Innovate like it's 1938
Blog by Simon, HMGCC’s Product and Engineering Director
We are living in an age of innovation; a time of fast-paced technological evolution, bringing both opportunity and threat.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Look back through history and we find patterns of amazing discovery and invention, accompanied by a race to stay ahead of our adversaries.
At HMGCC, as new technology emerges, we need to increase our strategic advantage over adversaries and not cede a technological edge. We must not miss out on novel technologies that could transform how we operate.
This is the backdrop to the launch of our new Top 10 Technologies campaign, which invites innovators across the UK to talk to us about the products and research they are working on and how it could prove useful to the work of national security.
Edge AI, quantum sensing and communications systems are all on our initial list of 10 and publishing this tally of tech priorities, as well as being more open about what we need, seems to mark a new approach for us. But is it really new? Let’s look at what has happened in the past.
Tech in the 1930s
History has seen this before. The 1930s are best known as the years leading to World War 2. HMGCC came into being back then, springing to life as the creative heartland of World War 2 secure communications technologies, which were to play such a pivotal part in the work of British intelligence.
However the 1930s were also a time of great technological transformation. Atomic physics came of age with the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932. Alan Turing proposed a model for a computer in 1936. Advances in aircraft manufacture saw the introduction of aluminium alloy monoplanes. Added to this, radio communications technology really came of age in the 1930s. This era saw rapid advances in radio communications, particularly in radio and TV broadcasting.
It is easy to imagine that policymakers and observers must have felt overwhelmed, particularly when coupled with the worsening economic and geopolitical situation. But many scientists saw opportunity in this upheaval.
The invention of radar and what we learn today
During the 1930s the Air Ministry tasked the Tizard Committee, chaired by Sir Henry Tizard with investigating “how science might be applied to the problem of detecting incoming aircraft.” This resulted in the development and construction of the world’s first early warning radar network, with 20 stations operational at the outset of World War 2, playing a critical role in the Battle of Britain the following year.