Past Forward: The First Land-Mine Detector that Actually Worked

The invention of an effective land-mine detector came about after a tragedy on the beaches of Dundee, Scotland. In 1940, the British Army, fearing a German invasion, buried thousands of land mines along the coast. But it didn't notify its allies. Soldiers from the Polish 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade on a routine patrol of the beach were killed or injured when the land mines exploded. After the tragedy, a Polish electrical engineer named Józef Stanislaw Kosacki developed a portable mine detector that performed flawlessly in tests. It weighed less than 14 kilograms and operated much like the metal detectors used by beachcombers today. The devices quickly went into production and were shipped first to Egypt, where the Germans had created a vast minefield, called the Devil's Gardens, covering over 2,900 square kilometers. Kosacki's detector was able to clear mines twice as fast as previous methods. It's estimated to have saved thousands of lives by the end of the war. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States continued to use versions of it until 1991.