The cool voice assistant that runs on the iPhone 4S? Years ago, someone thought what Apple calls Siriwould be a valuable tool for the military. Come to think of it, most of the technology we use — whether to cook our food, figure out directions, or gawk at adorable pictures of animals — was in some way designed to help, however tangentially, America go to war.
Armchair sociologists like to ponder the distance between military and civilian life. In the tech world, at least, they're not so far apart. Innovations that began with the U.S.' well-funded defense establishment almost always filter down into commercial, mundane usage. Sometimes in unexpected ways. Here are some of our favorite examples. Siri, can you think of some more?
Darpa Funds the Mouse, Hypertext, Even Computer Windows
Just think: If Doug Engelbart hadn't had a trippy vision while driving to his job at NASA, we might be living in a very different world. Engelbart had a waking dream of passageways to a networked world, powered by cathode ray tubes, where communications and organization became far more efficient than in augmentation-free reality.
Skip ahead a few years, and Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center played around with all kinds of weird interfaces for human-machine collaboration. One of them was a weird wooden box that helped you select different bits of text on a screen, the better to enter a command. Voila: the first mouse.
That wasn't the end. Engelbart came up with the hypertext language. His idea for organizing computer screens through virtual windows gave us an intuitive way to systemize all the information computers provide — and something to do after pointing a mouse at something.
Where'd Engelbart get these ideas? His time in the Navy helped. While reading an article in the Atlanticby legendary scientist Vannevar Bush at a Red Cross library, Engelbart was turned on to the idea of an automated library system. That influenced his seminal 1962 article "Augmenting Human Intellect." The seed money for his projects came from an obscure military arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency — later to become the blue-sky research organ known as Darpa.
One of the places Engelbart spent ARPA's money: his lab at Stanford, which became the Stanford Research Institute — and later SRI International. In 2008, SRI spun off a commercial firm called Siri Inc., which Apple purchased a few years later. The fruits of that collaboration: the Siri voice-activated data assistant on the next-gen iPhone.
Photo: Darpa
GPS
There was a time, not all that long ago, when you actually had to be able to read a map to figure out where you were going. Now, a little gadget perched on your dashboard does the direction-finding for you.
Thank a suite of six satellites, launched into the heavens in the 1950s by the Navy and Darpa to keep tabs on the Russkies. Designed to monitor "the Doppler shift in the frequency of Sputnik’s radio transmissions," the team quickly learned that they had a pretty reliable system for determining location — TRANSIT, the first satellite positioning system. Over the next two decades-plus, various iterations fine-tuned the capability, until a unified navigation system launched from Cape Canaveral in 1989. That was the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System — and the birth of GPS.
Photo: Flickr/Kimmo Palosaari
Microwave Oven
The origins of the microwave are even freakier than this '60s-era mockup of a hanging heat lamp that fried your bacon. Percy Spencer, an engineer with the defense giant Raytheon, thought he was building magnetron for radar sets. Suddenly he discovered his pants were a sticky mess. A Mr. Goodbar he kept in his pocket had melted from the heat emitted from his active radar set. From that embarrassing accident came a multimillion dollar industry — and one of the great twin blessings and curses of the American kitchen.
Photo: Flickr/SportSuburban
Cellphones
Actress Hedy Lamarr was the first major starlet to go naked on the silver screen. Her second most important contribution? An idea she cooked up in 1941 with avant-garde composer George Antheil for asecret communications system. Instead of using a single frequency to transmit information wirelessly, their signals hopped between 88 different frequencies. It'd be all but impossible to snoop on, or jam.
The U.S. Navy fiddled with the idea during World War II. Then it lay dormant for decades. But today, it's how cellphones manage to lock in, even when they're inside urban canyons or competing with the electromagnetic soup that is the modern city. (No AT&T jokes, please.)
The guts of cellphones — the microchips inside — got a boost from the Pentagon. In the '70s, Darpaprovided a testbed for different microchip designs. In the '80s, the agency funded the development of high-speed integrated circuits. We're all texting and yakking away as a result.
Photo: Flickr/KB35
Google Earth
It probably should come as no surprise that the investment arm of the U.S. spy apparatus helped back a tool that eventually gave us a satellite's eye view of the entire world. In 2003, In-Q-Tel, which you can think of as the CIA's VC adjunct, announced it would fund a company specializing in "interactive 3D earth visualization." That was Keyhole. The very next year, Google bought the firm — and its relationship with In-Q-Tel. The search giant parlayed it all into its phenomenally successful Google Earth mapping platform. Which, it's worth noting, is hardly the last collaboration between Google and the CIA.
Photo: Flickr/Born 1945
The Internet
In 1962, ARPA exec J.C.R. Licklider wrote a series of memos to "Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network." In them, he described his ideas for a group of computers that couldshare resources and talk to one another.
Licklider's proteges at the agency would turn the idea into a network of computers that passed along data in blocks called packets, each of which could be routed independently from the other. The network was called the ARPANET. The second server on that network: Doug Englebart's lab at SRI International.
In December 1968, in what would be forever known as the "Mother of All Demos," Englebart showed off all of his new ways of computing — from the graphical user interface to hypertext links to the computer mouse. Then he casually mentioned "this ARPA computer network-experimental network that’s going to come into being in its first form in about a year and end up sometime later with some 20 experimental computers in a network."
The network eventually gave rise to another one, the Internet, which had a lot more than 20 computers connected.
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