[mandevil]

It is really hard to predict when research will become valuable- the most valuable US Government grant ever just might turn out to be the NSF/DARPA grants for information science management that funded Brin and Page in their initial work on the PageRank algorithm.

But my favorite example of how research flows into a better world is the Sagnac effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein.

For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where ring-laser and fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do.

So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later the world depends on it.