OOPS looks like I was wrong, NASA didn't even come up with TANG.
As a pre-emptive strike, I list the following technologies that are often wrongly attributed to
NASA.
Quote:
Mistakenly attributed NASA spinoff technology (NASA didn't do it)
The following is a list of technologies sometimes mistakenly attributed directly to NASA.
Barcodes (NASA developed a special type of barcode, but this should not be mistaken for the original one.)
Cordless power tools (The first cordless power tool was unveiled by Black & Decker in 1961. It was used by NASA and a number of spinoff products came after that.)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), best known as a device for body scanning. (NASA contractor JPL developed digital signal processing, which does have applications in medical imaging.)
Quartz clocks (The quartz clock dates back to 1927. However, in the late 1960s, NASA partnered with a company to make a quartz clock that was on the market for a few years.)
Smoke detectors (NASA’s connection to the modern smoke detector is that it made one with adjustable sensitivity as part of the Skylab project.)
Tang juice powder (Tang was developed by General Foods in 1957, and it has been for sale since 1959. It was used in the first orbit missions, which gave awareness to it.)
Teflon (Invented by a DuPont scientist in 1941 and used on frying pans from the 1950s.[4] It has been applied by NASA to heat shields, space suits, and cargo hold liners.)
Velcro (A Swiss invention from the 1940s. Velcro was used during the Apollo missions to anchor equipment for astronauts’ convenience in zero gravity situations.)
Space Pen (A common urban legend states that NASA spent a large amount of money to develop a pen that would write in space (the result purportedly being the Fisher Space Pen), while the Soviets used pencils. While NASA did spend some money to create a pen to work in space, the project was cancelled due to public opposition, and US astronauts used pencils until the 'Fisher' space pen was invented by a third party.)
Microchip (The first microchips were developed more than ten years before the first moon landing.)
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