On Saturday, August 26, 2017, my father was posthumously inducted into the “Wall of Honor” at the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, site of the former Camp Evans, for his contributions to long-range radar development during World War II and his leadership role in Project Diana, the first successful attempt to bounce radar waves off the moon.
Among the crowd gathered at InfoAge for the banquet and awards ceremony were my three siblings, my husband, my sister-in-law, and my niece and her family (including my grand-nephew, the youngest and cutest attendee). My brother gave a brief speech accepting the honor on behalf of the family and acknowledging the beautiful plaque to be mounted on the Wall along with Marconi and other Camp Evans notables. It was a moving experience that left much of the audience in tears.
My father would have felt not only deeply honored, but also, in a sense, vindicated. The Army, embarrassed by being caught somewhat off guard by the feat and by early wild press speculations on the significance of the Project Diana experiment (radio control of “space ships”! mapping the surface of the moon! verifying Einstein’s light deflection theory!), adopted a deliberate policy of curtailing further publicity on Project Diana. This meant not only keeping the press at bay but also limiting what publicity it permitted to only those men who remained in its employ, effectively excluding four of the five engineers who formed the core Project Diana team. Jack DeWitt, King Stodola, Jack Mofensen, and Harold Webb had all moved to private industry shortly afterwards, in part to continue pursuing their research careers, since the Army was now jobbing out much of the research that had originally attracted them to Camp Evans.
Although my father never wavered in his gratitude to the Army, the gray-out of Project Diana, which he regarded as the signal scientific achievement of his life, always rankled. As he observed with just a faint hint of pique, “If we had been less vigorous, Dr. Zoltan Bay and his colleagues in Hungary would have been ‘First’ about a month later.” He spent his last few years lobbying first for a full-scale forty-year commemoration and then, when that failed to materialize, for an even more lavish celebration of the fifty-year anniversary. Had he lived he would have seen his optimism dashed once again.
Now, after more than seventy years, the tide has turned, along with a growing realization that this story belongs not just to the Army but to the world. It has great visuals and a compelling narrative. Moreover, history has caught up with this achievement, and many of the preposterous predictions that once made the Army brass cringe have actually come to pass. (See my essay “In Celebration of Diana Day,” posted to this blog on January 10, 2017.) Cell phones and global positioning systems have highlighted the importance of satellite communications. The popularity of Earth-Moon-Earth communication has increased recognition of Project Diana as the locus classicus for this technology. NASA, with its genius for popularizing space age technology and its general focus on peaceful applications of space exploration, has now become an important resource for information on Project Diana. Neil DeGrasse Tyson featured a contemporary newsreel clip in Episode 11 of Cosmos.
Although my father never wavered in his gratitude to the Army, the gray-out of Project Diana, which he regarded as the signal scientific achievement of his life, always rankled. As he observed with just a faint hint of pique, “If we had been less vigorous, Dr. Zoltan Bay and his colleagues in Hungary would have been ‘First’ about a month later.” He spent his last few years lobbying first for a full-scale forty-year commemoration and then, when that failed to materialize, for an even more lavish celebration of the fifty-year anniversary. Had he lived he would have seen his optimism dashed once again.
Now, after more than seventy years, the tide has turned, along with a growing realization that this story belongs not just to the Army but to the world. It has great visuals and a compelling narrative. Moreover, history has caught up with this achievement, and many of the preposterous predictions that once made the Army brass cringe have actually come to pass. (See my essay “In Celebration of Diana Day,” posted to this blog on January 10, 2017.) Cell phones and global positioning systems have highlighted the importance of satellite communications. The popularity of Earth-Moon-Earth communication has increased recognition of Project Diana as the locus classicus for this technology. NASA, with its genius for popularizing space age technology and its general focus on peaceful applications of space exploration, has now become an important resource for information on Project Diana. Neil DeGrasse Tyson featured a contemporary newsreel clip in Episode 11 of Cosmos.
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Part of what was truly remarkable about this event, at least for me, was the venue itself. My father was actually being honored not only in his own country but in the very same World War II radar laboratory buildings where his seminal work was carried out.
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As I think I’ve mentioned before, the outside of these buildings was a very familiar part of the iconography of my childhood. On days when my mother anticipated needing the family car to run errands, she drove my father to work in the morning and picked him up again after work, my sister and me in tow. The evening ritual was always the same: We parked and waited, watching for a slight black-haired man in a lumpy overcoat and fedora to emerge and take over the wheel. Never once did any of us go in, even my mother. At the time I’m sure I thought (correctly) that she didn’t want to leave her little daughters alone in the car, but in retrospect it also seems probable that these buildings contained top secret materiel not meant for prying eyes and that no outsider, even a wife, was welcome.
Now, here we were inside - dining, sipping wine, and accepting accolades for his achievements.
All the credit for this unlikely scenario, and at least some of the credit for the current revival of interest in Project Diana, goes to the InfoAge Science History Learning Center and its tireless efforts to preserve the long and checkered past of the Camp Evans site. Just how unlikely? In 1993, with the end of the Cold War, the Department of Defense had decided to close many of its military bases, and Camp Evans was on the hit list. But for the remarkable vision of one man, a local history buff and preservationist named Fred Carl, the entire Camp Evans campus with all its rich heritage would have been bulldozed into oblivion. So - very unlikely indeed.
I was originally planning to recount the InfoAge story here but the more I wrote, the more I realized I had veered into a different narrative, one with a different hero, one worthy of consideration in its own right. Accordingly, I will turn my attention to InfoAge in a future post.
Now, here we were inside - dining, sipping wine, and accepting accolades for his achievements.
All the credit for this unlikely scenario, and at least some of the credit for the current revival of interest in Project Diana, goes to the InfoAge Science History Learning Center and its tireless efforts to preserve the long and checkered past of the Camp Evans site. Just how unlikely? In 1993, with the end of the Cold War, the Department of Defense had decided to close many of its military bases, and Camp Evans was on the hit list. But for the remarkable vision of one man, a local history buff and preservationist named Fred Carl, the entire Camp Evans campus with all its rich heritage would have been bulldozed into oblivion. So - very unlikely indeed.
I was originally planning to recount the InfoAge story here but the more I wrote, the more I realized I had veered into a different narrative, one with a different hero, one worthy of consideration in its own right. Accordingly, I will turn my attention to InfoAge in a future post.
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