Innovation by SIT

It’s a sad but true fact that battles and wars stretch man’s creativity to the limit.

The Nazi steel industry needed about 8 tons of water to produce one ton of steel.

Most of the water was taken from three artificial lakes that were created by massive dams. The allies knew that by demolishing these dams they could create a bottleneck in the Nazis’ war machine.

But the dams were massive structures (one was 40 meters wide at the base, 8 at the top, and 50 meters high). A 30-ton bomb would be needed to create significant damage to the dams.

Unless…

…the bomb could explode in the water at the dam’s base upstream. Under these conditions, a 5-ton bomb would suffice.

But the Royal Air Force engineers couldn’t figure out a way to drop the bomb from the air so that it would reach its precise destination at the dam’s base in the water. It seemed as though a giant torpedo would be needed.

On top of that, the Germans had already considered this possibility and had placed anti-torpedo nets up the river.

Does this seem like ‘mission impossible’? Not if you use Systematic Inventive Thinking! (Or, unless you’re creative enough not to need it…)

Barnes Wallis, a senior aeronautical engineer for Vickers solved the problem brilliantly.

His idea was to use the river water and the dam itself to guide the bomb to its destination.

The bomb, shaped like a barrel, was dropped from a low altitude on the river at some distance upstream from the dam.

The bomb hit the water, shot straight up over the torpedo net, and like a smooth pebble skimmed over the water a few times until it hit the dam and sank to its base.

What SIT elements can you identify here?

Well, first we have the Closed World - no new element was added.

Then we have the Task Unification tool: the water (and the dam) were used to guide the bomb.

Another important SIT aspect is that to solve this problem we must pay attention to the specific environment in which this problem takes place.

Many people facing this problem totally ignore the river when thinking about the solution.

And the river, by the way, helps in another way - the high pressure that water exerts on the dam is added to the pressure created by the bomb.

So maybe Wallis was creative enough and didn’t need an SIT training, but what about you?

See you all in my next post,

Roni

Roni and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.

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Visit Roni at the start2think website