The following is a transcription of King's description of his work at Camp Evans and Project Diana, from an Oral History interview conducted by his daughter, Cindy Stodola Pomerleau, on October 2-4, 1979. As the excerpt opens, he has just finished talking about his first job with the Signal Corps in Washington, DC, which he didn't find very interesting.
King: After about two years in this Washington job, in which I had advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000 a year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600 a year, I decided that I wanted to advance - well, not so much advance, I really wanted to get out of this administrative thing I was in. During that period, I had taken a couple of courses at George Washington University, one of which was on electronics, which was taught by Harry Dimond. We struck it off quite well, and I did okay in the course and learned a lot about practical electronics in it. So I talked to Mr. Dimond about the possibility of a job with the Bureau of Standards, and eventually they offered me a job at the same grade as the job I had at the Signal Corps but was in research-type work. So I went to my bosses and told them what I wanted to do, and I guess the Chief Signal Officer called me in and talked to me about it - that was going up pretty high for my lowly status - but anyway, he said, "If you want to get into another kind of work, why don't you stay with the Signal Corps and go up to the Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, and we'll give you a one-grade-higher position?"
Well, you know the way the government works, if you can get a higher position you may do quite a bit of deviating. So I went up to Fort Monmouth and found myself assigned to what was then the Radio Position Finding section, which translated into modern terms is radar, out on Fort Hancock. It was a very good move, because I just learned an awful lot in the work. And I found that [because of] my experience in [a previous job at] the Radio Engineering Laboratories, where we really designed, built, developed, and sold things that had to work, and we had to do it for a profit, we were very well organized. The people at the Signal Corps Lab were not very well organized, and I was able to really progress pretty fast as a result of this.
I guess it was the summer of 1941, the summer or fall, and we weren't up there very long until along came Pearl Harbor, which was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic, but there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time, although there was some later. But when we went on wartime status, well, security was tightened up somewhat, although it was always pretty secure. Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week. We worked at Fort Hancock, which was an isolated peninsula up near New York City, but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar, in the Belmar area, and we moved down there. I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar, and I think some of it was very original.
We eventually did the moon radar project, and I guess my function in it was really Technical Director. In connection with this, I met Jack DeWitt, who was the Director of the Laboratory, He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army but he really was a reserve officer - I don't know whether he was a reserve officer or whether he had simply taken the appointment because they needed people. But in any event, he was the Lab Director, and he had been much involved with - in fact, I guess he had been one of the founders of radio station WSM in Nashville, which is still around, and he had quite a lot to do with the Old Opry and the like. I still keep in touch with Jack and we sometimes trade services with each other.
In any event, he 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 - and they didn't believe it! They didn't believe we'd really done it. So they called in a number of outside experts, and 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 also I kept quite friendly with, Donald Fink - he was then Editor of Electronics; later he got involved with the IEEE and he is now editor of some electrical engineers' handbook that's quite useful. But in any event, Don came down, and he was smart, he knew right away that there was no question about what we were doing.
So we decided that we would announce this publicly at the annual dinner of the IRE, the Institute of Radio Engineers, which we did. It created headlines which were of the same order of magnitude as the atomic bomb did, although it was not - at least from the intricacy viewpoint, there was no comparison; really we were just applying technology that was available. But it was a very significant...
Cindy: Like landing a man on the moon?
King: Well, it was much less than that in magnitude. But philosophically and sociologically, I think it was important, because as far as I know, it really was the first time that man had in a measurable way manifested his influence beyond the reaches of the immediate locale of the earth. Indeed, somebody on the moon could have received radio signals that were transmitted from the earth, but this was really the first proof of it. And rather interestingly, other people were working on it, too, and several others succeeded, but we, by circumstance or whatever, were the first. It was a very stimulating experience.
.
King: After about two years in this Washington job, in which I had advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000 a year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600 a year, I decided that I wanted to advance - well, not so much advance, I really wanted to get out of this administrative thing I was in. During that period, I had taken a couple of courses at George Washington University, one of which was on electronics, which was taught by Harry Dimond. We struck it off quite well, and I did okay in the course and learned a lot about practical electronics in it. So I talked to Mr. Dimond about the possibility of a job with the Bureau of Standards, and eventually they offered me a job at the same grade as the job I had at the Signal Corps but was in research-type work. So I went to my bosses and told them what I wanted to do, and I guess the Chief Signal Officer called me in and talked to me about it - that was going up pretty high for my lowly status - but anyway, he said, "If you want to get into another kind of work, why don't you stay with the Signal Corps and go up to the Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, and we'll give you a one-grade-higher position?"
Well, you know the way the government works, if you can get a higher position you may do quite a bit of deviating. So I went up to Fort Monmouth and found myself assigned to what was then the Radio Position Finding section, which translated into modern terms is radar, out on Fort Hancock. It was a very good move, because I just learned an awful lot in the work. And I found that [because of] my experience in [a previous job at] the Radio Engineering Laboratories, where we really designed, built, developed, and sold things that had to work, and we had to do it for a profit, we were very well organized. The people at the Signal Corps Lab were not very well organized, and I was able to really progress pretty fast as a result of this.
I guess it was the summer of 1941, the summer or fall, and we weren't up there very long until along came Pearl Harbor, which was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic, but there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time, although there was some later. But when we went on wartime status, well, security was tightened up somewhat, although it was always pretty secure. Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week. We worked at Fort Hancock, which was an isolated peninsula up near New York City, but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar, in the Belmar area, and we moved down there. I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar, and I think some of it was very original.
We eventually did the moon radar project, and I guess my function in it was really Technical Director. In connection with this, I met Jack DeWitt, who was the Director of the Laboratory, He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army but he really was a reserve officer - I don't know whether he was a reserve officer or whether he had simply taken the appointment because they needed people. But in any event, he was the Lab Director, and he had been much involved with - in fact, I guess he had been one of the founders of radio station WSM in Nashville, which is still around, and he had quite a lot to do with the Old Opry and the like. I still keep in touch with Jack and we sometimes trade services with each other.
In any event, he 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 - and they didn't believe it! They didn't believe we'd really done it. So they called in a number of outside experts, and 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 also I kept quite friendly with, Donald Fink - he was then Editor of Electronics; later he got involved with the IEEE and he is now editor of some electrical engineers' handbook that's quite useful. But in any event, Don came down, and he was smart, he knew right away that there was no question about what we were doing.
So we decided that we would announce this publicly at the annual dinner of the IRE, the Institute of Radio Engineers, which we did. It created headlines which were of the same order of magnitude as the atomic bomb did, although it was not - at least from the intricacy viewpoint, there was no comparison; really we were just applying technology that was available. But it was a very significant...
Cindy: Like landing a man on the moon?
King: Well, it was much less than that in magnitude. But philosophically and sociologically, I think it was important, because as far as I know, it really was the first time that man had in a measurable way manifested his influence beyond the reaches of the immediate locale of the earth. Indeed, somebody on the moon could have received radio signals that were transmitted from the earth, but this was really the first proof of it. And rather interestingly, other people were working on it, too, and several others succeeded, but we, by circumstance or whatever, were the first. It was a very stimulating experience.
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