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

A HABIT OF SECRECY

8/25/2016

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“[One] evening King came home beaming and hugged Elsa, saying, ‘We did it!’  He wouldn’t tell me what but they were both ecstatic.  Your mother’s comment was a matter-of-fact ‘I knew you would.’….It was, I later learned, that they had…bounced [radar] off the moon.”

This charming anecdote about my father sharing his elation with my mother was told to me by my cousin Tricia, who was twelve years my senior and lived with my family off and on at several points during my childhood.

So success had crowned their efforts, and the tiny band of volunteers at the Evans Signal Laboratory had scooped much bigger labs at home and abroad. The news that our horizons were no longer limited by the earth’s atmosphere, and that communication with extraterrestrial bodies was now possible, made front page headlines all over the world, followed shortly by newsreels shown before the Saturday matinee and extended radio interviews. My father even received warning letters about “disturbing God’s back yard” - a sure sign that a significant scientific advance had been made. 
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And the rest is history, right? 

​Not exactly.

In fact, although the successful moon bounce occurred on January 10, 1946, the Army actually sat on this news for more than two weeks before finally revealing it to the world on January 25. Some of the delay was undoubtedly dictated by a desire to have outside experts review the team’s claims, but an abundance of caution cannot entirely account for the aura of reticence surrounding the event. Very little information was initially revealed about even the five principals, who were described in the first NY Times article about the feat as "modest in the extreme. Only at the reporters' insistence was there any revelation of biographical material on the quintet." According to the late David Mofenson, son of team member Jack Mofenson, “My father used to like to quote Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: ‘the world will little note nor long remember….’” 

So why was the Army so reluctant to exercise its bragging rights? Perhaps its pride in Project Diana was tempered by a lingering concern that too much had been revealed about their capabilities (which just a few months earlier might have resulted in Camp Evans being a target for German or Japanese bombs). Or possibly Jack DeWitt, though not actively deceptive, had not been as forthcoming about what he was up to as the Army higher-ups might have wished, as the following passage from an oral history interview I conducted with my father in 1979 seems to imply:

“[Jack DeWitt] had thought for a long time about the possibility of getting enough energy onto the moon to be detectable back on the earth, and with this cadre of people that I was heading and the various pieces of apparatus that were around, we did some thinking about it and decided we had the resources to do the trick, so pretty much on a slave labor basis, we started to work on this moon radar project, and a lot of other people got "scrounged" into it. And to make a long story short, the thing came off successfully. Then we let our bosses know what was going on….”

The Army’s reluctance to take credit for Project Diana didn’t end there. Decades later my father, then in a high-level position in Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon and lobbying for a 40-year anniversary celebration of Project Diana (which he always regarded as his life’s proudest achievement), was unable to get sufficient security clearance to gain access to records of his own work. The 40th anniversary passed with barely a ripple.

David Mofenson told me he later tried to get the US Post Office to issue a stamp commemorating the 50-year anniversary: “I wrote our U.S. Senators etc but could generate no interest - more important to put out stamps celebrating Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny!” (Previous stamps have featured the lunar landing, and David might have been pleased to know that on February 22, 2016, the USPS issued a $1.20 Forever stamp showing a beautiful photograph of the full moon. So far no mention of Project Diana, though.)

The 70-year anniversary of Project Diana took place on January 10 of this year. For ham radio operators and Earth-Moon-Earth enthusiasts, and for historians of space exploration, Project Diana is still sort of a big deal. The InfoAge Science History Museum, which has been heroic in staving off the Army’s efforts to dismantle the Project Diana site, hosted a gala event in which museum volunteers, the Ocean Monmouth Amateur Radio Club (OMARC), and Princeton University, reenacted this historic milestone. So far as I know, however, the Army remained on the sidelines, leaving others to commemorate the event.
​
75th anniversary, anyone?
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ON THE MARCONI TRAIL: A TALE OF THREE PILGRIMAGES

4/22/2016

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International Marconi Day is a 24-hour amateur radio event held annually to commemorate the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian wireless radio pioneer, on April 25, 1874. The event is observed on the Saturday closest to Marconi’s birthday; this year it happens tomorrow, on April 23. 

Marconi showed an early interest in and aptitude for electronics, sending a wireless message from his bedroom to his mother's garden at the age of sixteen. Fortunately for him, his parents had both the inclination and wealth to support his talents. In his early twenties, failing to generate much interest in his work in his native Italy, he relocated to England and also spent much time in America, combing the coasts of both continents for spots suited to transatlantic radio communication, and leaving many wireless telegraph stations in his wake. 

Among Marconi’s hand-picked sites was the Belmar Marconi receiving station, located on a hilltop on the south bank of the Shark River Basin, at what later became Camp Evans, home of Project Diana and a stone's throw from my childhood home in Shark River Hills. The original buildings were constructed between 1912 and 1914 by the JG White Engineering Corporation for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America as part of Marconi’s “World Encircling Wireless Girdle” project. Weak transatlantic signals received at the Belmar Station were then relayed via a landline connection to a high-power transmitting station in New Brunswick, 32 miles to the northwest.

In 1913 Marconi returned to his native Italy, where he and his wife became part of Rome society and he was made a member of the Italian Senate. During World War II he was placed in charge of  the Italian military’s radio services. Sadly but perhaps inevitably, Marconi later in life joined the Italian Fascist party and became an active defender of its ideology. 

Today we honor him not for his politics but for his work as a visionary who, ahead of his time, dreamed of a connected world and dedicated his life to making his dream come true - an accomplishment for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909.

* * * * * * * * * *

Several decades ago my husband (call sign K8EV) and I had to cut short our delightful meanderings in southern England at the Devonshire-Cornwall border in order to keep an appointment with some friends in the Lake District. In 2010, we jumped at a chance to pick up where we left off and spent the better part of a fortnight exploring Cornwall. An unlikely (to me) highlight of our tour was a visit to the Marconi Centre in Poldhu, site of the Poldhu Wireless Station, where Marconi claimed (somewhat controversially) to have transmitted the first east-to-west transatlantic radio message in December, 1901, to his station on Signal Hill, St. John's, Newfoundland. The Poldhu station was built partly on enclosed pastures that remain to this day, making it hard to keep antennas in working order because the cows apparently have a taste for coaxial cable. The original station was designed by John Ambrose Fleming, who invented the ancestor of all vacuum tubes, earning him the sobriquet "father of modern electronics."

​That station was decommissioned in 1934 and demolished in 1937, but six acres were given to the National Trust in 1937 and more land added in 1960. The Marconi Centre, built in 2001, houses a Marconi museum and also provides meeting space for the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, GB2GM. It took a little persistence to find the site but we ended up spending a fine afternoon perusing the museum's fascinating exhibits and chatting with the local hams.
Fast forward to 2014, when my husband and I, car trekking across the Canadian Maritimes, realized we were within striking distance of another Marconi historic site, this one at Table Head in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, where Marconi transmitted (this time indisputably) the first west-to-east transatlantic message in December, 1902. Again, it took some looking to locate it despite my best efforts at iPhone navigation. Unlike Poldhu, there was no welcoming committee, just an isolated commemorative plaque to mark the start of a cold, windy walk to the edge of a cliff. Nonetheless, we added another notch to our Marconi belt.
Last summer, after I thought I’d long since finished going through my father’s collection of documents and photographs, my sister found one last box in her garage that she sent to me to deal with in my role as family archivist. Included among the photos was a small packet of faded images I’d never seen before but that nonetheless looked oddly familiar. I quickly realized that they dated to the 1970s and that I was looking at yet another Marconi pilgrimage, this one by my Dad (call sign W2AXO), to Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Marconi had selected Cape Cod because of its easterly location and, after scouting a couple of other possible places, settled on an 8-acre parcel in South Wellfleet. In 1903, he persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to send a message to King Edward VII of England, conveyed in Morse code to the Poldhu Station in Cornwall. Expecting only a confirmation from the Glace Bay Station in Nova Scotia that the message had been relayed to England, they instead received an immediate reply from King Edward himself. 
I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. Although the bleak, windswept Marconi stations that dot both Atlantic coasts are not most people’s idea of vacation resorts, they provide radio buffs with a window into Marconi’s mind, a place where they can stop and speculate about why Marconi, surrounded by his surveyors’ maps, preferred this promontory to the next outcropping up the coast. Somehow I suspect there will be more Marconi pilgrimages in my future.

It’s what hams do. 
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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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