Who invented the flight-data recorder, more commonly known as the 'black box'?

David Warren had a deeply personal reason to invent the flight-data recorder (commonly referred to as the “black box”). In 1934, his father died in one of Australia’s earliest air crashes.

In 1957, Warren completed a prototype—which he termed the “Memory Unit”—for his device. His idea, however, was greeted with no shortage of criticism from the Australian authorities. The Royal Australian Air Force haughtily suggested that the device would capture “more expletives than explanations,” while the Australian pilots themselves worried about the potential for spying and surveillance. It took the British—the maker of the tarnished Comet—to appreciate the necessity of Warren’s device. From there, flight-data recorders proceeded to become standard procedure not only in Britain and Australia, but also in America and in the commercial flying industry all across the world.