Whence the NGP?

The paper begins with fire. The author says the ability to control it is universally and exclusively human, and that the history of that controlled use is also the history of civilization. Twelve pages later the subject is fire suppression research in aircraft.

Richard Gann of the National Institute of Standards and Technology wrote it about the Defense Department's Next Generation Fire Suppression Technology Program, which ran from 1997 to 2006. He says the program arose from a discovery that earned two chemists a Nobel Prize, and from legislation that turned the science into public policy. The text refers to a forthcoming book on how the program came about, what research was done and what it found. This paper gives the short version while that book was still to come.