War & conflict · Inventions & technology

On paper it was worse than the Norden. In the air it wasn't.

The Norden bombsight is the famous one — guarded, mythologised, allegedly able to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel. The RAF's Mark XIV was theoretically less accurate, and in practice matched it, because accuracy on paper matters less than how a tired crew uses a device at night while the aircraft is being thrown around. The design trick was shrinking the sighting unit enough to fit a gyro platform inside, so the sight stayed locked on the target through manoeuvres instead of demanding a long straight run-in. It's a clean case study in how the cruder tool wins when you count the human operator as part of the machine.

The Mark XIV needed only ten seconds of straight and level flight before release, and coped automatically with shallow climbs and dives. Its post-war descendant, codenamed Blue Devil, was still serving with Britain's V bombers into the 1960s.

Read the whole of Mark XIV bomb sight on Wikipedia

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