MacArthur wouldn't have been MacArthur without those aviators.
I can think of many much more important inventions than silly putty...
The internet?
WD-40?
Jets?
Helicopters?
Tang?
Radar?
Space Rockets?
Long life shelf food?
King Tiger Tank (for going through Detroit)
M & M ‘s ?
Hmmm. I would have listed the 1911A1.
Dude, private enterprise developing stuff for the military is still private enterprise developing stuff...
Did the author not see the dichotomy of the first line and the first line of the second paragraph?
MacArthur wouldn't have been MacArthur without those aviators.
Duct tape. One of the best inventions ever.
How did he arrive at 1959 as the date GPS was invented? My dad, Roger Easton, was the person most responsible for GPS. My book on the subject will be published in October.
http://www.potomacbooksinc.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=293771
Waiting for a whole range of LBGT products to be invented for the military. such as..........
Teflon used to coat gun barrels in machine guns.
Slinky
In 1943, Richard James, a naval mechanical engineer stationed at the William Cramp and Sons shipyards in Philadelphia, was developing springs that could support and stabilize sensitive instruments aboard ships in rough seas.[1][2] James accidentally knocked one of the springs from a shelf, and watched as the spring “stepped” in a series of arcs to a stack of books, to a tabletop, and to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright.[3][4] James’ wife Betty later recalled, “He came home and said, ‘I think if I got the right property of steel and the right tension; I could make it walk.’”[5] James experimented with different types of steel wire over the next year, and finally found a spring that would walk. Betty was dubious at first, but changed her mind after the toy was fine-tuned and neighborhood children expressed an excited interest in it.[4] She dubbed the toy Slinky (meaning “sleek and graceful”), after finding the word in a dictionary,[3][4] and deciding that the word aptly described the sound of a metal spring expanding and collapsing.[6]
Would have been nice if all of us who pay taxes would get some return on our investments.
“Silly Putty was born out of desperation during World War II. Japanese forces had invaded rubber producing nations, limiting American access to the material. As a result, the U.S. military requested the private sector to create an alternative for the rubber used in boots and tires....”
I suspect that very few people know that prior to WW2, rubber (for tires or for whatever else) was 1: [derived from] a natural product which had to be imported from plantations in Indonesia and a few other places in the So Pacific. 2: Was pretty crappy.
...Note also that the US military was the driving force behind the ubiquitous system of ISO shipping containers that the world now uses to move goods everywhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container
Lets not forget CDMA technology developed by Linkabit founders Viterbi and Jacobsen, who later founded Qualcomm, and led to the modern cell phone
My daughter is a paramedic. She still comes across people who use superglue to seal a deep wound. She usually sees them after the infection sets in. It seems the idiots did not “finish reading” the article where it was used as a short stop to treatment (in the context of deep bleeding wounds.).
Don’t use it if you are within calling distance of an ambulance. It causes more problems than it solves.
We should place the word “Assault” in front of each of these and ban them! ;-)