Many of the familiar household appliances and electronic devices were invented by the military. At first, these inventions were labeled "Top Secret". Only years later they began to be used in civil engineering.
Most modern electronic devices and technologies have come out of the walls of military laboratories. They were originally intended for military use. Only after many years they began to be used in everyday life. The Internet, cell phones, microwave ovens, computers, computer mice … All these things were originally secret military developments.
Internet
The laurels of the invention of the Internet belong to the American military research agency DARPA. In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into orbit, and the US military believed that the US would need an information transmission system in case of a war between the superpowers. For these purposes, it was proposed to develop a computer network. Several American universities and the Stanford Research Center received an order for the development of such a network from DARPA.
The created computer network was named ARPANET. Initially, it united only a few universities. Later ARPANET went beyond military research and transformed into the Internet we are used to.
At the Stanford Research Center, which worked on military orders, the world's first computer mouse was also invented.
Computers
One of the earliest computers was the ENIAC computer. It was developed by the US Department of Defense's Ballistic Research Laboratory. "ENIAC" operated on vacuum tubes and was used to calculate the trajectories of projectiles. This computer was not just a secret, but a top-secret development of the military - in 1945, calculations related to the use of thermonuclear weapons were carried out on it. Thanks to ENIAC, the first civil lamp computers appeared.
Cellular telephone
The first prototype of a cell phone was a portable radio, which Motorola developed for the US military. It was intended for operational communication of soldiers on the battlefield.
Microwave
The familiar microwave oven was also invented by the military, albeit by accident. In the mid-1940s, naval engineer Percy Spencer conducted a series of experiments with radar equipment and discovered that the sandwich placed on top of the device was heating up due to the radiation from a working magnetron. This is how microwave ovens were invented. The patent for the invention was granted in 1946.
