Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S7E21 - Marching Orders: Household Products Invented by the Military

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

This week, we look at products invented by the military. The military has influenced more technology than any government, agency, business or organization in history. From the appliances in your kitchen, to the big screen in your living room, to the car you drive, you’d be surprised how much of your world is military-inspired.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 7, 2018. You're so king in it. You're so king in it. Your teeth look whiter than no nose. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. His serial number was 53310761.

After basic training, he was assigned to the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, West Germany. That's where he would spend his two-year stint in the Army from 1958 to 1960. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley. Much has been written about Elvis' groundbreaking 1950s Sun Records era leading up to his time in the Army, and much has been said about his 60s Hollywood movies and his 70s Las Vegas era. But his time in the Army has mostly been seen as a pause button,

a halt in his career. Yet four life-altering things would happen to Elvis during his time in the military. The first was the death of his mother, Gladys. She died of a heart attack while Elvis was in basic training in Texas. Elvis had an extraordinarily close relationship with Gladys and never fully recovered from that loss. He was said to have collapsed before, during, and after her funeral service. He left for Germany with a heavy heart. The second aspect of army life that had an impact on Elvis Presley was the fact

he started studying karate in Germany. He earned a black belt in a style called Cheeto Roo. Elvis was a devout martial artist for most of his life and even co-founded a karate school in Memphis called the Tennessee Karate Institute. Karate would become a big part of Elvis' stage moves in his Las Vegas years.

The third result of his army experience led to his one and only marriage. Elvis met his future wife Priscilla Ann Beaulieu in Germany. Her biological father, James Wagner, was a Navy pilot who was killed in a plane crash when Priscilla was just six months old. Four years later, her mother would marry another Air Force officer named Paul Beaulieu, who was from Quebec.

Paul would adopt Priscilla and was later transferred to Germany. It was there in 1959 that Priscilla met Elvis at a party when she was only 14 years old. While nursing a broken heart from the loss of his mother, Elvis fell hard for Priscilla. They would court for seven and a half years before getting married in 1967. That marriage would produce Elvis's only child, Lisa Marie. The fourth aspect of military life that had a lasting impact on Elvis was his introduction to the world of pharmaceutical drugs. Many soldiers

would take amphetamines to stay awake on all-night patrols and barbiturates to get to sleep. As well, Elvis loved the fact the pills led to weight loss.

That drug habit would follow him until the end of his life on August 16, 1977. The toxicology report later listed 10 drugs in Elvis' system. Elvis Presley made an indelible impression on the world, but it was the military that made a lasting impact on your everyday life too because the Army has invented more products

than any other agency, company or organization in history. You'll be astounded at how many products invented by the military that now sit in your home at this very moment. You use them when you wake up, when you shower, when you shave, when you dress, when you drive to work, when you cook, and when you relax at the end of the day. The military may be looking for a few good men, but it has created hundreds of everyday products. You're under the influence. Look around your home for a moment. See the appliances in your kitchen,

the personal care products in your bathroom. Now, look out the window at your car. Virtually everything you're staring at was inspired by the military. You may find that hard to believe, but militaries around the world are the biggest creators and early adopters of new technology. It also has the patience and funding to invest in solutions that may take 20 years to come to fruition. Most companies look at their watch. The military looks at the calendar. Chances are you have some canned food in your cupboard.

That was a Napoleon innovation. Napoleon Bonaparte was a brilliant wartime strategist and actually became a general at the age of 24. He once famously said, an army travels on its stomach. He realized he was losing more men to spoiled food and malnutrition than he was to muskets and cannon fire. So in 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc reward, which was a fortune in those days,

to anyone who could figure out a way to preserve food. Up stepped a French confectioner named Nicolas Appert, who developed a way of heating food in sealed glass jars. As long as the seal wasn't broken, the food would last a long time. With that, the health of Napoleon's soldiers greatly improved. There were just two problems. Glass was heavy to transport, and it was fragile.

History gets a little murky here, but it seems another Frenchman invented the tin canning process, but had a British friend file the patent. Once food moved to tin cans, preservation took a huge leap forward

that still echoes to this day. So the next time you buy a can of soup, you can thank Napoleon. While cans of food helped soldiers stay healthy, they were hard to open.

The problem? The can opener hadn't been invented yet. So soldiers would try hammering and chiseling. Then they would just give up and stab the cans with their bayonets. It wasn't until the American Civil War that the can opener finally made its appearance. Thanks to inventor Ezra J. Warner,

cans have been opened easily ever since. Summers are great. Until the bugs hit. Then it's warfare. There is bug spray for mosquitoes and black flies, and bug spray for crawling insects. Bug spray has been a big advertising

category for decades. Raid! Raid, house and garden bug killer, hunts bugs down like radar and kills them dead. But did you know bug spray was a military invention? In World War II, soldiers were suffering from malaria, typhus, and dysentery, carried by

mosquitoes, lice, and houseflies. At first, the Army issued restrictive clothing, gloves, and net hats, but they were uncomfortable and restricted vision. So in 1941, the military created small, refillable aerosol cans pressurized by a liquefied gas and patented them in 1943. The aerosol cans were filled with insecticide, and the soldiers dubbed them bug bombs. When the government later granted commercial licenses in 1948,

aerosol cans were soon being used for everything from shaving lotion and underarm deodorant to hair care products, whipped cream, and much more. Eventually, aerosol sprays were found to be very damaging to the environment, and the technology has evolved many times since then. But the next time you spritz a little hairspray on your lid, know the original idea can be traced all the way back to World War II. In 1957, Russia did something that put the rest of the world on full alert. It launched Sputnik 1, the first ever man-made satellite, into space.

Until two days ago, that sound had never been heard on this earth. Suddenly, it has become as much a part of 20th century life as the whir of your vacuum cleaner. It's a report from man's farthest frontier, the radio signal transmitted by the Soviet Sputnik, the first man-made satellite as it passed over New York earlier today. As author Peter Nowak says in his excellent book, Sex, Bombs and Burgers, Sputnik cut

the U.S. with its scientific pants down. Launching rockets into space in the 50s wasn't about who could venture farthest from Earth, but rather who could land nuclear weapons closest to their enemy. In other words, the space program was really about military superiority. But while Sputnik seemed like a Cold War defeat, it actually led to one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of the 20th century. Scientists at MIT noticed the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away.

They realized satellites could be tracked from the ground by measuring the frequency of the sounds they emitted and, conversely, the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked based on their distance from the satellite. Using that knowledge, the Navy built the first real satellite navigation system designed to locate submarines in 1959. Later, in 1974, the military launched the first 24-hour navigation system called NavStar. That technology would eventually lead to the GPS in your car and smartphone.

Access to GPS technology changed forever on September 1st, 1983. I'm coming before you tonight about the Korean airline massacre, the attack by the Soviet Union against 269 innocent men, women and children aboard an unarmed Korean passenger plane. The Korean airliner was en route from New York to Seoul when it apparently strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down. Not long after, President Ronald Reagan decided that GPS, which could have prevented that tragedy, would be made available for all civilian use.

But the military worried hostile nations would use GPS technology against them. So they purposely degraded the precision of commercial GPS devices. And if you remember back to the early 90s, GPS seemed miraculous, but frustratingly inaccurate. That was the reason. Commercial GPS was purposely made to be less than perfect. Then, in the year 2000, the military ended the degradation of GPS signals and navigation became ten times more accurate overnight. With that, all sorts of companies began manufacturing GPS devices. The global GPS market generated over $26 billion last year.

From Sputnik to the Korean airline disaster, your GPS has taken a tumultuous journey to your smartphone. As many other products have. And we'll be right back. how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. If you're enjoying this episode, why not dip into our archives? Available wherever you download your pods.

Go to terryoreilly.ca for a master episode list. Who walks the stair without a care and makes the happiest sound? Bounce up and down just like a clown. Everyone knows it's Lincoln. The list of military inventions that exist in our lives is extraordinary. As we've mentioned before, the Slinky was developed by a naval engineer in 1942 while he was trying to create a spring to stabilize shipboard instruments in rough seas. Ray-Ban sunglasses were created to help fighter pilots fight the glare of the sun at high altitudes. Infrared night vision technology created for Desert Storm has since been adopted by everything from security firms

to hospitals and prisons. Satellite spy technology was re-engineered to become Google Earth. Memory foam was developed to make seating more comfortable in warplanes and rockets and is now found in commercial mattresses and pillows. Teflon was developed to plug leaks in the piping used for wartime plutonium production.

In 1954, a French engineer invented a process for bonding Teflon to aluminum frying pans and launched a company called T-FAL. Saran wrap began as a spray the military used to protect guns and planes from the corrosive effects of salt water on aircraft carriers. After the war, the spray was turned into a clingy wrap that could be stretched over food.

The Jeep was created as a rugged all-purpose military vehicle. After the war, the CJ, or civilian Jeep, was made commercially available. Cargo pants were created by the British military in World War I to give soldiers more places to store equipment instead of loading them with another backpack. In the late 90s, the military hired a company to create a robot to defuse bombs and detect biological weapons.

That technology led to the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Back in 1942, a group of scientists led by a man named Harry Coover was looking to create a clear plastic that could be used to manufacture precision gun sights

for use in World War II. During their experiments, they stumbled on a formulation that had potential, but the material had one big drawback. It stuck to everything. It was so sticky, it frustrated the scientists. This new formulation, called cyanoacrylate, stuck to everything it came into contact with. As a matter of fact,

it was so annoyingly sticky, it was rejected as a gun sight solution. After the war in 1951, Harry Coover was heading up the research department at Eastman Kodak. He and another scientist rediscovered cyanoacrylate one day and suddenly realized something.

It may not have had wartime applications, but its stickiness might just have some commercial applications. So, in 1958, they began marketing it as superglue. It became a commercial phenomenon. But eventually, superglue would find itself back in the war with Vietnam. Field medics discovered when they sprayed superglue over open wounds, the bleeding stopped instantly, allowing injured soldiers to be transported to the hospital for treatment. Eventually, Kodak licensed the formulation to other companies,

and you can now find cyanoacrylate in all sorts of products in your home, from aquariums and electronics to fingernail cosmetics. From gun sights to your fingernails, what a long, strange trip it's been. When radio detection and ranging, or radar, was first implemented in 1941, it changed warfare for all time. After the war in 1955, an engineer was experimenting with radar magnetron technology in his lab and noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Curious about the heating effects of the technology, he brought in some popcorn kernels, which popped after being exposed.

So a team of engineers got to work transforming radar magnetron technology into a microwave oven that heated the water molecules in food but left moisture-free ceramic and plastic containers cool. And that's why the first microwave ovens were called radar ranges. Early microwave ovens were huge and expensive, but once the price and size came down, the uptake was remarkable. The ovens that accidentally sprang from radar technology

are now in 96% of North American homes. For nearly a century, citrus farmers have been growing oranges and making orange juice. But in the 1930s, when they tried to can, freeze, and ship their juice, something bad happened. The juice became an almost unrecognizable, foul-tasting, brownish-orange glob. For reasons unknown to chemists, frozen orange juice lost all of its flavor and essential oils quickly. This was a huge problem for the military.

During World War II, scurvy had reached epidemic levels. Soldiers were losing teeth. Desperate to keep its troops healthy, the U.S. Army took a page from Napoleon's playbook and offered a reward to anyone who could figure out how to preserve frozen OJ. Three years later, the United States Department of Agriculture made a revolutionary discovery. They realized the key to preserving orange juice was to evaporate the liquid from the juice in a vacuum at a low temperature.

The result was an orange juice concentrate. All that had to be done before consuming the juice was to add back some of the lost vitamins and oils through a little flavor pack, which was perfect for the army as the packs were small and could travel easily. The U.S. military ordered 500,000 units from the Vacuum Foods Corporation. But ironically, the war ended just before they arrived. Thankfully, the company realized there was a big domestic demand for orange juice in the months when fresh oranges weren't available. A Boston advertising agency named the product Minute Maid because you could whip up a pitcher of OJ in under a minute.

With that, Vacuum Foods began selling their new OJ concentrate to the public. But it didn't really take off until 1949, when Minute Maid inked a strategic partnership. For a hefty price and 20,000 Minute Maid shares, the company hired Bing Crosby as a board director. And Bing started promoting the juice in commercials. Bing Crosby loves Minute Maid. Here's wonderful news for you and me. That Minute Maid gives more vitamin C So why squeeze orange juice yourself?

When doctors say Minute Maid orange juice is better for your health Yes, Minute Maid orange juice is better for your health Sales jump from $374,000 annually to $106 million per year within a decade. The rest is breakfast table history. Orange juice concentrate, born of a military-fueled invention to stop rotting teeth. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Forrest E. Morris was the son of a candy maker. After graduating from Yale University, he moved to Europe. It was the late 1930s, and the Spanish Civil War had begun. During his time overseas, Mars stumbled across a military field kit. It was a small, self-contained food ration carried by soldiers to eat when no other food source was available. And in it was a tube of small, candy-coated chocolate pellets.

The chocolate gave soldiers a quick shot of energy and flavor, while the candy coating stopped them from melting in warm climates. Hmm, what an interesting idea, Mars thought. So he flew back to the States and approached Bruce Murray, the son of Hershey executive William Murray, with a proposition that the two make their own version of the chocolate pellets for the U.S. military. In 1941, they secured a patent. By 1942, the U.S. had entered World War II,

and Mars and Murray managed to convince the military to put their candy-coated chocolates into the U.S. Army field kits. Then something interesting happened. When the soldiers returned home after World War II, they missed their chocolate treats. So in 1947, the pair began producing their candy-coated pellets for the public. They branded them M&M's, which stood for Mars and Murray. Shortly afterward, they launched their first television campaign with their famous slogan. M&M's chocolate candies. The milk

chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Within four years, they were selling a million pounds of M&M's a week. Today, M&M's are the number one chocolate in the U.S. M&M's. Like so many other products invented for the military, enjoyed by the world. A marine colonel once said, I don't ever want to be in a fair fight. That is why the military put so much money into innovation and technology. And from that innovation has come

hundreds and hundreds of products that pervade our lives. We've only touched on a few of them today. Add to that list cell phones, computer graphics, weather satellites, laser technology,

G.I. Joe toys, solar power, fuel cells, dustbusters, UV coating, air traffic control, duct tape, silly putty,

nylons, and the very technology that many people are listening to the show on right now, a little thing called the Internet. As author Peter Nowak says, it's almost impossible to separate any technology from the military these days. Then there are the many projects on the Army drawing table right now, one of which is invisibility. The military has uncovered the scientific principles behind turning objects invisible.

Now it is patiently figuring out how to make that a reality. And if history tells us anything, that technology will make its way to civilian life one day. Will invisibility be provided by a company? Will it be a brand? It boggles the mind. But so did the idea of the Internet, GPS navigation, and even microwave ovens way back when.

It's enough to get you all shook up when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. Under the Influence was recorded in the Terrastream. Producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Ullman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre.

Research, Jillian Gora. Coriter Sidney O'Reilly Follow us on Twitter at Terry O'Influence See you next week. This episode brought to you by Amana Radar Range Microwave Ovens with Cookmatic Power Shift. Technology that can make the quality of life for all mankind richer and more bountiful. We'd like to see your mug shot.

Purchase an Under the Influence coffee mug, then send us a photo of you listening to the show with the mug. We'll post it to our social media. Go to terryoreilly.ca slash shop. Every purchase supports the show. We appreciate it.

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