7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7as a critical weapon of modern warfare, and fighters
proved too fast and agile for traditional fire-control sys-
tems. With support from Sperry and MIT, Draper and
his students designed and built the Mark 14 gyroscopic
lead-computing gunsight. Based on a radical new spring
mechanism, the gunsight calculated an aircraft’s future
position, taking into account gravity, wind, and distance.
Overcoming the problems posed by the production of
the sight demanded that Sperry hire Draper’s students to
oversee the manufacturing process, while Draper trained
naval officers in the newly renamed Confidential
Instruments Development Laboratory on the use of the
new sight. By war’s end more than 85,000 Mark 14 sights
had been built and installed on American and British
warships, making it by far the most popular sight of its
kind used by Allied navies during World War II.
After World War II Draper’s interests expanded beyond
the development of antiaircraft fire-control systems for
capital ships and gunsights to the development of self-
contained navigation systems for aircraft and missiles.
During World War II radar and other radio- and micro-
wave-based technologies had greatly increased the ability
of aircraft to navigate to their targets under various
weather conditions and with an unprecedented degree
of accuracy. However, these systems were vulnerable to
enemy jamming and provided foes with an electro magnetic
phantom to track and attack. Other methods of aerial
navigation, such as celestial navigation, produced no signals
but depended upon the skillful use of instruments and the
cooperation of the weather. As the Soviet Union became
the main enemy of the United States in the postwar period,
the development of a navigation system for aircraft and
missiles that did not need external referents or trained
humans became a national research priority. Working first
with gyroscopes insulated in a climate-controlled viscous