So in most cases, you already probably work for the government in some capacity — either directly or through a contractor — if you are in a position to have a useful idea along these lines. We tend to lionize the idea of "lone inventors" coming up with great ideas out of "nowhere" but in practice if you are going to make serious progress in a field of technology in the 20th century, you probably already need to be plugged into networks of people and research, and if it's a field that has military or industrial implications, there are already probably a lot of people working in it. This is just worth noting from the beginning, because it's exceedingly rare for a lone inventor to come up with a good idea that is useful for weapons or gadgets, and this is one of the reasons why the infrastructure for funding or finding such people is pretty slim (as opposed to the infrastructure for developing ideas that come up in national laboratories or industrial contractors).

But let's imagine you did it anyway. Congrats! Good for you, rare inventor that you are. What can you do?

First, you try to patent it. Even if you went to the government and said, "I've got a good idea," the first thing they would have told you to do is file a patent application first. Why? Because they don't want to be accused of stealing your idea, and this is a good way to weed out cranks. And if it's a useful military idea, the patent application will be bounced up to a government representative pretty quickly, too.

They might, if it's a really good idea, declare it secret, in which case, you are officially screwed. You get nothing, not even credit, and the government gets to use and develop it. Yes, this was, and still is, a thing.

But let's imagine that doesn't happen. Then what? Well, there are a few cases of "outsiders" in the Cold War being recognized for their brilliance and being allowed to become "insiders." There are several avenues here. One is that you could work for the government. Maybe on the basis of your great idea you would get picked up as a temporary researcher at a national laboratory, or part of the military R&D infrastructure. Awesome. In that capacity you'd be able to get as much money as you wanted for your research, without having to apply for anything. But the government is going to own whatever comes out of it, and your ability to commercialize it is likely going to be very limited. (Some of the latter changes in the 1980s, with the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act.)

Maybe you already work at a university. Congrats! There are means by which you can apply for formal research grants, and you can approach government and military agencies directly to get funding. The Office of Naval Research, for example, was an immense funder of Cold War R&D in universities. Up until the 1970s this was a pretty loose thing, but it got tightened up after then. Note that your university may ultimately own the rights to whatever you develop, though: it will depend on where you are. (If you are at Stanford, congrats! You own everything. If you are University of California, sorry! You own nothing. The university gets full title and all royalties. If you are at my current university, you own a fraction of it, and the size of that fraction depends on how valuable it is.)

OK, you don't work for a university and you don't want to work for the government directly. What are you options? Basically, your option is to join or found a company, and try to become a contractor to the government or military yourself. This is basically the story of early Silicon Valley: private companies acting as military contractors getting R&D funds that they turned into both military and civilian use.

Those are the basic "Cold War options." You will note that none of these involve you just getting money thrown at you: you need to find an agency sponsor, you need to be more than a random person on the street, and in many of these situations you are actively losing the rights to your work (and anything beyond research funds) by getting involved with the government. Such are the breaks and tradeoffs.

I haven't gone into some of the really crazy "you get screwed" possibilities, including my favorite, "we declare that someone else could manufacture this national security technology cheaper — because they never invested in any research on it that they need to recoup — so we've given the production contract to them, and you, the inventor, are entitled to nothing" (this is known as the "Authorization and Consent" policy, if you are curious). But this is not a system for lone inventors: this was a system that increasingly favored "big players" who had previously cultivated connections. It was not a system for individuals at all, it was a system that targeted institutions, organizations, and corporations as the means by which innovation was cultivated.

The government did throw money at a lot of research ideas, but primarily those already embedded within an institutional context. And if you are not embedded in a pre-existing institutional context, and have a really good idea — watch out! There were (and still are!) a lot of ways for the government to declare your work too important to let languish in individual hands, and effectively seize it. Again, despite the lionization of the idea of the "lone inventor," there have been very few true "lone inventors" since the 19th century, and almost all innovation activity, and policy, is tilted towards corporate and institutional invention.

The above based on many years of research into Cold War R&D practices. If you find the secret patent stuff interesting, check out [my article on atomic patenting policy](http://alexwellerstein.com/publications/wellerstein_patentingthebomb(isis).pdf), which is related to this. For general studies of Cold War R&D, see e.g. Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-industrial-academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1993); Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996); and, I don't know, maybe David Hounshell, Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), to name just a few of the books that edge around how the funding of science and technology worked in the Cold War. My forthcoming book (this summer!) on nuclear weapons secrecy also has a lot relating to how the private sector was handled in the case of nuclear-related technologies (including laser fusion, the gas centrifuge, and nuclear reactors). And in general, on the shift away from the "lone inventor," see David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 1979).