Fun piece about military research in the 1960s:

Major Greef moved on to assess the merits of a
new-fangled spiral spring bed mattress against the standard
barracks-issue rectangular mesh. Not content with a sleep test, the
major recruited two volunteers, weighing 12 st and 13 st – gender
unspecified – to "romp on the bedsprings for two periods of two minutes
each".

The 13 st volunteer then walked up and down
on the springs, establishing that the new model quickly developed a 10
inch sag in the middle, and was quite unsuitable for military use.

Other
tests involved the flammability of Army ponchos and the shape-retention
qualities of socks worn by the Women’s Royal Army Corps. They were
requested by an officer known only as Brigadier Q, the code name used
by James Bond’s gadget expert.

While it is easy to
mock the Heath Robinson research methods, they did form part of a
defence research establishment which has since been partially
privatised under the name Qinetiq, and is tipped for a £1 billion stock
market flotation this year.

Heath Robinson indeed, but note that last reference to Qinetiq. They’ve certainly grown up. One piece of research (in alliance with UMIST, Airbus, U. of Oxford and others, ie me,) is into the welding of aluminium. Specifically, into the addition of scandium to weld wire for the welding of aircraft fuselages. Yes, it works, and now the testing is on making sure that it works for decades (via accelerated age testing) for no one wants a plane to fall apart in mid-air, of course.

Assuming success, this will mean that no longer will planes be rivetted together, but welded, saving some 10% on the unladen weight of a plane. Huge fuel savings for that, of course.

A long way from testing socks, eh?