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Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsp.2006.0055

1944-6438

Vernon W. Ruttan,

Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth

July/August 2006 · Historically Speaking 17 Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Vernon W. Ruttan It is worth recalling that knowledge acquired in makingweapons played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. James Watt turned toJohn Wilkinson, a canon-borer who had invented the only machine in England that could drill through a block of cast iron with accuracy, to bore the condensers for his steam engines.' In the United States, what came to be termed the American system of manufacturing emerged from the New England armory system of gun manufacture. In 1794 President George Washington , disturbed by the inadequate performance and corruption of the contract system of gun procurement , proposed a bill, which the Congress passed, to set up four public armories to manufacture and supply arms to the U.S. Army. The Springfield Armory became an important source of wood and metal working machines. Guns with interchangeable parts were first developed at the Harpers Ferry Armory.= These are early examples of military exigencies driving technological innovation and economic growth. Defense and defense-related institutions have played a predominant role in the development of many of the general-purpose technologies that shape America today. The Aircraft Industry The U.S. military has been intimately involved in aircraft development since the Army Signal Corps purchased its first plane from the Wright Brothers in 1907. Procurement of military aircraft has been an important catalyst of research and development in the aircraft industry. The aircraft industry is unique among manufacturing industries in that a government organization was established to support research on technology development for the industry. By the mid-1920s research conducted or supported by the National Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) was beginning to have a major impact on aircraft design and performance. Most of the early advances that resulted from NACA research and development were "dual use"—applicable to both military and commercial aircraft. Every American airplane and every aircraft engine that was deployed in World War II had been tested and improvedbyNACA engineers. These advances hadbeen achieved at remarkably low cost. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 it set in motion a series of events that led to NACA being absorbed into a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The relationship between military procurement and commercial technology is illustrated with particular force in the development of the Boeing 707 and 747. Boeing engineers began to consider the possibility of developing a commercial jet airliner in the late 1940s. It was considered doubtful that initial sales could justify development costs. The problem of financing development costs for what became the Boeing 707 was resolved when Boeing won an Air Force contract to build a military jet tanker designed for inflight refueling of the B-52 bomber. Development of the Boeing 747 followed a Production of the B-17F at the Boeing aircraft plant, Seattle, Washington, 1944. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USW3-041020-E DLC]. somewhat different pattern. In 1965 Boeing lost an Air Force competition to design a large military transport to Lockheed. Starting with the design they had developed for the military transport, Boeing went on to design what became the Boeing 747 wide-bodied commercial jet By the early 1970s the Boeing 747 was recognized as having set the standard that defined technological maturity in the modern commercial jet air transport industry. The Computer Industry The first all-purpose electronic digital computer was constructed byJohn W Mauchly andJ. Prosper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical engineering in 1946. Development of the machine, the Electric Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was funded by the army's Aberdeen Ballistics Missile Laboratory. The first program run on the ENIAC was a simulation of the hydrogen bomb ignition. A second computer developed by the Moore School group, the Electronic Discreet Variable Computer (EDVAC), incorporated a stored program and sequential processing. In what came to be referred to as the von Neuman architecture, the processing unit of the computer fetches instructions from a central memory that stores both data and programs, operates on the data, and returns the results to the central memory. Eckert and Mauchly formed...