Posted on 07/17/2003 10:44:48 AM PDT by yonif
The Creation Story, By Hilary Leila Krieger
In search of the miraculous in the everyday: drip irrigation, the Arrow missile, and eight other inventions that make Israel great
For nearly two decades Americans have been trying without success to create an anti-ballistic missile system that can bat down incoming enemy missiles. It took Israeli aeronautical engineer Dov Raviv and his Israeli Aircraft Industries crew just seven days to come up with a successful solution.
The year was 1986 and the Israeli government had just signed on to develop an ABM defense system. Other experts proposed mechanisms involving attacks on enemy missiles from unmanned aircraft or complicated systems that need exceptional speed and accuracy for the intercepting missile to hit the incoming missile head-on. In contrast, Raviv's "simple" (his words) Arrow system explodes the intercepting missile near the enemy missile, annihilating the missile and its potential non-conventional payload.
As with so many of the inventions that have changed the face of Israel, the creation of the Arrow Weapons System proves the adage that necessity is the mother of invention: Raviv believed Israel faced an existential threat, so he sought and found a method to prevent it. The same can be said for a host of military innovations that have safeguarded Israel's survival from unending attack.
"The whole Arrow system was conceived within one week, and it has never changed until today," says Raviv, who was general manager of IAI's MLM System Engineering Plant at the time.
That first week was followed by years of "monotonous" work on making the plans reality. (Raviv explains, "You work 12 to 16 hours a day [for] years. That's monotonous.")
That monotony was punctuated by system tests along the way, but even those weren't too exciting in Raviv's opinion.
Describing the tests, he says, "If it's successful it's nice. If it's not successful, you go to mend what was wrong." But not much needed mending along the way to the Arrow's production: of the 10 tests, all save one succeeded.
Instead, the excitement stems from developing a system that counters the mortal danger posed by enemy missiles. That danger, felt so intimately by Israelis, helps account for the Arrow's speedy development.
"We know very intimately what the threats are. When you know what is the problem, the solution is halfway there already," Raviv says. "You don't dream up a system in seven days unless it's in your guts and you just spill it out."
In the army, one military threat after another has lead to advances in weaponry, vehicles, and infrastructure, demonstrated perhaps most emphatically in the recent creation of the Arrow missile defense system that Israeli engineers developed specifically in response to the vulnerability exploited by Iraqi Scuds in the Gulf War.
As Amit Shafrir, vice president of operations for Israeli-created ICQ instant messaging, puts it: "We are a small people surrounded by enemies. If you don't find solutions quickly, then you are gone."
Shafrir is not alone in attributing some of the qualities, such as problem-solving capabilities, gained through army service to the success of ICQ and other Israeli hi-tech ventures.
"It's related to the culture in the army. Sometimes you need to improvise," notes Jacob Goldenberg, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University's business school and an expert on product innovation. He adds that improvisational spirit is enhanced by Israel's youth - since there are fewer routines, there is a natural tendency to innovate, take risks, and be creative.
And the army encourages teamwork - a key factor in the start-up environment as well as interdisciplinary fields such as medical engineering that Israel excels at.
Agriculturally, too, Israel has come up with novel means to feed a population dwelling in a country lacking even the natural resource of water. In meeting these challenges, the citizenry has set a rapid pace for creativity and innovation that has spilled into other fields such as hi-tech and medicine.
Being a very small country with very few resources forces one to be very clever, says Yitzhak Hadar, dean of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's faculty of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Quality Sciences. He draws on developments such as drip irrigation, internationally successful vegetable strains, and various agricultural supplies to prove his point.
Pointing to Israel's status as a world leader in medical imaging - exemplified by Given Imaging's swallowable mini-camera - Bernard Dichek, publisher of BioIsrael, a monthly Internet magazine about Israel's life sciences industry, says, "Because of the army, people start to work together in different disciplines."
And given the country's small size, the distance from one lab to another - or from the farm to the university, as Hadar notes - isn't that great.
Yet for all that teamwork, a healthy ego is also key to generating inventions, or so says Haifa University sociologist Oz Almog, who studies the history of Israeli culture. And ego is something that "the chosen people" has in great supply.
"Jews are trained to think that they are better than other people and it's very important for inventors to think like this, that you can invent, that you can change the world," he says. "You have to have the urge to make the world better."
But an over-sized ego can also be a liability.
"We are Jewish. We think we know everything," Goldenberg says. "For inventions you have to be humble because you have to solve problems for other people, not for you. You have to understand them. Their perception is your reality."
Israelis' difficulty in doing this helps explain why so many home-grown ideas become successful only once they are produced and marketed by foreigners overseas.
People, particularly from East Asian countries, come shopping in Israel for new technologies to bring back and construct in their home countries, according to Israel-based technology writer David Rosenberg.
"If you're looking for technological innovation, there aren't that many addresses to go to, so even with the intifada, people come here," he says.
He notes that many of those who do come are amazed by what they find. He recounts his experience with a Taiwanese who explained that he had to come to Israel to find technology because of Taiwan's limitations in generating its own. He said, "Taiwan's a small country. We can't do very much. We're an isolated island. We only have 20 million people."
Rosenberg answered that Israel has only six million, to which the Taiwanese replied in shock, "No!"
That small size is a factor in why Israel is poor at marketing, says Shally Tshuva, managing director of Foresight, a technology and management consultant firm. He explains, "In a small country where a friend tells a friend [about new products], you don't develop a nationwide market."
Almog points to other reasons, such as a lack of the systematic, bureaucratic heritage necessary for developing and promulgating new businesses.
But at least Israelis, ever adapting, are quick to learn from their mistakes. As Bank Hapoalim analyst Benny Sharvit points out: "In the last five years things have changed. It's not that Israelis have become good at marketing. But at least they understand that they're not good at it."
Yet the army and war mentality that nurture that adaptability and other virtues can also cause problems.
Because of the constant stress of violence - coupled with the lack of financing from wary investors - Almog says Israel isn't able to focus its full energy on realizing its true inventive capabilities.
"We haven't fulfilled the slightest potential we have. Once - if - we are given peace of mind, then it [Israel] will be a shrine of inventions."
Though, Almog says, in some ways the pinnacle of Israeli invention has already been reached: "The best thing we invented is ourselves. The sabra is a cultural invention. We invented the New Jew. You hardly have a culture that invented itself out of an ideology."
The good, the bad, and the ugly
Once upon a time, archeologists at work in Italy found strands of copper wire buried a meter down. After much research they determined that during the time of DaVinci, the Italians already had a phone system.
The Greek archeologists, not to be outdone, dug down two meters and found strands of glass. They determined, after much research, that there was a fiber-optic communications system at the time of Aristotle throughout all of Greece.
Then the Israeli archeologists dug, and five meters down they found nothing. From this they determined that the Jews' telecommunications technology was the best - at the time that the children of Israel first inhabited the Promised Land, they already had wireless!
This might be a joke, but plenty of Israelis have been entirely serious in their attempts to sell their compatriots absolutely nothing. Take the El Al flight to nowhere. As Prof. Jacob Goldenberg, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University's business school and a product innovation expert, tells it, the idea was that the public would buy tickets to take off, circle in the air, and return to Earth. In place of a destination, the flight offered passengers the opportunity to load up on duty free items.
For some reason, the concept never took off.
Yet Goldenberg doesn't consider it a total no-go. "The fact that they tried to be creative is more relevant," he says.
In creativity Israelis get high marks, even if the bottom line doesn't always improve.
In Israeli inventions, Goldenberg explains, "There is more variance. We sometimes present things that are more different. But we can also produce some stupid things."
In the latter category, the Pal-Kal building method is likely the nadir. It was Pal-kal that was used to construct the Versailles banquet hall in Talpiot, whose collapse killed 23 and injured 400 during a wedding ceremony on May 24, 2001. It was Israel's worst civilian disaster.
But the former includes products that at first glance seem oxymoronic - or at least moronic. Take the featherless chicken, developed last year by a team of geneticists at The Hebrew University's Faculty of Agriculture.
Researchers swear the reason they initially began cross-breeding regular chickens with naturally balding birds was to relieve the suffering the chicks experience in heat. Later they realized the fowl play saved energy resources and waste (in the form of feather piles) resulting from plucking.
Chickens aren't the only livestock to benefit from Israeli ingenuity. Before the state had even been founded, Prof. Saul Adler, also for The Hebrew University, managed to breed golden hamsters after identifying that the animal might prove particularly useful for scientific experimentation and managed to bring three into the country from Syria.
By the Sixties, golden hamsters were being used by scientists for experiments conducted throughout the world, as well as by children eager for pets. It is thought that hundreds of thousands of these precious creatures trace their roots back to Prof. Adler's original colony.
But for sheer bang for your buck, no Israeli invention outdoes the Davidka. A failure from the perspective of accuracy, reliability, and losses inflicted, the Hagana artillery piece succeeded in its ultimate aim: repelling Arab combatants in the War of Independence.
As Jason Fenton, the youngest Mahal fighter in the War of Independence told The Jerusalem Post Magazine a few years back, the "monstrous and highly unpredictable weapon" nevertheless served its purpose.
He related, "We filled it with nails and garbage and bits of old equipment. It made a terrible noise, scaring everyone to pieces, including us. Some of the Arabs in the villages we fired on thought it had something to do with the atom bomb."
According to Fenton, rumors of the Davidka spread throughout the Arab sector, and once an entire village emptied out in fear before the Davidka could even be put into its proper position.
The Jews once again got something out of nothing.
10. EPILADY
Hair today, gone tomorrow
Like corporate giants Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid, the Israeli-made Epilady has become a household name, and the generic label for electrical hand-held leg-hair removing devices.
When it premiered in 1986, it was the only one of its kind in the world. Within a record period of three years, sales skyrocketed from $4 to $90 million, mostly from exports, and the company's current general manager Moti Lapid recalls that production could barely keep pace with demand.
"Both the customers and the distributors were waiting in line to buy the device. There was nothing like this before," he says, referring to the innovativeness of the product. And he can say the same of the product's popularity: "There was nothing like it before in international business, where a [product] debuts and immediately [makes] $100 million."
"I remember the worldwide hysteria that accompanied the product," recounts Yehuda Levy, manager of Epilady's legal department for the last decade. "Nobody, nobody, not the inventors or the kibbutz [manufacturers] expected it to be one of the century's revolutions in [grooming] habits."
The ground-breaking device features coils that pluck the hair like an army of tweezers working at once. For $70, women who traditionally had to endure the lengthy, messy, and less-meticulous process of waxing can use the small machine and be done four minutes later. Even the pain of the removal subsides after a few uses, according to the company. And in contrast with shaving, the leg is smoother and the hair regrows more slowly afterwards.
"It was a big change" when Epilady came on the scene, says Merav Meluban, public relations manager for SuperPharm. "I prefer the electric machines. It's easier. It's less painful [than wax]."
She says the pharmacy continues to sell thousands of the devices each year, and that more women continue to use them each year - but not necessarily the Epilady brand.
In fact, despite its initial roaring success, in the late Eighties and early Nineties the company began to falter and by the mid-Nineties had voluntarily declared bankruptcy. Lapid attributed the collapse to difficulties in the company, at the Kibbutz Hagoshrim, which produced the machines, and the kibbutz movement generally, and because of stiff new competition.
Levy says that the company spent large amounts of money pursuing patent encroachers with limited success. And when even competitors who didn't violate the patent began to eat at Epilady's profits, "The company was too big and too heavy to rapidly shrink to its necessary size."
The company was recently purchased by two American Jews, and Lapid, who has been on board since the mid-Nineties, is hoping it will stage a comeback.
Either way, Bank Hapoalim analyst Benny Sharvit has no doubts about the product's success: "Epilady, even though it went bankrupt, invented a new market."
9. TIVALL
Bete'avon
Whenever food science expert Dr. Michael Shemer thought his tinkering with wheat and soy proteins had yielded a quality meat substitute, he would rush home to his wife and have her prepare "meat" dishes using the new substance.
After a few years of such attempts, he hit upon a product that had the three characteristics required to give consumers the same experience they get from eating meat: taste, texture, and nutritional value.
By matching up the complementary soy and wheat proteins together, he was able to achieve all three.
"The technology provides the texture, the two proteins provide the nutrition, and then it's a matter of [adding] the right spices to get the right taste."
In 1980, Snocrest agreed to try the product in a pilot program, since their food storage van was available in the winter when they weren't selling ice cream. The product was then distributed to vegetarian soldiers in the army, and, when Snocrest was sold to Tnuva, which had no interest in meat substitutes, it began to be produced by Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz) in 1985.
There, under its new name - Tivall - sales of the product skyrocketed.
Gezy Kaplan, chairman of Tivall for the last 15 years, is the first to admit that he never expected it to be the success it has become.
"I just thought it would be a $5 million to $10m. company. I never imagined that it would reach to a stage where it would be famous around the world and today be the number one exporter of processed food in Israel."
Today the company's sales reach $50m. a year - 60 percent of that revenue from exports - under the aegis of majority stake-holder Osem, taken over in the Nineties by Nestl .
Shemer attributes its success to "a combination of a good idea with good timing and good people who took it and pushed it."
The product's debut, the company says, coincided with public interest in decreasing its consumption of meat stemming from concern about cholesterol and other health issues. More recently, mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease have encouraged diners to avoid animal products.
Tivall controls 70% of the Israeli market and leads Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Belgian, and German markets, as well as sizable chunks of other European countries.
Previous attempts at "meat replacement" products in Europe failed to achieve the quality Shemer's break-through technology offered - a quality able, for the first time, to attract the general public and not just vegetarians.
"We would never have been able to sell so much and be so successful if we were selling only to vegetarians. But the main customers of Tivall are meat reducers - people who eat meat but want to cut the amount of meat that they eat," Shemer says.
8. MULITPLE MEDICINES
Hope for MS patients
Researchers Ruth Arnon, Michael Sela, and Dvora Teitelbaum of the Weizmann Institute had no intention of finding a treatment for Multiple Sclerosis when they began their work in the late Sixties. Instead, they wanted to find a way to induce the disease in mice using a synthetic antigen, a copolymer of amino acids, as a basis for further immunological experiments.
Fortunately for MS patients, their attempts were a total failure; they found it impossible to induce the disease, even under the harshest inducing conditions. It was only then that they wondered if the substance might instead have an inhibiting activity on the disease. After a series of further experiments, they realized they had found an effective method for preventing MS episodes.
As they continued their research, they even discovered that there was a copolymer (which they named Copolymer-1 or COP-1) that provides protection across multiple species and strains, according to Dr. Irit Pinchasi, vice president for global innovative research and development for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.
Teva came on board in the mid-Eighties, almost a generation after the Weizmann researchers began their work and after initial promising clinical results were available. Over a number of years, the company worked to refine the chemical process by which the copolymer is produced in order to make sure the active ingredient was consistent across different batches, an essential requirement for any marketable drug, and meet other conditions imposed by regulatory bodies, as well as prove the efficacy and safety of the drug from long-term use.
Following approval of the drug, now branded Copaxone, in major markets from 1997 and on, it has become Teva's top seller. Though another MS drug, Betaseron, was already on the US market when Copaxone debuted, it causes serious side effects.
"Copaxone has many advantages," says Pinchasi in reference to Betaseron and two other MS drugs that have since been created. "It is by far the safest and the best tolerated."
One of the latter two drugs was also developed in Israel. Like Betaseron and the fourth drug, Avonex, InterPharm's Rebif uses an interferone, a natural substance that helps the body fight disease. (Copaxone is unique because, among other properties, it is a synthetic material.) But Rebif was so effective that the US Food and Drug Administration rescinded its non-competition protection for Avonex so that Rebif could enter the American market, according to Ezra Ouziel general manager of InterPharm, a subsidiary of Switzerland's Serono S.A.
"It has a dramatic effect," he says, noting that the drug can stave off attacks for as long as two years that otherwise might occur several times a year.
"The two leading drugs, and really the only two drugs to treat Multiple Sclerosis today, come from Israel," says Bernard Dichek, publisher of BioIsrael, a monthly Internet magazine about Israel's life sciences industry.
Multiple Sclerosis, which affects approximately 5,000 Israelis, is a neurological disorder in which the patient's own immune system attacks the nerves' myelin coating. The attacks disrupt the flow of signals from the brain, affecting patients' muscular control, vision, balance, hearing, and more.
7. GIVEN IMAGING
Candid camera
Gavriel Iddan won't soon forget the day he received a letter from Norway describing how his invention had saved the life of a three-year-old boy.
Thanks to a real-life magic bullet - a pill-sized camera that is swallowed in order to record the functioning of the small intestine - the location of internal bleeding, which had necessitated the child's constant hospitalization for blood infusions, was identified and rectified through a simple operation.
"A month later he was like all other children playing outside, with a small scar in his stomach," Iddan relates.
Before the creation of his encapsulated camera, it was impossible to discern the insides of the small intestine.
Prof. Eitan Scapa, a gastroenterology specialist affiliated with Tel Aviv University Medical School, explains that other digestive tract assessment methods, such as x-rays and endoscopes, can't physically maneuver through the five meters of convoluted passageways that form the small intestine, making internal bleeding, lesions, and tumors difficult and at times impossible to identify and diagnose.
Iddan, an electro-optics expert at RAFAEL, first learned about the "terra incognita" of the small intestine while visiting his neighbor, Scapa, when they both happened to be on sabbatical in Boston 20 years ago.
"Ten years later he [Iddan] called me up and said he had an idea," Scapa recounts. In that time, camera miniaturization and other necessary technologies had progressed to a point where he began to think a wireless video device that could traverse the digestive tract might be realized.
Iddan tried to raise money for his idea, but "it was almost impossible," he says. "People saw it as a science fiction idea, and it was before the hi-tech boom."
But in 1997, the United States approved a patent for the product, and Iddan was able to raise some funding. The Given Imaging company was created in order to develop the camera, and in October, 2001 became the first initial public offering on Nasdaq following September 11 (raising $60 million).
In 2002, the company earned $28.9 million, but its value isn't just monetary.
In addition to identifying ailments previously discoverable only post-mortem, the device can also spare the patient some of the discomfort incurred during other procedures. The capsule, no bigger than large vitamin tablets, is easily swallowed.
While it takes its eight-hour trip through the body, the patient can leave the hospital and engage in normal activities. Later the film of the recording is viewed by a doctor with the help of a computer.
Iddan envisions expanded applications, saying it can potentially be used "everywhere where there are natural openings in the body which require examination and are difficult to do without a miniature camera."
6. ARROW
Straight as an Arrow
While other Israelis breathed sighs of relief after Iraq failed to launch a single Scud at Israel during the recent war, Dov Raviv was disappointed.
"I'm very sorry that no missiles were shot at us during this war," says the erstwhile general manager of the MLM System Engineering Plant, a division of Israel Aircraft Industries, where he conceived of and developed the Arrow Weapons System. "Then it [the Arrow] would have been proven. It would have been a live demonstration."
Though others have expressed doubts, Raviv is confident that his anti-missile defense system safeguards Israel from the threat of non-conventional ballistic missiles, a capability deemed necessary after Saddam Hussein lobbed 39 Scuds at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.
So far, only Israel has created an effective means to counter such threats.
The system, funded heavily by America, works by first identifying the trajectory of the incoming missile using radar, known as Green Pine, developed for the project. The Arrow is then sent to explode nearby, instead of by a direct hit, and obliterate the first missile.
The idea is that the explosion takes out the enemy missile and any nonconventional payload it carries; if nuclear, chemical, or biological substances remain, the physics are such that it would land on enemy states. "The shit will go back to the Arabs. This is a very nice feature of the system. We didn't create it, but it's very nice," Raviv says.
The intercepting missile is deployed quickly enough to allow for two additional tries if the first Arrow doesn't succeed. Those three attempts allow for a successful interception rate of 99.9 percent, according to Raviv.
The system, which has cost nearly $2 billion, began to be developed in 1986 and was first successfully tested in 1999. By this winter, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz had declared the Arrow capable of eliminating any enemy threat.
Raviv estimates that the Arrow, traveling close to nine times the speed of sound and countering threats from as far away as Pakistan, will be able to meet any enemy missile challenge over the next 10 to 15 years, effectively neutralizing dangers posed by Iran, Syria, and other Arab countries pursuing non-conventional ballistic missile capabilities.
Other observers, while still giving the project high marks, offer less rosy predictions. But Raviv, who immigrated to Israel from Bucharest via the camps in Cyprus in 1948, is resting easy. He has full confidence that with this project he has realized what he describes as his aim in life: preventing Israel's destruction.
5. FIREWALL
Fire in the wadi
Since Israel is known for its security expertise, it is perhaps not surprising that the country would have created the world's leading technology safeguarding electronic communication.
Sharon Besser, for one, thinks it's no coincidence. The security solutions manager for Check Point, the globe's number one firewall provider, points out, "Since we are dealing with threats all the time, we are able to understand threats and we are able to understand how to solve them."
And indeed, Check Point co-founder Gil Shwed parlayed his experience developing firewalls between classified programs in the army to building the successful Internet security program.
Though other firewalls work had been done, Check Point was the first that could be used by mass-market consumers as opposed to experts, could be run in a user-friendly manner, and could be standardized across systems. The company has patented the technology, which has become the industry standard.
According to Besser, 98 out of NASDAQ's 100 top companies use the software and, he says, "I don't think there is a government anywhere in the world that isn't using our product."
The company's success - 2003's first quarter earnings topped $100 million - came quickly for what began as a three-man shop. Today, the staff numbers approximately 1,200.
When Shwed, army buddy Shlomo Kramer, and fellow 20-something Marius Knacht founded the company in 1993, they were ahead of the Internet curve, which had yet to fully penetrate the public's consciousness.
Yet, Besser says, "People who understood that it's possible to connect, also understood the need to do it in a secure way."
So the trio went about figuring out how to do that better than anyone else. They received investment money from BRM Technologies, the venture capital company until recently headed by Jerusalem mayoral candidate Nir Barkat, in return for a stake in the business.
As their profile rose, so did their competition. But they've managed to post consistently high numbers despite the international economic downtown that has hit the hi-tech community particularly hard.
The idea is to keep on being one step ahead, just as the company did when it started.
"They were ahead of the times," Besser says. "The vision was enormous."
4. UAVS
Up in the sky
Thanks to the Israeli-made Unmanned Air Vehicles, during the 1991 Gulf War the United States was able to spot a truck in the middle of the desert, watch the truck's path, see a hole in the ground open up, and observe people in the truck passing food and water to the men inside the hole. In this way, the military located every Iraqi bunker along the Kuwaiti border.
"The Iraqis had no idea how they were able to track them, because they were timing their resupply to the satellites," says David Mulholland, the business editor at Jane's Defense Weekly.
It's not the only time an unmanned aircraft has confounded the enemy. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1982's Peace for the Galilee war, Israel took out an entire Syrian artillery battalion in the Bekaa Valley over two days, thanks to information relayed from the UAVs. A decade later, Hizbullah fired anti-aircraft rockets next to a UN building, which the Israelis didn't want to hit. The IDF took out the anti-aircraft rockets, but the fighters hopped into a truck. A UAV relayed information that allowed them to hit the truck.
"Before that you would have had a guy out there with binoculars and a map, saying hit this coordinate," Mulholland notes.
The "continuous surveillance" of the UAV, he says, is like "having an eye in the sky."
He concludes, "That was a real change, and the things Israel has done with UAVs have made a real change in the way people fight wars."
In 1982, explains David Harari, who managed the UAV project for Israel Aircraft Industries from its inception, "It was the first time we were using means that were giving us in real time the topography of the battlefield in four dimensions."
All these years later, according to Mulholland, "Every military in the world is now clamoring to develop these."
In fact, the US military first piloted the idea by sending a camera to take surveillance images during the Vietnam War, but abandoned it after the lack of direct feed made the information less than vital.
But Israel, reeling from the loss of several pilots during the Yom Kippur War, was determined to create a mechanism for real-time surveillance of the battlefield in order to know where the danger zones for pilots lay, Harari says.
He describes the system he spearheaded as simple, consisting of a lightweight airplane, camera, a link between the camera and the ground, and a ground-control station. It beat out American attempts because the US went for a new, complicated design instead of using the Israelis' step-by-step approach.
Twenty-six countries, including major players in Europe and Asia, have since purchased the aircraft, but initially the international community expressed skepticism about the simple Israeli design - and about the need for a plane without pilots.
"In Israel this [need] was understood, unfortunately, by the loss of our pilots during the Yom Kippur War," Harari says.
3. UZI
Privatized firepower
When a crazed gunman tried to assassinate president Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C. in 1981, the secret service officers at his side whipped out Uzis to defend their charge from his attacker. That, according to IDF Col. Benny Michelsohn, illustrates the ubiquitousness and peerlessness of the Israel-made submachine gun.
"You can be sure that if they had something produced in the United States," says the IDF's chief of military history, "they wouldn't buy something from Israel."
Indeed, for more than two decades, the Uzi dominated the submachine gun market, becoming an international icon. It came on the scene in 1951 after a young Israeli army lieutenant, Uziel Gal, designed a gun for the IDF to use in place of less effective European imports, according to Martin van Creveld, a military historian at the Hebrew University.
"The Uzi was ground-breaking," says David Mulholland, the business editor at Jane's Defense Weekly. "It was the standard to beat."
He pointed to "the size, accuracy, and robustness of it."
Based on a faulty Czech submachine gun model, the revolutionary Uzi did what other submachine guns before it had failed to do: perform reliably.
"For sure it was the best submachine gun in the world," Michelsohn says. "It was great. Because it was no problem. It was totally reliable."
He explains, "What you want in the battlefield is that you use your weapon and it works. It doesn't stick."
He says the secret of the Uzi's success lies in the simplicity of its design, with fewer springs and parts which minimize external problems (five internal parts to the 12-20 needed by other machine guns).
"The Uzi can shoot if it's full of sand and mud and in all kinds of weather," Michelsohn says.
That capability came in handy during the three Israeli wars in which it played a starring role: the Sinai War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The small and user-friendly Uzi, Michelsohn notes, was designed specifically to provide a barrage of fire power within close range of the enemy, such as in street-to-street fighting in built-up areas, capturing fortified points involving trench warfare, and tank crew disembarkment.
Its compact size also allows for one-handed use and has been particularly popular among police, paramilitary forces, serious street criminals, and terrorists.
Michelsohn notes, "It didn't change the nature of warfare, but it assisted a lot in reducing the casualties."
It proved so successful that 100 countries around the world imported the Uzi, beginning in 1964 with the Netherlands. It has since been edged out by new assault rifles, according to Michelsohn.
Nowadays it has become a gun used by second-line forces.
"It's now not any more a weapon of the front line," Michelsohn says. "Now it's more a part of our history."
2. ICQ
Loving the messenger
The story is no less than a "fairy tale," in the words of Amit Shafrir: four twenty-somethings with no serious expertise, education, or training in three months developed a revolutionary new technology and took the Internet by storm. Two years later, AOL bought out the start-up for $287 million, plus up to $120 million more based on growth levels over three years.
Shafrir now serves as the vice president of operations for ICQ ("I Seek You"), the company that pioneered instant messaging and gave humans one more way to communicate. That enterprising spirit came from "computer geeks" (again, Shafrir's words) Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser, and Amnon Amir, who thought that if people were already connected to the Internet, they should be able to connect with each other.
Vardi's father lent them the seed money that allowed them to move to a Silicon Valley apartment (where they figured they needed to be to develop software) and work for three months around the clock to churn out the product. Within six months, 850,000 people had registered for the messaging service - without any prompting by marketing or advertising. Instead, all the promotion came from "word of mouse" as users encouraged their friends and family to sign on.
As the company grew, the founders had to solve the myriad problems that came from the unanticipated volume of traffic, particularly in the early years when the Internet was new.
But the staff overcame the obstacles with flying colors: in May 2001, ICQ counted 100 million users and is the number one downloaded software of all time from CNET.com, though it has lost some of its competitive edge due to the plethora of competing IM programs. In addition, advertising revenue has dropped on ICQ as throughout the on-line world.
But AOL is satisfied with its purchase, according to America Online spokesman Derick Mains.
"ICQ has always been really big within the international community and the ICQ brand has been very successful from the AOL standpoint because its gotten AOL... to Europe and other parts of the world where AOL hasn't had [visibility]." Mains said. "It also helps us from an AOL perspective to increase AOL's user base."
AOL hopes that a new ICQ patent on wireless IM between cellphone and Internet users - complementing the Instant Messaging patent already obtained by ICQ - will continue to propel the company forward.
1. DRIP IRRIGATION
One drop at a time
To convey the impact that drip irrigation has had on agriculture and the world, Uri Shani, professor of irrigation at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, mentions an article he once read in Scientific American. Written by a Japanese irrigation expert, the author began by noting that the Jewish people gave the world two things: the Bible and drip irrigation. Which was more important is a matter for debate.
Without drip irrigation, Shani says, "You cannot imagine agriculture on sandy soil... you cannot imagine irrigation on artificial soil... you couldn't think of using saline water for irrigation... all greenhouse technology is based on drip irrigation."
The technique also saves users approximately 40 percent to 50% of water usage in return for a 300% crop increase according to Yossi Lavi, vice president for international marketing for Netafim, the company that produces the irrigation system.
Lavi relates that one day in the early Sixties, Simha Blass - at that time the water engineer for Israel - noticed that one tree in his garden was much bigger than the others. He went to inspect the plants and found a leaky valve next to the larger one.
The observation gradually evolved into the new irrigation method, which places a water conduit on the ground next to the vegetation and releases carefully controlled amounts of water into the soil along the root system. The technique replaces sprinkler and flood irrigation methods, which waste vast amounts of water as they bathe the whole plant in more water than necessary, the excess of which evaporates into thin air.
"It's exactly as we would like to feed our babies. We don't give one huge plate of food and water at the beginning of the week and tell our sons or daughters, 'Eat it all now,'" Lavi explains.
More recent developments in the drip irrigation system have also allowed fertilizer to be mixed directly with the water, minimizing the waste and contamination of fertilizer spread above the surface.
Blass received help refining his idea from Kibbutz Hatzerim, which took on production of the system and founded Netafim in 1965.
"Our economic position was rather bad, and we had nothing to lose," Lavi says. "The rest is history and miracle."
That miracle can be measured in numbers such as the 109 countries whose farmers use the technique and last year's income of $230 million (92% exports), according to Lavi.
But it can also be measured by what it has allowed Israel to achieve agriculturally.
Because of the shortage of water in Israel, Lavi explains, "every drop counts. If you want to get more crops per drop, you have to use drip irrigation."
In Israel, almost 70% of agriculture uses drip irrigation, a rate much higher than elsewhere, though the technology is making inroads. Lavi explains that agriculture is an ancient, change-resistant tradition handed down from father to son - except in Israel, where many of the first farmers were European intellectuals with no background in agriculture.
"New methods were adopted with an open mind. They didn't have to fight against tradition," says Lavi. "Actually, this open-minded tradition is something that my father told me and I'm going to tell my son."
The Bamba booby prize
Bamba might be the most successful Israeli food product of all time thanks to the inexplicable penchant of the Israeli palette for peanut rather than cheese flavoring when it comes to junk food. But was it a revolutionary product rather than a smart bit of tinkering on existing puffed packaged products? Not really.
Ditto for the Galil assault riffle, a noteworthy take-off of the Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 but hardly a modern icon such as the Uzi. And the innovations the Galil did present couldn't prevent its quick eclipse by later weapon designs.
The Python air-to-air missile in its various incarnations and the Merkava tank, though widely hailed as formative systems, have not made a revolutionary impact on the international arms market.
And the cherry tomato, which has transformed salads around the world, was aided rather than created by Israeli brainpower. The miniature red veggie was pioneered by British scientists; Israelis merely developed a strain that prevented them from dying too quickly to allow for international distribution.
Other products, such as the ubiquitous milk-in-a-bag, have dubious origins, with representatives from Canadian, Bolivia, and even Wisconsin claiming ownership of the idea.
The lack of deep Israeli roots also disqualified Pergonal, the world's first fertility drug. Though the ground-breaking clinical trials - and, most significantly, the first induced pregnancy - took place in Israel, the drug itself was developed by an Italian scientist and produced under the auspices of the Swiss-based Serono S.A.
The possibilities for a tally of this sort are endless, and in the end the Israeli inventions that made the top 10 had as much to do with gut feelings as quantifiable reasoning.
Though some disqualifications were on technical grounds: for missing the post-1947 deadline, monotheism, the Bible, and kibbutzim all failed to make the list.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1057813448651
| Chrysler Corporation was to add a new car to it's line to honor Bill Clinton. The Dodge Drafter was to begin production in Canada this year, but the car had to be pulled out of production when initial tests showed that the little white lines on the road kept disappearing all the time. |
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The Arrow is purely a tactical (non-nuclear, short-range) interceptor that has to use the hit-to-kill approach. And the Arrow was 80% funded by our SDIO. It was easily replicated using our off-the-shelf Patriot system. And then improved upon in time for the most recent Iraq campaign, with the only glitch, with thousands of plane sorties occurring daily, the inadvertant and rare friendly fire accident. These probably trace to IFF problems with the boxes on the planes.
Meanwhile, for tactical intercepts, the Israeli's are cooperating with OUR development ( A TRW Project) of the laser intercept system for both Katusha rockets and artillery shells. It has been a complete success. This author would undoubtedly take credit for the whole system, conveniently omitting the 99% U.S. contribution.
Apparently this author is unaware of Wisconin's long-time leadership along with Minnesota in the Dairy field. Must never have heard of the innovative company, Land-O-Lakes? As for ubiquitous? I don't think so. I stay with bottles that are re-used. I like the non-homogenized, CLA-rich organic milk as it is much healthier. Some traditions are worth keeping...or rediscovering.
As for real inventors, heck we have them in grades 1-6 and before they even get into the military:
Young inventors find creative ways to solve problemsBy J.N. Dant, 15, Y-PRESS
Does your backpack kill your back but you have no other way to carry your books? Do you get soaked when you wash your dog? Do you spill every time you pour milk from the carton? Four kids had these same problems but instead of just complaining they came up with some solutions. Carly Summerell, 15, of Fort Myers, Fla., invented Cultural Cuisine, a placemat that translates food and cooking terms from English to Spanish, French or German, to make it easier for people from other countries to order food at a restaurant. Christen Wooley, 12, of Live Oak, Fla., invented The Vest Pack to hold books: "It's a vest and it has two pockets in the front, one on each side, and one big humongous pocket in the back," she explained. Charlie Matykiewicz, 14, of Windermere, Fla., invented the Automatic Dog Washer out of PVC pipe and a box. "It's sort of a rectangular box that you leave the dog in, and the nozzles spray the dog with water," he said. And Timothy Shin, 10, of North Hills, Calif., invented The Automatic Milk Dispenser, a milk carton with a pump and a tube that goes from the carton into a glass so children can get their own milk without spilling. All these kids are participants in the Invention Convention, a national competition for grades 1-6, sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Co. Carly's inspiration for her invention was her desire to help people. "I just look at things and instead of seeing what they are, I see what they could be and how they could be improved," she said. The other kids were inspired by school assignments. "Our teacher told us to write 10 problems on a piece of paper, and I think my eighth one was `heavey book bag.' said Christen. "I went around school, and people were like saying, `Oh my back hurts from my book bag.' So I told my teacher, and then we were brainstorming." In addition, Timothy was inspired by a personal problem. "I drink milk a lot, and I usually had to ask my mom or my dad to pour for me. Whenever I tried, I usually spilled," he said. All of the kids received moral support from their parents. Christen's and Timothy's parents helped them create their invention. "My mom sews, and we just used regular material," Christen explained. "It took about two days, and that was because we had to figure out how to design it and stuff. But then the second one we did, it only took about a day." None of the inventions was expensive to make. For most of the kids, this invention was their first. However, Carly has had multiple inventions. In previous years, she has invented Pollywog Polymers, a reusable type of sandbag; the Lonely Sock Bag, a transparent bag that helps match stray socks; and prestained fabric that could be used "for tablecloths in restaurants or babies' bibs or T-shirts, so when food fell on them it would just look completely natural," she explained. Most of the kids either have patents, or have patents pending. Christen has U.S. and foreign patents pending on the Vest Pack. Carly has a document of disclosure on Pollywog Polymers, which protects her invention for a year, and is doing research to see if there are any previous patents. Charlie is trying to get a patent for his dog washer. "An attorney offered to get me a patent for free, which is a good deal," he said. Christen and Charlie found that some people are interested in buying their inventions. Carly plans to refine Cultural Cuisine and then market it. "I'm going to try to update it with more accurate cooking terms and techniques, more accurate translations, and then I'm going to go door to door to restaurants and try to get it on the market," she said. After these creations, how likely is it that these kids will continue to invent products? No one is planning to make a career of it. REPORTERS: Andrew Clark, 13; Katie Qualkinbush, 12; George Jernigan, 12; Evan Phillips, 12; Patrick Beyer, 11; Xixi Hohman, 13; and Ben Hohman, 11.
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This story originally ran in The Indianapolis Star on September 5, 1999. |
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o you wish you could understand menus in foreign language?