No such thing as an "idiotic question."
The way I heard it, BNC stands for British Naval Code. It was developed either late in WWII or soon after. It seems to have been developed as standard electrical connections in use at the time was the RCA connector. With the salt water environment most navies operate in, it seems a high rate of operational failures with "new-fangled" RADAR occurred & it was determined the reason for failure was cable oxidation. The solution: don't allow oxygen to corrode the connection. Hence the BNC connector.
However, I don't have article to back me up. Just memory. Goes to show that there are usually several answers to each question.
