Grant Awarded: £500,000
Time Frame: July 2023 - June 2028
Overview
Lifesavers is a five-year project between Imperial War Museums and Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore how conflict has driven innovation in science and technology. Sponsored by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Robert Rumble, Project Curator for Lifesavers, aims to discover how conflict has accelerated innovation, and how this has impacted on the world we live in today.
Impact
The project will reveal how safety-improving technologies and innovations created during and through modern war and conflict transfer to civilian use and with what impact. Through public and stakeholder engagement, this insight will enable:
- A more complete narrative of the history of safety innovation.
- An increased awareness of this history and its impact on life today among the public engaging with the project's public engagement activities.
- An increased awareness of this history and its learnings that will enable better decision-making and more efficient knowledge exchange and technology transfer from military to civilian use today and in the future.
- A global network of museums and other collections relevant to the history of safety innovation.
Progress
A year into the project, Robert has discovered many collections and themes around wartime innovation, and how they impact our lives today.
From equipment used for safety at sea and innovative use of SONAR for detecting submarines, to air sea rescue. Wartime technology-inspired innovations in everything from computing and communications technology - from the Fullerphone of the First World War to the famous Enigma machine.
Robert plans to hold the first Lifesavers Expert Forum in Autumn 2024, followed by a potential IWM Institute Symposium on the subject of conflict innovation in 2025.
As Lifesavers moves into year two, new content focused on technology and innovation is being produced. This includes a series of online films exploring the role of technological innovation in 20th century conflict.
We follow the story of the development of jet aircraft, from the race between Great Britain and Germany to build the world’s first jetfighter during the Second World War, to the ultimate development of the De Havilland Comet, the world’s first civilian jet airliner.
We'll also be exploring the development of advanced electronics and computers, such as the new concept of aerial warfare, Suppression of Enemy Defences (SEAD), from their genesis during the Vietnam War, to their world-changing impact during the 1991 Gulf War. A series of short films on YouTube on IWM: Conflict Explained are set to explore various developments, such as freeze-dried food to cryptography will be published.