ARMSTRONG'S INVOLVEMENT IN PROJECT DIANA
That the narrow-band receiver built by Edwin Howard Armstrong was crucial to the success of Project Diana is not in dIspute. Although military censorship prevented a full explanation of the details, according to Jack DeWitt the receiver was a thousand times more sensitive than anything in current use. So DeWitt, who attributed the failure of his own early moonshot effort to lack of receiver sensitivity, undoubtedly welcomed any contribution Armstrong might care to make.
History is surprisingly coy, however, about the nature and extent of Armstrong's involvement with Project Diana. We know he maintained a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at his own lab in Alpine, New Jersey, just a couple of hours from Belmar even without benefit of the not-yet-built Garden State Parkway. (The SCR-271 radar tower, minus the actual antenna, remains on the site.) But did he ever actually make that journey? Did he ever roll up his sleeves and work directly alongside DeWitt and his team?
One of Armstrong's employees in the Alpine lab at the time, Renville McMann, later stated that the staff was strictly forbidden from pointing their radar at the moon, in order to avoid any possibility, however remote, of "scooping" the Army--suggesting that Armstrong might have adopted a policy of deliberately keeping Project Diana at arm's length to avoid deflecting credit from their work.
On the other hand, Armstrong already had a close working relationship with the Chief Scientist on the Project Diana team, King Stodola, dating back to several years before Project Diana. As Stodola explained in an oral history interview conducted in 1979, he had been employed by Radio Engineering Laboratories, a small company in Long Island City, Queens, NY that manufactured radio transmitters, from 1936 to 1939. It was his first real engineering job; and because he had more formal training in engineering than the other employees, he was often assigned the most challenging jobs. One of these was building equipment for Armstrong, including collaborating with him on redesigning transmitters that could no longer be made by REL under the Armstrong patents following the unexpected loss of a patent dispute with Lee De Forest over an essential component, the vacuum tube oscillator.
Later on in the interview, Stodola told an amusing story about another interaction with Armstrong: "When the time came to open his first commercial frequency modulation broadcasting station up in Alpine, New Jersey, they had to have somebody who had a proper license to be the operator for the first day's operation, and I was it. And so I went up there and went through the formalities of signing the log. I really didn't do much, he did everything as far as running it was concerned. But I gave it the legal requirement, and he paid me a handsome $25 for my work. And I tell you, I wish I'd kept the check instead of cashing it, because it would be a souvenir I would value very highly."
Stodola's daughter, who conducted the interview, believes these remarks strongly support the likelihood of ongoing hands-on interactions with the Project Diana team, stating that "Anyone who knew my father is aware that he was a very sociable guy and extremely retentive about his relationships. So it seems likely that he brokered DeWitt's initial choice of Armstrong's equipment for the project, and it is impossible to imagine that he wouldn't have persuaded Armstrong to spend time in Belmar meeting directly with the members of the team. My father was a very persuasive man."
History is surprisingly coy, however, about the nature and extent of Armstrong's involvement with Project Diana. We know he maintained a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at his own lab in Alpine, New Jersey, just a couple of hours from Belmar even without benefit of the not-yet-built Garden State Parkway. (The SCR-271 radar tower, minus the actual antenna, remains on the site.) But did he ever actually make that journey? Did he ever roll up his sleeves and work directly alongside DeWitt and his team?
One of Armstrong's employees in the Alpine lab at the time, Renville McMann, later stated that the staff was strictly forbidden from pointing their radar at the moon, in order to avoid any possibility, however remote, of "scooping" the Army--suggesting that Armstrong might have adopted a policy of deliberately keeping Project Diana at arm's length to avoid deflecting credit from their work.
On the other hand, Armstrong already had a close working relationship with the Chief Scientist on the Project Diana team, King Stodola, dating back to several years before Project Diana. As Stodola explained in an oral history interview conducted in 1979, he had been employed by Radio Engineering Laboratories, a small company in Long Island City, Queens, NY that manufactured radio transmitters, from 1936 to 1939. It was his first real engineering job; and because he had more formal training in engineering than the other employees, he was often assigned the most challenging jobs. One of these was building equipment for Armstrong, including collaborating with him on redesigning transmitters that could no longer be made by REL under the Armstrong patents following the unexpected loss of a patent dispute with Lee De Forest over an essential component, the vacuum tube oscillator.
Later on in the interview, Stodola told an amusing story about another interaction with Armstrong: "When the time came to open his first commercial frequency modulation broadcasting station up in Alpine, New Jersey, they had to have somebody who had a proper license to be the operator for the first day's operation, and I was it. And so I went up there and went through the formalities of signing the log. I really didn't do much, he did everything as far as running it was concerned. But I gave it the legal requirement, and he paid me a handsome $25 for my work. And I tell you, I wish I'd kept the check instead of cashing it, because it would be a souvenir I would value very highly."
Stodola's daughter, who conducted the interview, believes these remarks strongly support the likelihood of ongoing hands-on interactions with the Project Diana team, stating that "Anyone who knew my father is aware that he was a very sociable guy and extremely retentive about his relationships. So it seems likely that he brokered DeWitt's initial choice of Armstrong's equipment for the project, and it is impossible to imagine that he wouldn't have persuaded Armstrong to spend time in Belmar meeting directly with the members of the team. My father was a very persuasive man."