Sometimes inventions lead to the need for other inventions. Without the invention of the Norden bombsight, Honeywell would not have been asked to develop the C-1 autopilot. The following is an excerpt of a magazine article about the development of the Norden bombsight.

Describe the accuracy of the following statement: "The Honeywell autopilot was a totally new invention."

 

The Secret Weapon by Don Sherman As secret weapons go, the Norden bombsight and the atomic bomb were a study in contrasts. The Norden device initiated the U.S. battle against the Axis powers; the A-bomb ended it. While Norden was practically a household word by the end of the war, only a handful of people knew of the atomic bomb before it exploded into headlines. The Norden sight supposedly allowed airmen to pick off strategic targets as frontier marksmen would, while the atom bomb waged war by annihilating entire cities in one flash. The two secret weapons first intersected on August 6, 1945, when Major Thomas Ferebee, a 24-year-old bombardier with 63 combat missions under his belt, used a Norden sight to drop an atomic bomb from the Enola Gay, a B-29 flying 31,000 feet above Hiroshima. Bombardiers liked to boast that with the Norden bombsight they could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. When asked if that was true, inventor Carl Norden often responded, "Which pickle would you like to hit?"... ...The vision of striking the enemy with frontier marksmanship gradually evolved into a shotgun approach. Still, on the eve of World War II the ever-optimistic Barth postulated, "We do not regard a fifteen foot square...as being a 'very difficult' target to hit from an altitude of 30,000 feet, provided the new Army M-4 bombsight, together with Stabilized Bombing Approach Equipment is used." (Norden designed and developed his Stabilized Bombing Approach Equipment--SBAE--during the 1930s. In 1941, Minneapolis-Honeywell incorporated some SBAE components into its C-1 electronic autopilot, which became a mainstay for World War II aviation.) Originally published in Air & Space/Smithsonian, February/March 1995. Copyright 1995, Smithsonian Institution. All Rights Reserved. See the entire article: http://www.airspacemag.com/ASM/Mag/Index/1995/FM/swpn.html

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