…there was never a Manhattan project for [electricity]… This is true of most other technologies with military uses: explosives, steel, computing, the internet, etc.
The Internet started as a military-sponsored project, funded by DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). It used to be called ARPANet, and .mil is a top-level domain, along with .edu and .gov. The actual work on it was mostly done by universities, with Defense funding. The original aim was to automate the routing of electronic messages through a network in a way that could survive massive damage, for example in the case of nuclear war. The resulting routing protocols proved quite resilient and flexible. But yes, at no point did it look anything like the Manhattan Project: it wasn’t anything like that expensive or secretive.
I suspect a great deal of research on explosives was also conducted or sponsored by various militaries, but I’m less familiar with the history there. As for aerospace, that’s a huge chunk of the military-industrial complex, But yes, again, they generally don’t look much like the Manhattan Project.
Humorously, in retrospect, it turns out we actually did need a much larger government project to realize the potential of the internet. Licklider’s visions of a new infrastructures for trade and collective intelligence were all totally realistic, those things could have been built, the internet would have been very different and much more useful if the standards had been designed, the distributed database design problems had been solved, but no one did that work! There was no way to turn it into a business! So now the internet is mostly just two or three entertainment/advertising tubes.
The Internet started as a military-sponsored project, funded by DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). It used to be called ARPANet, and
.milis a top-level domain, along with.eduand.gov. The actual work on it was mostly done by universities, with Defense funding. The original aim was to automate the routing of electronic messages through a network in a way that could survive massive damage, for example in the case of nuclear war. The resulting routing protocols proved quite resilient and flexible. But yes, at no point did it look anything like the Manhattan Project: it wasn’t anything like that expensive or secretive.I suspect a great deal of research on explosives was also conducted or sponsored by various militaries, but I’m less familiar with the history there. As for aerospace, that’s a huge chunk of the military-industrial complex, But yes, again, they generally don’t look much like the Manhattan Project.
Humorously, in retrospect, it turns out we actually did need a much larger government project to realize the potential of the internet. Licklider’s visions of a new infrastructures for trade and collective intelligence were all totally realistic, those things could have been built, the internet would have been very different and much more useful if the standards had been designed, the distributed database design problems had been solved, but no one did that work! There was no way to turn it into a business! So now the internet is mostly just two or three entertainment/advertising tubes.