l-r: Jack Mofenson, Harold D. Webb, John H. DeWitt, jr., E. King Stodola, Herbert Kauffman
In some ways it could be seen as a case of "better to ask forgiveness than permission." Lt Col Jack DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, New Jersey, had dreamed of bouncing radar waves off the moon since long before World War II. Now the War was over. The Army, anticipating the development by the Soviet Union of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, wanted to know whether such missiles could be detected by radar. Because they would be likely to arc into the atmosphere enroute to their target, DeWitt was charged with determining whether radar waves could penetrate the ionosphere.
Obviously no long-range missiles were available for this test, but if the signal were strong enough, it might be possible to bounce a signal off a stand-in, a large object outside the earth's atmosphere.
Say, the moon.
Following the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, Col DeWitt made his decision. He had the team, he had the equipment, he had the expertise - and it was all about to be disbanded, its collective capability lost forever. The offer of an excuse to pursue his dream of "shooting the moon" was just too good to pass up. In the waning days of their wartime service, his men began to work feverishly on what they dubbed Project Diana. On January 10, 1946, their efforts were crowned with success, and a series of radar signals produced answering beeps exactly 2.6 seconds later.
And the crowd went wild! News of their accomplishment was trumpeted around the world in the press and on radio and television, then in its infancy. Parades were held to honor this new breed of scientist-hero. Many were excited by the glitz or stirred by patriotism. A smaller number, perhaps, grasped the full significance of the event - that this tiny handful of scientists had ushered in a new age, an age in which we were no longer bound in theory or in fact by the earth's atmosphere. The sky was no longer the limit.
You might think the Army would be delighted, but you would be wrong. Although they couldn't altogether suppress the public excitement surrounding the event, they downplayed it as much as they could, fearing it revealed too much about their electronic warfare capability. The Army has a long memory. When E. King Stodola, DeWitt's Chief Scientist on the project, wished to review the documentation he himself had generated in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the event, he was told his security clearance was insufficient to allow him access to that classified material - even though by then he was a senior administrator of Electronic Warfare (EW) at the Pentagon.
What was so special about these men, and the team that was more than just the sum of its parts? What made them click? This Website represents an effort to capture what each man brought to the effort and the chemistry among them that enabled them to succeed where others had failed.
Obviously no long-range missiles were available for this test, but if the signal were strong enough, it might be possible to bounce a signal off a stand-in, a large object outside the earth's atmosphere.
Say, the moon.
Following the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, Col DeWitt made his decision. He had the team, he had the equipment, he had the expertise - and it was all about to be disbanded, its collective capability lost forever. The offer of an excuse to pursue his dream of "shooting the moon" was just too good to pass up. In the waning days of their wartime service, his men began to work feverishly on what they dubbed Project Diana. On January 10, 1946, their efforts were crowned with success, and a series of radar signals produced answering beeps exactly 2.6 seconds later.
And the crowd went wild! News of their accomplishment was trumpeted around the world in the press and on radio and television, then in its infancy. Parades were held to honor this new breed of scientist-hero. Many were excited by the glitz or stirred by patriotism. A smaller number, perhaps, grasped the full significance of the event - that this tiny handful of scientists had ushered in a new age, an age in which we were no longer bound in theory or in fact by the earth's atmosphere. The sky was no longer the limit.
You might think the Army would be delighted, but you would be wrong. Although they couldn't altogether suppress the public excitement surrounding the event, they downplayed it as much as they could, fearing it revealed too much about their electronic warfare capability. The Army has a long memory. When E. King Stodola, DeWitt's Chief Scientist on the project, wished to review the documentation he himself had generated in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the event, he was told his security clearance was insufficient to allow him access to that classified material - even though by then he was a senior administrator of Electronic Warfare (EW) at the Pentagon.
What was so special about these men, and the team that was more than just the sum of its parts? What made them click? This Website represents an effort to capture what each man brought to the effort and the chemistry among them that enabled them to succeed where others had failed.