of GPS, mobile tracking is also becoming increasingly popular today. Its essence is that using the built-in GPS of the phone, the tracking program collects the coordinates of the location of the mobile and transmits them via the Internet to the tracking server. In suspicious people, mobile tracking can awaken a phobia of Big Brother's surveillance, but for parents it is very convenient.
Let's face it, it's hard to imagine life today without satellite navigation systems, although some 20 years ago information about them was classified as "secret".