50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

Painer Munda is a sandspit in northern Germany where the river Painer meets the Baltic Sea.

There, in October 1942 German engineers sat in a control room watching a television screen.

It showed live, close-up images of a prototype weapon on its launch pad, some 2.5 km away.

They counted down. On another screen, with a wide angle view, they saw the weapons surge skywards.

The test had succeeded. They were looking at something that would shape the future, but perhaps not in the way they imagined.

The V2, the Fair Geltung's Waffe, the Vengeance weapon, was supposed to win Hitler the war.

It was the world's first rocket-powered bomb. It travelled faster than the speed of sound, so you didn't know it was coming until it exploded.

But crucially, it couldn't be targeted precisely.

The V2s killed thousands, but not enough to tip the scales of conflict.

Vener von Braun, the brilliant young engineer behind the V2, surrendered to the Americans as the Third Reich fell.

Then helped them win the space race.

If you told him that his rocket test would be the first step towards putting a man on the moon, he wouldn't have been surprised.

That's exactly what motivated him.

But von Braun might not have anticipated that he was also witnessing the birth of another hugely influential technology.

Closed Circuit Television, or CCTV.

The pictures in that control room were the first example of a video feed being used not for broadcasting, but for real-time monitoring in private over a closed circuit.

The top brass at Paintermunder worked slave labourers to their deaths, but they had no intention of joining the fatalities.

They invited television engineer Walter Bruch to devise a way for them to monitor the launches from a safe distance.

And that was wise, because the first V2 they tested did indeed blow up, destroying one of Bruch's cameras.

Exactly how popular Bruch's brainchild has now become is tricky to pin down.

One estimate, a few years old, puts the number of surveillance cameras around the world at 245 million.

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