PROJECT DIANA: RADAR REACHES THE MOON
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TO THE MOON AND BACK
​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

The Human and Scientific Legacy of Project Diana

ON BEING NAMED "KING"

7/18/2016

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The recent death of Prince caused me to reflect on my father. This was not because of even the slightest overlap in aesthetic preferences. My father’s musical tastes ran the gamut from Gilbert and Sullivan to John Philip Sousa. He was the kind of guy who enjoyed going to a high school band concert even if his own kids weren’t in it. Not your typical Prince fan.

No, the strictly tangential link between Prince and my Dad is that both had unusual given names, names that implied a royal connection that each in his own way ended up earning.

In my father’s case, King was not his first name - that was “Edwin,” after his father; but King was his mother’s birth name and no one ever called him anything but "King" - nor did my father ever seem the least bit abashed by it. Consequently it never struck me as being at all out of the ordinary, though some of my friends later told me how odd it seemed to hear a man addressed as "King" as casually as their own fathers were called "Jim" or "Bill" or "Ken."

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The King family crest, painted by my grandmother. The motto - “Out of a ducal coronet or a demi ostrich ar beak or” - roughly translates as “The upper half of a silver ostrich with a beak of gold, shown in profile view, emerges through a duke’s golden crown.”
Later, as I sifted through the extensive collection of King family letters and documents I inherited from my father, I came to appreciate my grandmother’s love for her family and pride in their name. Her father, Arthur King, was descended from a long line of Anglican clergymen who lived and pursued their calling in Little Glemham in Suffolk, England. As a young man, Arthur emigrated to the US, probably for economic opportunities that were closed to him as one of many more younger sons than were needed to serve the needs of the local houses of worship. In 1889 he married a Pennsylvania girl named Vergetta Jane Sayers and the pair had one child, their daughter Beatrice, whom they adored. My father and his two younger brothers were Arthur and Vergie's only grandchildren, and my father fondly remembered long rambles with his grandfather King, butterfly nets in hand.
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Arthur King with his grandson (Edwin) King Stodola (circa 1920)
Arthur became a naturalized US citizen in 1893 - an act requiring him to forswear allegiance to Queen Victoria. Despite his love for his adopted country, however, Arthur retained strong ties with his family for the rest of his life, returning frequently to visit them. My grandmother corresponded regularly with her first cousins in England. So my grandmother’s King heritage was, for her, living history.

Luckily for my grandparents and for Prince's parents, the US is quite tolerant of obscure or unusual name choices. Had they been born elsewhere, these names might have been rejected out of hand. “Prince” and “King,” for example, are both near the top of a no-list maintained by the New Zealand government for violating the rule that “acceptable names...should not resemble an official title and rank.” (Ironically, the name King does not necessarily imply descent from royalty but rather refers to a man with a kingly bearing, or to someone who played the part in a pageant or earned the title in a tournament.)

Since my father, no one else in the family has ever been known as "King." The tradition of using King as a middle name is now in its fourth generation, however, so I guess the Kings will continue to be with us for quite awhile!

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CAMP EVANS AND THE LEGACY OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER

7/4/2016

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Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 and died just a few days before his 88th birthday, on July 1, 1983. The Fourth of July, sandwiched between the anniversaries of his birth and death, seems an appropriate moment to celebrate this quirky and peculiarly American genius - architect, designer, engineer, planner, visionary, futurist - and his link with radar research at Camp Evans.

In the late 1920s, Fuller unveiled the first of many iterations of a new approach to home design, the Dymaxion house, launching a line of inventions associated with the Dymaxion concept. The term “Dymaxion” was coined by Fuller in collaboration with Waldo Warren, an adman hired by Marshall Field’s in Chicago to help promote a display model of the Dymaxion house. A portmanteau word created by jamming together the words “DYnamic,” “MAXimum,” and “tensION,” it was intended to convey Fuller’s underlying vision of “the largest dividend of human advantage from the least investment of energy and materials …achieved by the over-all employment of scientific and technical means” (or more succinctly, "doing more with less”). Fuller was so taken with the term that he applied it not only to the Dymaxion house but also to the 3-wheeled Dymaxion car (potentially a flying machine as well), the molded plastic Dymaxion bathroom, a unique world map projection known as the Dymaxion map, and the main topic of this essay, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit. He renamed his journal the Dymaxion Chronofile. He advocated, and actually practiced for a couple of years, what he called Dymaxion sleep, a polyphasic sleep schedule that involved taking 30-minute naps whenever he became tired, after approximately six hours, allowing him to function with considerably less sleep than today’s sleep gurus insist upon. He stopped not because of any ill health effects but because he found it put him totally out of phase with the rest of the world.

Fuller’s goal in developing the Dymaxion house was to produce an inexpensive, mass-produced modular dwelling that could be airlifted to its final location in kit form and easily assembled on the spot. The original versions were hexagonal in shape, with a domelike roof and a central supporting mast allowing them to be raised off the ground by one story. The Dymaxion house was ahead of its time - way ahead - in employing photovoltaic cells, wind generators, micro-hydroelectric systems, locally purified water pump, and clean packaging toilets (a feature of the Dymaxion bathroom) in support of off-the-grid living at a time when the virtues of such green innovations were apparent to few besides Fuller. 

Only two Dymaxion houses (having by then evolved into circular Dymaxion Dwelling Machines) were actually built, the Barwise (in 1945) and the Danbury (1946). A third, hybrid version, the Wichita House, was assembled by an investor named William Graham from salvaged parts of the two prototypes, which he purchased in 1948, and was occupied by his family for 30 years - although as an accessory to an existing house rather than as a freestanding living unit. In 1990 the house and all the leftover Dymaxion house parts were donated by the Graham family to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, which lovingly restored it and placed it on display in 2001. It is well worth a visit but if a stop in the Detroit area is not part of your upcoming travel plans, click ​here for a virtual tour.

Meanwhile, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit or DDU, a considerably less elaborate version of the Dymaxion house, was created in 1940-41, initially for British military use. The inspiration for these buildings came during a drive through the Illinois countryside, where Fuller became fascinated with the corrugated metal grain bins on the farmsteads that dotted the landscape. Adapting the construction principles exemplified by the Dymaxion house, he designed a structure with circular walls, ten porthole windows, and a dome-like roof, with a downdraft ventilator at the apex to provide natural air conditioning. Unlike the Dymaxion house, the DDU was designed to sit directly on the ground.

Although DDUs were originally intended as prefabricated bombproof shelters, Fuller envisioned multiple other wartime and peacetime uses including as storage space, small workshops, and (in the form of two side-by-side structures) vacation cottages. ("How to be Comfortable though Bombed," read one headline to a feature on the units; "A Shelter in War - A Beach House in Peacetime," read another.) In 1942, the Army Signal Corps commissioned 200 DDUs for use around the world. The Butler Manufacturing Company of Kansas City, MO, manufacturer of the silos Fuller so admired, was engaged to produce the units, which sold for $1,250 apiece. Probably 100 or more were built, until production was finally halted by the wartime shortage of steel.

Sometime between 1941 and 1943, some 28 DDUs were installed on circular concrete pads at Camp Evans for use by the Signal Corps’ radar research program. Parts for the AN/TPS3 radar unit, invented by Dr. John Marchetti to fill an urgent need for lightweight, transportable early warning devices by troops recapturing islands in the Pacific Theatre of Operations, were stored in five of the buildings. There is also evidence that DDUs were used as protected areas for workers conducting potentially flammable experiments or handling hazardous materials.

Click here for a remarkable vintage photo of a ceremony behind Building 9020, kept by Loren Stone of Neptune as part of his collection of memorabilia and later donated by his family to InfoAge. The photo was taken on the afternoon of July 18, 1945, just a month before the Japanese surrender, and the occasion was a presentation of the Legion of Merit medal to Captain Charles H. Vollum for his work on artillery fire control radar. The speaker is Col. Jack DeWitt, Commanding Officer of Camp Evans, who just a few months later, as the leader of Project Diana, successfully bounced radar waves off the moon. Several DDUs can be seen, including one directly below a radar tower.


Several of the original DDUs have now been removed from the Camp Evans site, but eleven of the units, among the handful of known surviving examples of the DDU, are maintained in varying states of what preservationists like to call “arrested decay.” Seven have been painted regulation Army beige. As of 2011, four of the units in the back of the property were unlocked and accessible to the public. One of the units is occupied by a local artist, who has set up two electric space heaters and hung the walls with brightly colored fabric to soften the military decor. A copy of the Army's instructions for assembling a DDU is preserved in the Ft. Monmonth Command Historian’s collection.
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In the 1950s Buckminster Fuller turned his attention to the geodesic dome, a remarkably efficient design that  brought him international acclaim on a scale beyond anything he had heretofore achieved. Although his Dymaxion designs generated a fair amount of popular interest in their day, they never became commercially viable. The reasons for this can probably be traced to Fuller himself. To some extent, he regarded the Dymaxion products more as concepts than as commercial ventures. Furthermore, the idea that “the perfect is the enemy to the good” was not part of Fuller’s mindset; he never wanted to sell a product till he had perfected it, and he always seemed to have one more idea for improvement. 

Perhaps driven by the demands of wartime and the simplified design, the DDU, unlike the Dymaxion house or the Dymaxion car, was actually built in substantial numbers. Thus, the little cluster of DDUs at Camp Evans may be the best and most extensive surviving example of the Dymaxion phase of Fuller’s work. A shout-out here to Fred Carl, local history buff extraordinaire and founder of the InfoAge Science/History Learning Center - who, when he first acquired a property adjacent to Camp Evans in 1985, had no idea what these odd, yurt-like structures were. As historical research brought new information to light, he steadfastly resisted the Army’s demolition plans and worked with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to protect Camp Evans and its treasures. Without his heroic efforts, this historic legacy of Fuller’s work might well have been leveled by now.
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    CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

    I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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