FOCUS ON HISTORY
CableVision of Central Florida, Channel 14
with Elaine Stone, interviewing E. King Stodola
November 11, 1987
ELAINE STONE: Good evening and welcome to Focus on History. I’m Elaine Fairbanks [Murray] Stone, organizing regent of Rufus Fairbanks Chapter. Daughters of the American Revolution. Tonight I have as my guest E. King Stodola, who was responsible for making the first contact with the moon. As you can see, we have here a newspaper from the Daily Mirror, [with the headline] “Army Radar Contacts the Moon.” We’ now going to talk to the gentleman who made that possible. Good evening, King, so nice you can be here. Tell me something, what was the name of this project that contacted the moon?
E. KING STODOLA: You spoke of me being responsible for - several people helped in it, and the US Army Radar Laboratory Director at Evans Signal Laboratory [Jack DeWitt] in 1946 was key to it. In any event, it was named Diana for the goddess of the moon. In current “feministic” thinking, that was a better choice than might have been made by some of the other people.
ELAINE: Yes, you were saying earlier that NASA had named everything after masculine gods, so this is nice that this happened. Now, where does this take place, where were you? And this was during the War? Right after the War, the Second World War?
KING: Well, we started work on it before the War was formally over, but it was obviously coming to an end. And we had received from the Chief Signal Officer in Washington an inquiry as to what we might do about detecting missiles in space. Jack DeWitt, a civilian engineer who had been commissioned as a lieutenant colonel and was the director of the lab, had had for years the idea of trying to get a radar signal to the moon. Well, this was an ideal purpose to be served by accomplishing that feat. I had a special developments group, which had recently before that completed a moving target radar system for a possible invasion in the Far East, and many of the things that we developed for that were directly applicable to the moon, So there were five of us, including Jack DeWitt, who were dedicated people working at this without much in the way of time limits or anything else. Actually, if you're going to try to detect the moon with an antenna that looks horizontally, you have to be there at all sorts of odd hours, depending upon when the moon rises and sets.
ELAINE: Well, according to the New York Times of January 25, 1946, E. K Stodola was in charge of the research which resulted in man's first contact with the moon. That is why I have the opening about that. Now, during the War you were involved with radar already, is that right? and you had been working for that for quite some time. And don’t you have a whole lot of inventions to your credit, something like 20 patents? Are most of those in the field of radar?
KING: No - well, almost all of them are in the field of electrical engineering, and several of them relate to frequency modulation, in which I was interested quite early, partly because of my contacts with Major Armstrong, the inventor, so-called, of frequency modulation.
He had done some radar work for the Signal Corps during World War II, and indeed, in our moon radar [work], we embodied some of the items that Armstrong had furnished, among others. We put it together as quickly as we could, and the pictures I showed you indicated the - not haywire, as some people call it, but the improvisations that we did to get it done and quickly.
ELAINE: What was the major obstacle in getting something to the moon, to send a radar signal and receive it back?
KING: Well, there had been a strong question as to whether very high frequency signals could penetrate the ionosphere which surrounds the earth and get to the moon and back. Well, calculations indicated that attacking the ionosphere at a steep angle, signals should go through, and indeed, we did want to prove it, though.
In any case, once we had the equipment working, we set up schedules, and various people manned the station and looked for the moon. and two of the five colleagues, Dr. Harold Webb and Herb Kaufman were at the station when we first succeeded, and they were very excited and so the rest of us. And in a news interview, somebody said said, “Why didn't you go out and shout it to the world?” The answer is, no, we don't want to, because this is such a giant achievement that we want to have it verified by various experts in the field, and we invited in several other experts in the field before an announcement was made. And it was made at the annual banquet of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which has now been merged with the old Institute of Electrical Engineers together into what's now that mouthful, the IEEE.
ELAINE: Now, you also were involved with a satellite conveyance system called the Discoverer; is that similar?
KING: Well, not really. Let me go back to the moon for just a minute to introduce what needed to be done. The time of transit for a signal from the Earth to the moon and back is approximately three seconds, and I think we have here a picture of what this looks like - I don't know, can I show this? This is the oscilloscope picture which was obtained from the moon track and this [points] vertical deflection is the transmitted pulse, and this [points] is the received echo three seconds later.
Well, if you are going to track a satellite near the Earth, it's not going to be 238,000 miles away! And we don't want to have a long delay between transmitting a pulse to getting the echo back. So what I invented was a scheme for interleaving the pulses in such a way that many pulses could be transmitted between before the reception of the first pulse in that group, and the scheme allowed keeping track of which [returning] pulse went with which transmitted pulse, and the whole thing was automated heavily. I had been trying to sell the idea of using this to the Air Force for about two or three years, and they were progressing with the vehicle and all the other parts of it. But [then], after a lot of vacillation, two weeks after Sputnik* was in the air we were under contract to deliver quickly. And within a few months we had radar sets, which up to now [had] existed [only[ on paper, out in the field and working. And it really was a very timely invention, because I'm sure it reduced the time required for getting this system on the air, because we were able to produce it and off it went. Serendipity, it’s called.
ELAINE: You just were recently honored with a very important award, the Distinguished Alumni Citation from Cooper Union Institute in New York, Now, how did you happen to go to that particular school?
KING: OK, well, this is an ad that appeared in the New York Times in April: “We haven’t raised our tuition, it’s still zero.”
ELAINE: …”in 128 years”, you left that part out!
KING: Well, Cooper Union was the child, if you will, of an early inventor industrialist, Peter Cooper, who was born while George Washington was president, but he lived from 1791 on to 1892. He was a very long-lived person for that period. But he founded his school because he felt that his education had been greatly neglected, and in 1860 Cooper Union came into being, and it is still going on the basis it did before. I guess that's a quick summary, and I would mention this to students in this area - and all through the country, for that matter - that they might well consider that as a school to which to go, particularly if they have means of living in New York - because we don't have a dormitory system yet.
ELAINE: In other words, all tuition is paid for by some foundation that Peter Cooper left money to, or other people did?
KING: Yes. Peter not only influenced himself, but he influenced people like Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar, some of those people, to start schools, too. But they didn't come out free. But I should tell you one of the negatives - 20% of the applicants are accepted, it’s a very selective school.
ELAINE: Well, look what it turned out, a great scientist like you, with all your inventions. And also lots of other very famous people. And you just had your 50th anniversary of your class. Isn’t that exciting?
KING: It was indeed.
ELAINE: We had so many things we were going to talk about, but because the time is just about gone, the most important thing is to say that you really did something wonderful for the world and for our country when you did these inventions that made it possible to contact the moon, isn’t that right?
KING: Well, these inventions… I ran across a quotation from Isaac Newton last night, when I was looking into some of this, and he said, “I could see further because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” So I didn't make the moon [shot] possible, everybody did; you're all part of a train of science.
ELAINE: Well, we’re certainly glad that you were part of that train. Thank you so much, King Stodola, for being on Focus on History. And I thank all of you for watching Focus on History. Watch us every Wednesday and Friday at 6:15. This is Elaine Stone for the Daughters of the American Revolution. Good evening.
*Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, surprising the US and disappointing the hope of being the first to accomplish this feat.
E. KING STODOLA: You spoke of me being responsible for - several people helped in it, and the US Army Radar Laboratory Director at Evans Signal Laboratory [Jack DeWitt] in 1946 was key to it. In any event, it was named Diana for the goddess of the moon. In current “feministic” thinking, that was a better choice than might have been made by some of the other people.
ELAINE: Yes, you were saying earlier that NASA had named everything after masculine gods, so this is nice that this happened. Now, where does this take place, where were you? And this was during the War? Right after the War, the Second World War?
KING: Well, we started work on it before the War was formally over, but it was obviously coming to an end. And we had received from the Chief Signal Officer in Washington an inquiry as to what we might do about detecting missiles in space. Jack DeWitt, a civilian engineer who had been commissioned as a lieutenant colonel and was the director of the lab, had had for years the idea of trying to get a radar signal to the moon. Well, this was an ideal purpose to be served by accomplishing that feat. I had a special developments group, which had recently before that completed a moving target radar system for a possible invasion in the Far East, and many of the things that we developed for that were directly applicable to the moon, So there were five of us, including Jack DeWitt, who were dedicated people working at this without much in the way of time limits or anything else. Actually, if you're going to try to detect the moon with an antenna that looks horizontally, you have to be there at all sorts of odd hours, depending upon when the moon rises and sets.
ELAINE: Well, according to the New York Times of January 25, 1946, E. K Stodola was in charge of the research which resulted in man's first contact with the moon. That is why I have the opening about that. Now, during the War you were involved with radar already, is that right? and you had been working for that for quite some time. And don’t you have a whole lot of inventions to your credit, something like 20 patents? Are most of those in the field of radar?
KING: No - well, almost all of them are in the field of electrical engineering, and several of them relate to frequency modulation, in which I was interested quite early, partly because of my contacts with Major Armstrong, the inventor, so-called, of frequency modulation.
He had done some radar work for the Signal Corps during World War II, and indeed, in our moon radar [work], we embodied some of the items that Armstrong had furnished, among others. We put it together as quickly as we could, and the pictures I showed you indicated the - not haywire, as some people call it, but the improvisations that we did to get it done and quickly.
ELAINE: What was the major obstacle in getting something to the moon, to send a radar signal and receive it back?
KING: Well, there had been a strong question as to whether very high frequency signals could penetrate the ionosphere which surrounds the earth and get to the moon and back. Well, calculations indicated that attacking the ionosphere at a steep angle, signals should go through, and indeed, we did want to prove it, though.
In any case, once we had the equipment working, we set up schedules, and various people manned the station and looked for the moon. and two of the five colleagues, Dr. Harold Webb and Herb Kaufman were at the station when we first succeeded, and they were very excited and so the rest of us. And in a news interview, somebody said said, “Why didn't you go out and shout it to the world?” The answer is, no, we don't want to, because this is such a giant achievement that we want to have it verified by various experts in the field, and we invited in several other experts in the field before an announcement was made. And it was made at the annual banquet of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which has now been merged with the old Institute of Electrical Engineers together into what's now that mouthful, the IEEE.
ELAINE: Now, you also were involved with a satellite conveyance system called the Discoverer; is that similar?
KING: Well, not really. Let me go back to the moon for just a minute to introduce what needed to be done. The time of transit for a signal from the Earth to the moon and back is approximately three seconds, and I think we have here a picture of what this looks like - I don't know, can I show this? This is the oscilloscope picture which was obtained from the moon track and this [points] vertical deflection is the transmitted pulse, and this [points] is the received echo three seconds later.
Well, if you are going to track a satellite near the Earth, it's not going to be 238,000 miles away! And we don't want to have a long delay between transmitting a pulse to getting the echo back. So what I invented was a scheme for interleaving the pulses in such a way that many pulses could be transmitted between before the reception of the first pulse in that group, and the scheme allowed keeping track of which [returning] pulse went with which transmitted pulse, and the whole thing was automated heavily. I had been trying to sell the idea of using this to the Air Force for about two or three years, and they were progressing with the vehicle and all the other parts of it. But [then], after a lot of vacillation, two weeks after Sputnik* was in the air we were under contract to deliver quickly. And within a few months we had radar sets, which up to now [had] existed [only[ on paper, out in the field and working. And it really was a very timely invention, because I'm sure it reduced the time required for getting this system on the air, because we were able to produce it and off it went. Serendipity, it’s called.
ELAINE: You just were recently honored with a very important award, the Distinguished Alumni Citation from Cooper Union Institute in New York, Now, how did you happen to go to that particular school?
KING: OK, well, this is an ad that appeared in the New York Times in April: “We haven’t raised our tuition, it’s still zero.”
ELAINE: …”in 128 years”, you left that part out!
KING: Well, Cooper Union was the child, if you will, of an early inventor industrialist, Peter Cooper, who was born while George Washington was president, but he lived from 1791 on to 1892. He was a very long-lived person for that period. But he founded his school because he felt that his education had been greatly neglected, and in 1860 Cooper Union came into being, and it is still going on the basis it did before. I guess that's a quick summary, and I would mention this to students in this area - and all through the country, for that matter - that they might well consider that as a school to which to go, particularly if they have means of living in New York - because we don't have a dormitory system yet.
ELAINE: In other words, all tuition is paid for by some foundation that Peter Cooper left money to, or other people did?
KING: Yes. Peter not only influenced himself, but he influenced people like Ezra Cornell and Matthew Vassar, some of those people, to start schools, too. But they didn't come out free. But I should tell you one of the negatives - 20% of the applicants are accepted, it’s a very selective school.
ELAINE: Well, look what it turned out, a great scientist like you, with all your inventions. And also lots of other very famous people. And you just had your 50th anniversary of your class. Isn’t that exciting?
KING: It was indeed.
ELAINE: We had so many things we were going to talk about, but because the time is just about gone, the most important thing is to say that you really did something wonderful for the world and for our country when you did these inventions that made it possible to contact the moon, isn’t that right?
KING: Well, these inventions… I ran across a quotation from Isaac Newton last night, when I was looking into some of this, and he said, “I could see further because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” So I didn't make the moon [shot] possible, everybody did; you're all part of a train of science.
ELAINE: Well, we’re certainly glad that you were part of that train. Thank you so much, King Stodola, for being on Focus on History. And I thank all of you for watching Focus on History. Watch us every Wednesday and Friday at 6:15. This is Elaine Stone for the Daughters of the American Revolution. Good evening.
*Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, surprising the US and disappointing the hope of being the first to accomplish this feat.