Jugurtha
a day ago
Three-point belt, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt
>The three-point belt was developed by Nils Bohlin, who had earlier also worked on ejection seats at Saab. Volvo then made the new seat belt design patent open in the interest of safety and made it available to other car manufacturers for free.
GPS, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
>After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 carrying 269 people, was shot down by a Soviet interceptor aircraft after straying in prohibited airspace because of navigational errors, in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good. The first Block II satellite was launched on February 14, 1989, and the 24th satellite was launched in 1994. The GPS program cost at this point, not including the cost of the user equipment but including the costs of the satellite launches, has been estimated at US$5 billion (equivalent to $10 billion in 2023).