Category: Science And Technology

"GOOD MORNING, MOON"

10/4/2019

The moon is in the ascendant this weekend. The theme of this year’s World Space Week (October 4-10), which begins today, is “The Moon: Gateway to the Stars.” Coincidentally, International Observe the Moon Night, a moveable feast that occurs in late September or early October, happens to fall on October 5 - tomorrow - in 2019.

World Space Week, inaugurated in 1999 by the United Nations, and Observe the Moon Night, launched by NASA in 2009 to celebrate its return to moon exploration, are public engagement programs intended to increase awareness of space exploration and science. Both organizations, however, have taken the short view of the history of space exploration. The beginning of World Space Week commemorates the launch of Sputnik 1, the first human-made earth satellite, on October 4, 1957, which is described as “opening the way for space exploration.” NASA also dates the "Dawn of the Space Age" to the late 1950s, when a series of unsuccessful attempts by the USA and the USSR to orbit, impact, or carry out a "fly-by" of the moon culminated in a Soviet Union fly-by on January 2, 1959 - listed as a partial success because the goal was impact.

* * * * *

Project Diana enthusiasts know better. The true dawn of the space age, the event that opened the way for space exploration, occurred on January 10, 1946, when a small band of radar scientists at Camp Evans on the coast of New Jersey said “hello” to the moon, and for the first time ever in human history, the moon said “hello” back.

At moonrise, 11:48am, the men aimed their antenna at the horizon and started transmitting. Their first few tries were unsuccessful, but at 11:58am, the moon began answering - tentatively, then definitively. The conversation continued until 12:09pm, when the moon moved out of radar range. On the following three days, and on eight additional days during the month, two-way communication resumed: Signals were sent, and around 2.5 seconds later, the time it took to make the 800,000km round trip, the moon reflected back the greeting from Planet Earth.

* * * * *

And just like that, Project Diana disproved once and for all the going hypothesis that the ionosphere could not be penetrated by radar. By adding the radio band to the visible portion of the electromagnet spectrum, the use of radar expanded our observational capabilities tenfold. Not only that, it represented the first-ever application of radar astronomy, which offered the possibility not simply of observation but also communication with other parts of the universe.

A practical result of the birth of radar astronomy was that measuring the distance to and velocity of a heavenly body or a spacecraft became so accurate that over thirty years later, even though other methods were available that might have been adequate, it remained the method of choice for tracking the Apollo 11 mission. The moon bounce technology pioneered by Project Diana - that is,
reflecting microwaves off the moon and analyzing the reflected signal - was subsequently used for topographical mapping of Venus and other planets near enough to be within radar range, measurement and analysis of the ionosphere, and radio control of space travel, missiles, and orbiting artificial satellites.

The space program as we know it today could not exist in the absence of this advance.

* * * * *

A less tangible contribution of Project Diana was its effect on the imagination not just of the public but also of the scientific community. As I have written elsewhere in this blog, “[T]he inspirational and aspirational elements of the project dynamized future research by emboldening scientists to consider such new and exciting possibilities as artificial satellites, space probes, and yes, human spaceflight, in the process garnering widespread public support for such efforts in ways that have been well-documented here and elsewhere.”

One more way in which Project Diana inaugurated the space age: It started the tradition of naming space programs after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. In actual fact, as someone pointed out, most of the subsequent programs were named after gods and not goddesses. All that has now changed with Artemis, named for Diana’s Greek alter ego, a collaboration between NASA and its commercial partners to land “the first woman and the next man” in the region of the lunar south pole by 2024. The longer-term goal of the Artemis program is to establish a sustainable colony on the moon, and eventually to send a crewed spaceflight to Mars.

* * * * *

After the success of Project Diana, the team was disbanded and its members reassigned to other work. When the Army then started jobbing out much of its research program, scientists originally attracted to the Signal Corps by the research opportunities it offered came to feel that the jobs they had come to do no longer existed; many, like my father, left for positions in private industry, where the action, they concluded, now was.

Another decade would elapse before the first artificial satellites were rocketed into space, followed rapidly by crewed spaceflights. But despite this long hiatus, Project Diana was no mere “precursor,” it was truly the foundation of all subsequent space exploration.

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edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

6/8/2018

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In 1991, just a few months before he died, my father was awarded the Armstrong medal and plaque by the Radio Club of America. Of all the accolades he received, none would have been more meaningful to him. Sadly, he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and beyond grasping the nature of the honor that had been bestowed on him. He hadn’t forgotten, however, that Major Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of his heroes, and he would happily discourse about the importance of Armstrong’s work to anyone who would listen.

I now wish I had listened more closely.

* * * * *

Most radio buffs are familiar with Armstrong’s turbulent career in wireless communications, during which he revolutionized the field not once but repeatedly - in the process stirring up mighty opposition from stakeholders in a new way of doing business that had little use for lone-wolf inventors like Armstrong.

His earliest work focused on improving receiver sensitivity. While still in college, he perfected the regenerative circuit, which dramatically improved radio reception by means of a positive feedback loop in the receiver, using a triode tube recently invented by Lee De Forest. Armstrong went on to invent the superheterodyne, which still further improved reception by mixing an incoming high-frequency signal with a second tunable lower-frequency signal to produce a predetermined intermediate frequency (IF) still further improved reception. The superheterodyne outperformed every previous approach including his own regenerative receiver and remains the industry standard to this day.

He then turned his attention to developing wide-band frequency modulation (FM) radio. Radios in use at the time were designed to be sensitive to the strength or amplitude of the incoming signal (that is, amplitude modulation or AM), but were also sensitive to environmental disturbances such as thunderstorms or electromagnetic waves emanating from electronic equipment. No amount of tweaking or shielding could fix this problem. Armstrong took a radically different approach, arguing that by varying the frequency instead of the amplitude of the signal to be transmitted and designing receivers accordingly, such interference could be prevented. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to demonstrating the superiority of FM.

As a wedding gift to his wife, Armstrong (shown here on their honeymoon in Palm Beach) built the world's first boombox.

Armstrong, a fearless climber, atop RCA's 115-foot north tower on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the commercial potential of the burgeoning field of wireless communication created a mercilessly competitive environment dominated by huge, well-heeled corporations. Armstrong’s genius as a radio engineer was matched only by his naivete about the realities of organizational politics (“all substance and no style,” as one biographer put it). Wildly underestimating the ability of greed and self-interest to prevail against (as he saw it) simple truth and honesty, Armstrong engaged in a long series of time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes quixotic legal battles to defend and protect his own interests.

His first such encounter was with Lee De Forest, who responded to Armstrong’s success by laying claim to the idea of regeneration, despite little evidence that he even understood how the triode tube he invented worked, let alone that he had dreamed up Armstrong’s brilliant new application for it. The ensuing litigation lasted for over a decade, with AT&T throwing its muscle behind De Forest after buying up his patents. In the end the Supreme Court, befuddled by the technical details, ruled against Armstrong, despite universal recognition among his scientific peers that regeneration was his invention and not De Forest’s.

His conflict with De Forest, personally and professionally devastating though it was, paled in comparison to that subsequently elicited by the introduction of FM technology. By essentially eliminating the static that bedeviled AM radio, FM threatened the broadcasting industry not only by obsolescing millions of dollars worth of existing radio equipment overnight but also by diverting interest, attention, and coveted frequencies away from the anticipated Next Big Thing, television.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - led by David Sarnoff, formerly his friend and collaborator, now his bitter foe - was not about to take this lying down. Both fair means and foul were employed to thwart Armstrong: Lawsuits were filed and then intentionally dragged out, patents were infringed, royalties were withheld, reverse engineering was used to buttress fake claims of priority. Armstrong was forced to remove his equipment from the top of the Empire State Building, ostensibly to make room for television equipment, driving him to move his operation to Alpine NJ. Here the first FM station, W2XMN, began broadcasting in 1939 - but only after the FCC first revoked his license and then restored it but diverted FM into a new frequency band at limited power - again, supposedly to make way for TV channel 1. (Ironically the Alpine station was briefly resuscitated after radio communication from the World Trade Center came to an abrupt halt on Nine-Eleven.)

FM station W2XMN broadcast from Alpine, NJ, where Armstrong's 425 ft antenna tower dominated the Palisades landscape. It's still there!

Faced with the prospect of seemingly unending legal battles he could ill afford, Armstrong became despondent and even lashed out at his beloved wife Marion, who moved out of their home to escape further abuse. On the night of January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong donned his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat, removed the air conditioner from a window of his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan’s exclusive River House, and jumped to his death. Marion Armstrong continued to prosecute her husband’s unresolved infringement suits and ultimately triumphed, winning some $10 million in damages. Sadly, this vindication came too late to comfort or benefit Armstrong himself.

* * * * *

Far less known - perhaps because it remained highly classified for many years - is the story of Armstrong’s work on FM radar during World War II. Indeed, in Armstrong’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, this phase of his career is casually dismissed as “a hiatus caused by World War II.”

Politically conservative and proud of his military service in World War I, Armstrong generously extended to the US government royalty-free use of the patents he had so fiercely defended - a patriotic but costly gift. Meanwhile, in addition to his legal expenses, he was self-funding much of his research at Columbia (having declined a salary for his appointment as a full professor at Columbia in order to escape administrative duties and minimize teaching responsibilities), as well as his high-powered FM station in Alpine NJ. (His red and white antenna, all 425 feet of it, still looms over the surrounding Palisades landscape, where its affluent neighbors regard it as an eyesore.)

As his debts mounted catastrophically, his attorney, Alfred McCormack, urged him to accept government contracts for his investigations of long range radar. These contracts enabled Armstrong to hire an assistant, Robert Hull, a newly-minted Columbia graduate, and together the two set about adapting FM technology to radar. The end of World War II, however, brought these explorations to a close, leaving no clear indication of what they hoped to accomplish. Since then, continuous wave FM radar has found only specialized applications, and pulse radar remains the technology of choice for most purposes.

* * * * *

And here begins my quest to clarify the nature of Armstrong’s role in Project Diana. Starting with a standard SCR-271 early warning radar, Armstrong and Hull had transformed the equipment into a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver using conventional pulse radar. The Project Diana team modified the set still further, adding a tunable crystal to allow the narrow band receiver frequency to be adjusted to compensate for the Doppler shift caused by the constant relative motion between the earth and moon.

As I worked on my most recent blog entry, about the famous bedspring antenna, I found myself becoming increasingly curious about whether Armstrong had directly interacted with the Project Diana team, and whether he had actually spent time with them at Camp Evans during this period. On the one hand, I had never, among all the first-person accounts I’d read by the Project Diana team, including my own oral history interview with my father, encountered any mention of face-to-face meetings or discussions with Armstrong. On the other hand, Belmar and Alpine are less than 100 miles apart, and Armstrong was highly familiar with the Marconi facility, where he and David Sarnoff in happier times had first listened to signals from his regenerative receiver.

The answers to these questions proved surprisingly elusive, even after I consulted such authoritative and comprehensive sources as Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, Man of High Fidelity by Lawrence Lessing, The Invention that Changed the World, by Robert Buderi, and the librarians in charge of the Armstrong archives at Columbia University. Finally, with the help of Fred Carl, Director of the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, I found my way to Al Klase and Ray Chase, who work with the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's Radio Technology Museum at InfoAge, where they specialize respectively in the development of radar and Armstrrong's career.

Al very kindly directed me to an audio recording made in 2005 of an interview with Renville McMann, a panelist at a celebration broadcast from Alpine of the 70th anniversary of FM radio [starting at min 7:00]. In this loving reminiscence of Armstrong, McMann describes the time he innocently suggested that Armstrong point his equipment towards the moon - and with uncharacteristic vehemence, Armstrong refused. That feat, as McMann later learned, was reserved for the Army. “Armstrong had a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at Alpine,” adds Al; indeed, “the SCR-271 radar tower, sans antenna, is still there…. So clearly, there was direct contact with the Diana team. Armstrong's narrow-band receiver was crucial to the success of the project.”

Al goes on to observe, “It's easy to assume Armstrong visited Camp Evans during the Diana era, it was only a day trip, even without modern roads, but I see no hard evidence. Dave Ossman, in his excellent radio drama version of Empire of the Air [starting at min 7:26] has Armstrong at Evans for the first experiment, but rereading [the original book version of Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, p. 298], we could attribute this to artistic license. I, too, would like to know if he was there.”

But as Ray muses, it appears that the famous radio pioneer took pains to maintain an "arm's length" relationship with the youthful Diana team to ensure that they got full credit for whatever successes they achieved. He did such a good job of covering his tracks that barring some unexpected scholarly find, the nature and extent of his personal interactions with the Project Diana team will remain shrouded in mystery.

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THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

4/22/2018

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My parents, never known to be particularly demonstrative, were uncharacteristically ebullient. After months of intense activity and preparation, my father and his colleagues had “shot the moon” with radar waves, and the moon had echoed back: message received. “We did it!” he exclaimed, enfolding his wife in a bear hug. “I knew you would!” my mother replied with a broad grin. She knew from long experience that if my father said something could be done, it almost certainly could.

Not everyone, however, had shared my mother’s implicit faith that Project Diana would succeed. Radar had more than demonstrated its utility during World War II in locating enemy aircraft and submarines, but - hit the moon? Earlier unsuccessful efforts had convinced many that asking radio waves to pierce the ionosphere, hit a designated object in space, and then return back through earth’s atmosphere to the point of origin was expecting too much of the technology. Indeed, the standard method for measuring the distance to the ionosphere at that time was “pulse ranging” - that is, bouncing radio waves off the reflective surface of the ionosphere and timing their return, not passing through it.

Only a group of optimistic visionaries would attempt such a feat. Only a group of engineers would have the practical know-how to accomplish it.

This effort was the brainchild of Lt Col John "Jack" DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. Right after the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, DeWitt was assigned the task of developing radars capable of detecting missiles from the Soviet Union. Since no missiles were available for a test,
DeWitt decided the moon could serve as a stand-in - and incidentally allow him to carry out a project he had dreamed of since long before World War II. Like my mother and unlike the skeptics, he was quite confident (despite a previous failure of his own several years earlier) that it could be done, if done right.

If ever there was a monument to American ingenuity, it is surely Project Diana. The approach, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was to work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test. “Materials already on hand” was the watchword. No attempt was made to design any of the main components for the project from scratch, and little if anything new was purchased to make it happen. The transmitter, the receiver, and the antenna all represented novel applications and redesigns of equipment they had used before.

These three elements were interdependent and had to work together as one for the project to succeed. Arguably the most critical, however, was the antenna, since the failure of previous attempts was attributable in large measure to insufficient sensitivity of the receiver antenna.

* * * * *

By the end of World War I, Army scientists at Fort Monmouth realized that the biggest threat in the next war would come from the air, and that Americans could no longer depend on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect and isolate them. Early detection of incoming threats was crucial if attacks on the homeland were to be avoided or minimized. Initial conceptual explorations of radar began as early as 1920. In the mid 1930s, radar research at Fort Monmouth took a more practical turn, to the point where development of a prototype of the SCR [Signal Corps Radio OR Set Complete Radio, used interchangeably]-268 was well underway.

Then, in 1938, shaken by the discovery in their midst of a Nazi spy named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a Chicago-born German whose friendly curiosity had enabled him to infiltrate the radar research program alarmingly easily, the Army decided to increase security and reduce accessibility by moving the operation from Fort Monmouth to Fort Hancock.

It was at Fort Hancock that the legendary SCR-270/271, capable of detecting bombers 150 miles away, was developed under the leadership of Dr. Harold Zahl. Among other important innovations, this system featured a common antenna for both transmitting and receiving, made possible by a gas-discharge device called a duplexer invented by Zahl. The SCR-270 was a mobile unit; the SCR-271 was a fixed, tower-mounted version that differed mainly in having an antenna with a somewhat higher resolution.

My father was recruited as a young engineer to the Army's radar research program at Fort Hancock in early 1941, in the Radio Position Finding section. He participated in the development of the SCR-270/271 radar and continued to work on modifying and improving it throughout the War. Many years later, he wrote of this radar that it was "still the Old Faithful, coming through where more modern and more advertised sets have become unavailable."

An SCR-270, with its bedspring-type reflective array antenna, ready to rock and roll.

As the nation inexorably drifted towards war, it was realized that Fort Hancock, at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, New York Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay, also had some shortcomings as a location for radar research. More space was needed, it was argued, and the fierce nor'easters that periodically struck the base coated the radar equipment with a film of salt that undermined performance. Its location, so favorable to defense from conventional land and sea attacks, made it vulnerable to U-boat strikes.

So the Army purchased the old Marconi site in Belmar from King’s College and rechristened it Camp Evans. Piecemeal, the radar research program was evacuated from Fort Hancock. Pearl Harbor hastened the transfer, and by 1942 the move to Camp Evans was complete.

With the acquisition of the Camp Evans site, the Signal Corps inherited a rich history of antenna development. During World War I, the Navy had assumed control of the property, and although Marconi’s famous 400-foot wireless towers were used for the dispatch of important messages - indeed, historians dubbed World War I the “wireless war” - breakthroughs in reducing radio static achieved by a resident Canadian scientist named Roy Weagant enabled replacement of these ungainly structures by safer and cheaper if more ho-hum 30-foot antennas. This news was kept under wraps until after the War; “The End of the Giant Towers,” proclaimed contemporary headlines. All of them were gone by 1925.

The arrival of the Army and the entry of the US into World War II transformed the site into a major center for radar research. In addition to newer systems (some involving testing of conceptual designs developed at the MIT Rad Lab), refinement and stepped-up production of the "Old Faithful" SCR-270/271 continued throughout the War - turning Building 37 into a veritable antenna factory as bedspring-type array antennas ranging in length from 2 to 30 feet were assembled for installation on trailers to be used in remote locations. One such SCR-270 radar provided an early warning of incoming Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor - though in one of history’s most egregious command and control failures, the information was initially misinterpreted by the Operator and subsequently discounted by the Commanding Officer on duty.

* * * * *

Project Diana, a name intended (among other things) to befuddle the Guenther Rumrichs of the world, introduced a whole new series of challenges beyond the reach of existing technology designed for (relatively) short-distance detection of enemy aircraft.

Early on, DeWitt decided to use as a starting point a crystal-controlled FM transmitter/receiver specially designed for the Signal Corps by Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the "father of FM radio," by modifying an SCR-271. This set had features that could address two important problems:

1) Due to the relative velocities of the earth and moon, the frequency of the returning echo differed from the transmitted signal (a phenomenon known as Doppler shift) by as much as 300Hz, a number that was constantly changing depending earth's rotation and moon's orbital path. DeWitt called on the Theoretical Studies Group for these elegant calculations, which were done by the mathematician Walter McAfee.) The Armstrong radio was capable of being fine-tuned to the exact frequency required to compensate for the Doppler shift at a given point in time.

2) Signals bounced off an object 238,000 miles from earth would take much longer to echo and be much too weak to be detected by receiving antennas then in use. As noted, this was a problem that had bedeviled previous attempts to shoot the moon. To amplify the incoming signal, it was decided to generate a much longer pulse that would be easier for the receiving antenna to detect. The Armstrong radio was one of the few existing sets capable of generating such a long pulse.

The long pulse, while solving one problem, created another, since there was no antenna on site ready to receive such a signal. To come up with a solution, DeWitt called on the Antenna Design Section at Camp Evans. Two prominent antenna specialists, one the section head, designed a novel system using a quarter-wave step-up transformers. This approach failed to work, however, even after extensive efforts to tweak the transmitter.

DeWitt then turned to his own little group of engineers, who came up with the inspired solution of positioning two SCR-271 stationary radars side-by-side to create an enormous (40x40 ft) double bedspring antenna consisting of a 8x8 array of half-wave dipoles in front of a reflector that further enhanced the 111.5 MHz signals. Who was the first to propose that approach will probably never be known, but given my father's long experience and intimate familiarity with the SCR-271, his leadership role on the team, and his general approach to problem-solving, it wouldn't surprise me if the credit belonged to him. In any event, translating the idea into reality was undoubtedly easier said than done, but engineers from the Mechanical Design Center rose to the occasion and succeeded in assembling the Diana Bedspring. (Unfortunately, engineering specifications were destroyed by the Army in 1971, so our knowledge of the design details remains sketchy.)

This whole contraption - there is no other word for it - was mounted atop a 100-ft reinforced tower in the northeast corner of Camp Evans. The heavy and ungainly antenna could not be tilted, it could only be rotated in azimuth; so moonshots could only be attempted twice a day, usually at moonrise but occasionally at moonset, during the 40-minute window open when the moon passed through the 15 degree wide beam of the antenna pattern.

Panoramic view of Camp Evans

The iconic Diana Bedspring, perhaps the most famous antenna in history, has become the unofficial symbol of Project Diana. Its picture, doctored by a photo editor who thought the moon looked too dim in the original so used 20th century “Photoshop” technology to “burn in” a picture of the sun in its place, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on magazine covers throughout the world. Readers of this blog see it every time they open a new post. If the late David Mofensen’s dream of having Project Diana commemorated on a postage stamp is ever fulfilled (which can’t happen before 2046 because - I know, I checked - the US Postal Service will only issue such stamps in multiples of fifty years after the event), surely the Diana Bedspring will be the featured image.

* * * * *

So where is the Diana Bedspring? Perhaps it was scrapped in the mid-1950s, when the Army removed its old radar units from the site to make way for a parabolic dish antenna, a design already in widespread use by most US search radar at the end of the War. Or perhaps it was finally destroyed in the early 1990s, when the Army began to demolish the historic site in response to a Department of Defense decision to close many military bases including Camp Evans - until Fred Carl, now Director of the InfoAge Science History Center, almost literally threw his body in the path of the wrecking ball. Or perhaps it is still being stored in pieces in some forgotten location, awaiting reassembly. In any event, it is, in the wistful words of an InfoAge volunteer, “no longer available.”

The replacement antenna was a 50-foot dish created by the Signal Corps, using the frame of a captured Nazi Wurzburg Reise radar, to serve as our first satellite tracking antenna. In honor of its predecessor, it was dubbed the “Diana Dish.” In 1957, when the Soviets stole a march on the US by launching their Sputnik satellite, the Diana Dish was joined by a companion 60-foot dish named the “Space Sentry.” In 1960, control of space research was transferred to a new civilian agency, NASA, which continued the weather observation research already underway at the Diana site and proudly broadcast the first televised images of cloud movements from space.

The Diana Dish has joined the Diana Bedspring in the dustbin of history, but the Space Sentry was gifted by the Army to InfoAge, which has refurbished it for scientific and educational purposes as part of a larger effort to restore and preserve the Diana site. On January 10, 2015, a local amateur radio club celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Project Diana experiment by using the Space Sentry to make a series of Earth-Moon-Earth contacts.

The Space Sentry, just a few hundred feet from where the Diana Bedspring once stood.

* * * * *

Although the development of communications satellites has obsolesced moon bounce as a national security tool, Earth-Moon-Earth or EME has become quite popular among amateur radio operators. The object of modern EME, unlike Project Diana but like successor projects such as PAMOR, is a two-way exchange of information, in which a signal is sent from one station to another by ricocheting it off the moon; overcoming the challenges of weak signal communication is part of the fun and represents a test of skill. EME is the longest path between any two stations on earth.

To accomplish this feat, EME enthusiasts need to erect antennas that by amateur radio standards are often large enough to jangle the nerves of Property Owners’ Associations and perhaps violate the aesthetic sensibilities of their XYLs (ham-speak for ”ex young ladies” - that is, ahem, their wives). By Project Diana standards, however, most modern EME antennas are mere minikins and some are even portable.

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THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

12/7/2017

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Pearl Harbor, whose 76th anniversary we observe today, marked the end of American isolationism - not just as a political ideology but also as the comfortable assumption that its location beyond two oceans could somehow protect the US from the rest of the world. Pearl Harbor, and the declarations of war by Hitler and Mussolini that followed shortly thereafter, thrust the US into the role of defender of liberty and democracy and leader of what later came to be called the “Free World.”

After the War ended with the Axis powers soundly defeated, the temporary alliance between the Western bloc, led by the US, and the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, became unraveled by their profound social, economic, and political differences. The result was a Cold War between these two superpowers that lasted for over forty years, sustained by the belief on both sides that only the buildup of arsenals capable of “mutually assured destruction” could keep either side from demolishing the other. It was also characterized by the development of spy technology far more advanced than anything that preceded it - technology that, to remain effective, demanded almost epic levels of secrecy by those in the know.

* * * * *

I have elsewhere referred to Project Diana as the opening salvo in the Cold War, but only recently have I come to appreciate the full truth of this statement. Although much has been made of Jack DeWitt's almost obsessive fascination with the idea of bouncing radar off the moon, it is well to remember that his actual assignment from the Pentagon was to study ways to detect and track Soviet rockets that might, drawing on expertise captured from the Germans, it was feared, be capable of reaching the US. DeWitt argued, with some justice, that since there were no such rockets currently available for testing, hitting the moon would equally well confirm that radar could penetrate the ionosphere.

Not long ago a reader kindly referred me to a recently declassified document, originally published in 1967, in which the author, Frank Eliot, asserts that the “entirely new technique” emerging directly from Project Diana - that is, using the moon to receive and reflect radio signals - offered a possible solution to the thorny problem of how to intercept Russian radar signals in an era when flights over the Soviet Union were prohibited. Although Project Diana involved monostatic transmission - that is, sending and receiving signals in the same location - a Naval Research Laboratory engineer named James Trexler figured out as early as 1948 that signals emanating from one location (e.g., in Russia) could potentially be detected via bistatic transmission to other locations (e.g., in the US) if they happened to bounce off the moon.

Thus was born the highly classified PAssive MOon Relay or PAMOR, code-named "Joe." Initial tests proved so promising that the project was intensified, at even deeper levels of secrecy. As one wag put it, “Leave it to the US Navy to weaponize the moon.”

Moon bounce via bistatic transmission. (Courtesy of Roger Shultz)

The Russians, of course, weren’t bouncing signals off the moon for the benefit of their Cold War adversaries. Indeed, most of their signals simply escaped the atmosphere and disappeared into outer space. Detecting those that did serendipitously hit the moon could only be done at certain times of day, in certain locations on earth where both the sending and receiving elements could “see” the moon at the same time; nor could the lunar terrain be too “rough” for clear reflection of signals. Antennas had to be at least 150 ft in diameter and preferably larger, and only a few were available for that purpose (e.g., those at the Grand Bahama tracking station, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Chesapeake Bay Annex, Stanford University, and Sugar Grove, West Virginia).

There were more ways for this effort to fail than to succeed, but the military got lucky - not only in having favorable antenna locations and encountering favorable lunar conditions, but also, in the case of the “Hen House”, a major anti-ballistic missile operation deep within the Soviet Union, in being able to take advantage of occasional brief practice sessions during which the Russians actually set their radar to track the moon. In the end, PAMOR proved to be an intelligence coup, continuing to yield information until the late sixties, when it was obsolesced by communications satellites.

PAMOR's success led the Naval Research Laboratory, in the mid 1950s, to commission an ambitious spinoff code-named Operation Moon Bounce, a series of experiments to test the feasibility of using the moon as a natural communications satellite. These tests were so effective in refining moonbounce technology that Operation Moon Bounce was used for several years to link Hawaii with Washington DC. Like PAMOR, Operation Moon Bounce was superseded in the late 1960s by networks of communications satellites - networks whose design profited from the experience gained during the Moon Bounce tests.

Moonbounce communication, generally referred to as Earth-Moon-Earth or EME, is now largely the province of amateur radio enthusiasts, who continue to reap the benefits of Operation Moon Bounce and ultimately of Project Diana.

* * * * *

As anyone who follows this blog regularly must be aware, the Army's reluctance to publicize Project Diana has long puzzled me. Based more on my own inferences from my father’s comments than on anything he actually said, I have generally interpreted it as retribution for Jack DeWitt's lack of complete candor about what he was doing, forcing the Army to play catch-up after the fact.

Still, this explanation has never entirely satisfied me. Why (per an earlier post) should those who left the Signal Corps (that is to say, those over whom the Army no longer maintained control) be selectively denied media attention? Why should my father, even decades later, have trouble gaining access to his own earlier work? Even granting that DeWitt was an ask-for-forgiveness-not-for-permission kind of guy working in an organization that prized discipline, it all seemed - well, a bit of an overreaction on the Army’s part.

The recently declassified article by Eliot has given me a somewhat different perspective on this issue. In short, it suggests that the Army discouraged media attention less because of what the Project Diana team did wrong and more because of what it did right.

The success of PAMOR clearly depended on the Soviets' remaining unaware that their emissions were being monitored, a consideration that makes the Army’s wish to control information that might provide clues about the extent of its capabilities more understandable. Likewise, severely restricting access to information about PAMOR and its debt to Project Diana based strictly on need-to-know provides a more plausible explanation for classifying it above my father’s level of security clearance than an arbitrary determination to curtail access to his own work, even though it did in fact have this (presumably unintended) consequence.

Did my father know about PAMOR? He obviously wouldn’t have told me if he did, but given that documents such as the Eliot article weren’t declassified until 2014, I tend to doubt it. Had he known, he might have been more philosophical about the modest notice given by the Army to Project Diana’s milestone anniversaries.

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Defeating the "divine wind"

2/25/2017

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In 1274 AD and again seven years later, Mongol fleets led by Kublai Khan launched major attacks on Japan. On both occasions, according to legend, massive typhoons destroyed the vessels and foiled the invasions. The Japanese believed these storms had been sent by the gods to protect them from conquest and called them the “divine wind.”

Or in Japanese, “kamikaze.”

In the waning days of World War II, when Japan’s defeat was all but inevitable but surrender was unacceptable, Emperor Hirohito “asked” Japanese pilots to become kamikazes, divine winds once again defending the homeland by deliberately crashing into Allied warships. Preference for death over defeat or capture was deeply embedded in the Japanese military culture, as was the tradition of absolute loyalty to the Emperor, the gods' representative on earth. The number of volunteers exceeded available aircraft, and extra men were sometimes sent to accompany the official pilot, perhaps to provide moral support.

Some kamikaze aircraft were fashioned from existing planes, others were purpose-built - most notoriously the MXY-7 "Ohka", which was actually designed to kill its pilot. (Although the Americans sometimes dismissed these pilot-guided missiles as “baka” bombs - a Japanese pejorative roughly meaning “stupid” - it would probably be more accurate to describe them as the original “smart bombs.”) The first kamikaze mission struck in late October of 1944. In the end, nearly 4,000 kamikaze pilots died and more than 300 managed to hit a ship. Reportedly, more than 70 US vessels - aircraft carriers were a favored target - were sunk or damaged beyond repair.

USS Bunker Hill was hit by kamikazes piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa (photo above) and Lieutenant Junior Grade Seizō Yasunori on 11 May 1945. 389 personnel were killed or missing and 264 wounded from a crew of 2,600.By U.S. Navy; The original uploader was Quercusrobur at English Wikipedia.

Most soldiers go into battle understanding they may be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice. As we know from even more recent history, however, deliberate suicide attacks present special challenges since no exit plan is required. Kamikaze pilots were instructed to fly low over the water and to keep the mountains at their backs. This enabled them to evade Allied radar, which aimed its beams away from the ground to avoid signals from non-moving objects at a fixed distance from the antenna - producing "clutter" on the display that made detection of moving targets more difficult. Essentially, the Japanese military had found a radar blind spot they could exploit, for example, through suicide missions that could remain "under the radar" until they self-destructed.

Urgent appeals were made to the radar laboratories of the Army, the Navy, Bell Laboratories, and MIT to find a way to eliminate the blind spot. At the time, my father was head of the Special Developments Group, which had produced many radar improvements including the Army's first operational moving target radar. Based on his earlier work on the Army radar series, the SCR 270/271, which had successfully detected Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor in 1941 (information that was unfortunately discounted by the commanding officer on duty), he was assigned to lead a team of experts in responding to the call for improved detection of moving targets low on the horizon by filtering out background clutter.

To accomplish this goal, within the context of very limited time and budget, the team made major modifications to the SCR-270 to stabilize emissions and improve detection of small frequency shifts (Doppler modulation effects). The large return signals produced by stationary objects (i.e., background clutter) were then processed using small time constants, resulting in rapid decay on the radar screen, while the smaller Doppler-modulation signals were processed using longer time constants to obtain greater persistence of the moving target on the screen, producing a distinctive "writhing" pattern that could be readily perceived by the human eye.

These modifications were carried out onsite by available government personnel - no time to job it out! - and then field-tested both in a mountainous region near Ellenville, NY and on Navy landing craft. The updated equipment performed beautifully. Gone was the blind spot; kamikaze pilots could no longer fly under the radar.

Less than a year later, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima; on August 9, another was dropped on Nagasaki. The calculus that went into this decision - the number of Allied lives presumably saved by ending the War sooner rather than later, and whether the same goal might have been achieved without targeting large civilian populations - will undoubtedly be debated as long as it is remembered. In any event, the Japanese surrender was announced less than a week later, and the official documents were signed on September 2, 1945. For many historians, however, the verdict remains that although the A-bomb may have ended the War, it was radar that won the War.

My father later wrote that this "earlier work on moving target detection had prepared us well for [Project Diana]." And indeed, the approach he and his team brought to the task of making kamikaze flights visible - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test - foreshadowed his approach to bouncing radar waves off a very large target moving through space and, in little, to household repairs, where clever jury-rigging was elevated to a fine art.

My Dad, E. King Stodola, at around the time of the work described in this essay.

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JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

12/31/2016

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In the spirit of tidying up 2016’s loose ends in time for the New Year, I have a couple of follow-ups to earlier posts based on reader responses. Rather than updating old entries and expecting my long-suffering readers to go back and dredge them up, I decided to do a free-standing post elaborating on a couple of interesting bits of mid-20th century Americana.

* * * * * * * * * *

First, in the essay entitled “Out and About on the Jersey Shore,” dated May 3, 2016, I stated “Our friends the Evers had [a car with a rumble seat, a padded bench where the trunk should have been], and we all vied to be one of the two lucky ducks (three, if we wheedled persuasively enough) who got to ride there…. (The Evers family also had a Willy’s Jeep. They had all the good cars!)”

(Courtesy of the Evers family)

When I recently asked Helen and Bill Evers for some photos of their mother for my essay on Pearl Harbor, Helen sent several of their childhood family, including a couple of pictures of the cars I had mentioned in the May 3 post. This one is almost certainly the car with the rumble seat, though that particular feature is hidden by the Evers paterfamilias, Jim.

The other car photo she sent was of the Willy's jeep! Just seeing that iconic car and those two adorable little kids brought a smile to my face.

Bill and Barbara Evers, shown with their family's Willy's Jeep in 1949. (Courtesy of the Evers family)

We Americans loved our Willy’s Jeeps. Brainchild of the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, the Willy’s Jeep Station Wagon first rolled off the assembly line in 1946, just in time to join American families in their wholesale move to the suburbs. I was pleased to confirm my childhood memory: Despite its appearance, it was actually a faux woody made of painted steel, a design that was both safer and better-suited to mass-production than contemporary wood-bodied passenger wagons. Production continued in the US until 1965, when the Jeep Wagoneer supplanted it in our fickle affections. Production continued in Brazil and Argentina for several more years.

Thanks, Helen and Bill, for your generosity in sharing these wonderful old family photos. (I always have a hard time using the term "vintage" about photos of my own contemporaries!)

* * * * * * * * * *

Second, my daughter Julie, upon reading my most recent entry, “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” dated December 25, 2016, asked me if my mother’s legs were really bare in the home movie clip of her sledding down the driveway with me. “Those weren't white wool stockings?” The same comment could equally well be applied to the women’s legs in the photo of the riverside bonfire.

A little clarification is in order. No, I don't remember my mother's ever owning or wearing white wool stockings. But I probably shouldn’t have used the term “bare-legged” (even though to my way of thinking it’s a distinction without a difference) because she was almost certainly wearing nylon stockings - and therein lies a story.

Nylon was developed in the 1930s in the lab of Wallace Carothers, a polymer scientist with Dupont, and patented in 1938. Although Dupont’s vision for their invention - the world’s first fully synthetic fiber - extended far beyond hosiery, they cannily decided to start by offering women an affordable and less delicate alternative to silk stockings. The new product was introduced with much hoopla at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and went on sale to the general public in May of 1940. Four million pairs were sold on the first day alone. Nylon became a household word and “nylons” a synonym for stockings. They were more than just an article of women’s underwear, they offered hope that modern technology would lift a Depression-weary nation into prosperity once again.

Barely had nylons become one of life’s necessities for the American woman when they were snatched away. In December of 1941 the US entered World War II, and all nylon was diverted to the War effort, used for everything from parachutes to rope to aircraft fuel tanks. The only stockings to be had were bought either before the War or on the black market. To give the illusion they were wearing proper nylons, women painted “seams” down the backs of their legs (probably straighter than it was ever possible to get the real thing!). When stockings were reintroduced after the War, consumer demand outstripped supply, leading to mile-long queues and even “nylon riots,” with women getting into fist fights with one another in the heat of competition. Fortunately Dupont soon rose to the occasion and ramped up production of the coveted garment.

Late in the 1940s seamless nylons became available, but surprisingly they never entirely caught on. (For some, apparently the seams were part of the mystique.) Nylons, with or without seams, along with the garter belts that held them up, remained women’s wardrobe mainstays until the introduction of pantyhose in 1959 - ushering in a trend towards higher hemlines and ultimately the micro-miniskirts that shocked us all a few years later. But that is another story.

I should add that little girls did not wear nylons until they reached their teens or at least their tween years. In the firehouse Christmas party photo, the girls truly were bare-legged, though we usually wore leggings when we went outside during the winter. By leggings I don’t mean either the modified tights that are now called leggings or the leg-warmers worn by dancers and dancer wannabes, I’m talking about thick wooly pants held up with suspenders that were companion garments to winter coats. These leggings were only worn outside, so we put them on and took them off again multiple times per day - going to and from school, for recess, at lunchtime, etc. Synthetics had not yet revolutionized cold-weather gear, at least not for civilians, and we spent much of our outdoor recreation time looking and feeling like the Pillsbury Doughboy - unlike our moms, who simply had to grin and bear it.

Thanks, Julie, for asking a good question and for caring about how cold your grandmother must have been!

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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.

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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NOT THE FIRST?

3/28/2016

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Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, once made a wry observation about the stages through with a new idea or discovery passes before it eventually becomes an accepted truth: “First it is said that ‘It can’t be true’; then ‘If true, it is not very important’; and finally, 'We knew it all along’.”

Case in point: Project Diana.

Stage 1: It can’t be true.

The successful moon shot was made on January 10, 1946 but wasn’t announced to the world until January 25. Of course in those days events weren’t tweeted and retweeted at warp speed almost before they are finished happening, but still, why the 15-day delay? At least part of the explanation was offered by my father when I interviewed him in 1979, describing the immediate aftermath of the event:

“And to make a long story short, the thing came off successfully. Then we let our bosses know what was going on - and they didn't believe it! They didn't believe we'd really done it. So they called in a number of outside experts…. One of them was a fellow named Waldemar Kaempffert, who was then Science Editor of the New York Times. He was a pompous fellow. He came down and we talked with him and very quickly convinced him that we were really getting echoes from the moon. And then another man that I also kept quite friendly with, Donald Fink - he was then Editor of Electronics…. - [he] came down, and he was smart, he knew right away that there was no question about what we were doing.”

Verification that echoes had actually been received from the moon: King Stodola (back to camera) reads a description of the Doppler calculations to Harold Webb, Herbert Kauffman, and Jack Mofenson, with Donald Fink and George Valley looking on.

Stage 2: If true, it is not very important.

After the news was announced, Dr. Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard College Observatory, was asked by a reporter to provide expert commentary. Dr. Shapley termed the feat "an interesting tool in exploring the solar system" but added that astronomers were working on other wartime discoveries that he predicted would be "far more startling than the radar contact when they were announced.”

Unsubstantiated intimations of unspecified breakthroughs as yet unrevealed - thank you for that, Dr. Shapley.

Stage 3: We knew it all along.

Of course, no feat like Project Diana ever occurs in a vacuum. The War had spurred radar research in labs all over the world, on both sides of the conflict, and several other teams were poised to carry out a similar demonstration. Indeed, the great Hungarian scientist Zoltan Bay succeeded in his own attempt to bounce radar waves off the moon less than a month after Project Diana using quite a different approach, an accomplishment for which he richly deserves recognition and respect. It is an injustice to imply, however, as do some historians, that it was a colossal stroke of bad luck that Bay didn’t get there first, completely discounting the thousands of hours of work that went into making Project Diana a success - not to mention the fact that the driving force of this effort was Jack Dewitt’s “lunar love affair,” as someone put it, dating back to the 1930s. Project Diana was hardly a fluke!

Another team that “should” have gotten there first (but didn’t) was the MIT Rad Lab - forcing Robert Buderi in his book The Invention that Changed the World, about radar but mostly about the Rad Lab, to make a 3-page detour on what he called this “Army coup” - because clearly no history of radar would be complete without Project Diana. (Buderi - who I hasten to add has been very generous in directing me to information and allowing me to quote from his book - has provided my family with an endless source of amusement by referring to my father in his account as “the diminutive, bespectacled E. King Stodola.”)

In the snarkiest twist of all, a comment was posted on the InfoAge Camp Evans website stating, “In fact, the Diana project was not first. Germans detected Moon radar echo in 1943 when developing the Mammut long-range radar, at ~600 MHz. They had to keep it secret, and only in ~1950 the engineer who saw Moon echo, earned his Dipl.Ing. degree for his work.”

A German engineer and not the Project Diana team deserves the credit for being the first to bounce radar waves off the moon? Really?

A different perspective on this earlier moon contact is offered by Magnus Lindgren in his Master’s Thesis submitted in 2010 to the Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden, in which he notes that “operators of a German experimental radar succeeded in hearing their own lunar echoes in January 1944, by pure chance.”

There is a big difference, as Lindgren goes on to point out, between accidentally hitting the moon because it happened to get in the way when you were really trying to do something else vs making a "deliberate" (Lindgren's word), carefully planned effort to hit the moon based on antenna design and location, elaborate calculations of the moon’s location, etc, thus “determining with certainty that radio waves could penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere. This discovery,” Lindgren continues, “was a prerequisite for all space related communication projects to come, thus marking the beginning of the space age.”

Primacy is a funny thing. A lot of scientists have failed to achieve it because they asked the wrong question, or because they asked the right question at the wrong time and the technology was not there to support it, or because the vision needed to keep their objective in focus was lacking. Yes, there is always an element of luck involved, but planning, timing, and a perfect match between the goal and the resources available to achieve it are also required.

On January 10, 1946, all these criteria were met. The Project Diana team aimed their radar at the moon, hit it, and recorded the echo back on earth a little over two seconds later. Then they did it again, and again. They were the first to do this. Ever. End of story.

**************************

The Stodola family, 1945: Elsa holding Leslie, King holding Cindy

"[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."
Patricia Lewis McManus, Elsa's niece

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"A PLACE WHERE AFRICAN AMERICANS COULD DO GREAT THINGS"

2/7/2016

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Early on, someone at the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth was smart enough to recognize that African Americans represented an enormous untapped talent pool, and the post came to be known in the 1940s and 1950s as the Black Brain Center of the U.S. While it would be naive to romanticize Fort Monmouth as a utopia of nondiscrimination, it was known as a place where African Americans had an unusual opportunity to become not just janitors or technicians but scientists working at the highest level. As one high official later remarked, it was "a place where, twenty years before the civil rights movement, African Americans could do great things."

In recognition of African American History Month, I thought I'd say a few words about two Camp Evans scientists who did great things and who, in different ways, touched my life as a child of Project Diana.

The first is Walter Samuel McAfee (1914-1995), mathematician and theoretical physicist. After graduating from Ohio State University, he began his career in 1939 as a junior high school physics teacher in Columbus, OH. Then, in 1942, he was recruited to fill an opening for a civilian physicist at the Army Signal Corps. He quit his teaching job with some trepidation, because contrary to usual practice, the application form had not required a photograph and he wasn't sure what would happen when his new employers discovered he was African American. What a relief to find other desks already occupied by African Americans when he arrived.

When work on Project Diana began, McAfee was charged by DeWitt and his team with predicting the moon's position at a given moment in time by calculating its speed relative to that of the earth. Anyone who remembers word problems from high school math can relate to the issue: If a small heavenly body (let's call it the moon) is traveling in a certain direction at a certain speed, and you are positioned on a much larger heavenly body (let's call it the earth) moving in a different direction at a different speed, where do you aim your radar beam if you want to hit the moon a second or so later? Though the problem is conceptually straightforward, the mathematics are far from simple (especially remembering that said moon is traveling not in a straight line but in orbit around said earth) and in fact had foiled a previous moon bounce attempt by DeWitt in 1940. McAfee was the one who carried out this elegant work and provided the computations crucial to Project Diana's ultimate success. He was the only scientist outside the core engineering team singled out for particular acknowledgment by DeWitt and Stodola, in their 1949 report on Project Diana, citing his role in resolving "echoing-area problems." McAfee stayed at Camp Evans for the remainder of his career - 42 years - and in 2015 was posthumously inducted into U.S. Army Materiel Command's Hall of Fame, the first African American to be so honored.

Love this charming photo of Walter McAfee and my Dad, both in their late 60s, reminiscing about the Diana days on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the moon shot in 1981.

The second scientist I wish to highlight is William Benjamin Gould III (1902-1983). Although Bill was not part of Project Diana, he and my father were both radar engineers with a shared passion for amateur radio. Because of their close relationship, I spent many happy hours playing at the Gould home with his daughter Dorothy, whom I sort of shero-worshiped because she was smart, pretty, and a little older than I was. So when I started researching Walter McAfee, whom I don't actually remember meeting (being only a toddler at the time of the moonshot), it occurred to me to wonder about the Goulds. We left NJ when I was 13, but my father remained in touch with Bill and Leah and continued to boast about Bill's accomplishments till the end of his life, even after he could no longer remember that Bill had died a few years earlier and, much to my stepmother's frustration, persisted in speaking of him in the present tense.

A little research confirmed that Bill indeed had an illustrious career. Half a generation older than McAfee and my father, he had already held a variety of high-profile positions by the time he arrived at Camp Evans - working as Engineer with radio station WTAG in Worcester, MA, serving as a Navy Radioman aboard the coastal steamer SS Edith, and setting up radio communications for the Metropolitan District Police in Boston. The following excerpt from his obituary gives a good sense for the scope of his career at the Signal Corps Labs: "Coming to Fort Monmouth in 1940, he was responsible for the installation and operation of early warning radar systems on the West Coast of the U.S. During the 1950s, Mr. Gould directed research-involving instrumentation of long-range guided missiles at Cape Canaveral. Before his retirement in 1969 he was a section chief in the Electronic Warfare Laboratory, directing research and development involving the application of radio and radar for meteorological purposes. During his 29-year career he contributed to the development of radar equipment from the old spark gap transmitter to the vacuum tube and the modern solid state devices."

An interesting sidelight: In 1958, Bill came across the diary of his grandfather William B. Gould in the attic of his family's home in Dedham, MA. The first William B. Gould had escaped from slavery and subsequently fought in the Civil War, and although the pages of the old diary were crumbling in his fingers, Bill recognized its importance and managed to rescue it from oblivion. After his death in 1983, Leah Gould gave the document to their son Bill IV, who himself has had a distinguished career as professor of law at Stanford University. Bill IV introduced and annotated the diary, which in 2002 was published under the title of Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor and dedicated to the memory of his father, "the greatest man that I ever knew."

I'm happy to have had the privilege not only of celebrating the groundbreaking work of Walter S. McAfee, but also of tracking down William B. Gould III, whose life and work lend quiet support to the proposition that excellence, given even a little encouragement, will out.

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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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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

"GOOD MORNING, MOON"

edwin howard armstrong: DIANA's godfather

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

THE MOON ENTERS THE COLD WAR

Defeating the "divine wind"

JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

A HABIT OF SECRECY

ON THE MARCONI TRAIL: A TALE OF THREE PILGRIMAGES

NOT THE FIRST?

"A PLACE WHERE AFRICAN AMERICANS COULD DO GREAT THINGS"

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)