PUSHING the HORIZON

•••• •

Naval Research Laboratory

Seventy-Five Years of High Stakes

Science and Technology

at the

I V A N A M A T O

IVAN

AMATO PUSHINGHORIZON

e

h

t
n 1915, with Europe in flames, Americans looked

anxiously over their shoulders, wondering

whether they, too, would be pulled into the “Great

War” raging across an ever-narrower Atlantic Ocean.

Conversations that year between Thomas Alva

Edison and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels

set in motion the forces that led to the establishment

of an inventions factory modeled on those

laboratories newly established within the most

progressive part of American industry. Within a

generation, the new Naval Research Laboratory

(NRL) would produce the first operational American

radar and sonar and accomplish path-breaking

fundamental research on the transmission of highfrequency radio waves and the nature of the

ionosphere.

Science writer Ivan Amato explores the origin,

development, and accomplishments of NRL over the

last 75 years. He analyzes the personalities,

institutional culture, and influences of what has

become one of the preeminent research laboratories

within the United States. Tracing the Laboratory from

its small and often inauspicious origins to today’s

large, multidisciplinary research center, Amato sets

in context many of the important research events and

fronts of modern military science and technology.

The author explores the role of the Laboratory

within the Navy and U.S. science during the 1920s,

Great Depression, and the “physicists’ war” of 1941

to 1945. Amato subsequently looks at NRL during

the Cold War and the birth of the space age, of which

it was such a key player. He then presents overviews

of contemporary research programs that will shape

the substance of military capabilities well into the

next century. Amato examines research fields ranging

from oceanography to plasma physics to space

technology in order to demonstrate how advanced

science and technology have developed

synergistically within the dual context of a militarysponsored, civilian-administered R&D laboratory.

– David van Keuren, NRL Historian
I V A N A M A T O

PUSHING the HORIZON

Naval Research Laboratory

Seventy-Five Years of High Stakes

Science and Technology

at the
C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments .................................................................................. v

Chapter 1 - The Navy’s Invention Factory ............................................ 1

Chapter 2 - The Laboratory That Almost Wasn’t .............................. 13

Chapter 3 - First Steps ......................................................................... 31

Chapter 4 - An Orphan Proves Itself................................................... 65

Chapter 5 - An Adolescent NRL at the Crossroads of History ........ 93

Chapter 6 - NRL Goes to War ........................................................... 105

Electronic Warfare—The Solution Becomes the Problem .......................................................... 113

Antisubmarine Warfare—The U-Boat Menace .............................................................................. 125

Building 44: The Unspeakable Specter of Gas ................................................................................. 130

The Navy’s Secret Little Manhattan Project .................................................................................... 139

NRL and the New World .................................................................................................................... 151

Chapter 7 - Harold Bowen and a Born Again NRL.......................... 153

Chapter 8 - Turning Vengeance Weapons into a Space Age ............ 167

Chapter 9 - NRL, Nuclear Fallout, and the Cold War ..................... 215

The Testing Begins ................................................................................................................................. 216

Losing the Nuclear Monopoly ............................................................................................................ 220

Listening in on the Other Superpower ............................................................................................ 225

Cold War in the Abyss ......................................................................................................................... 236

Making Nuclear Submarines Habitable ............................................................................................ 244

Making Nuclear Tipped Missiles That Don’t Break ........................................................................ 248

Testing Goes Underground and Other Places ............................................................................... 252

Make-believe Nukes .............................................................................................................................. 260

Red Scares (Or Not) and Secret Capabilities ................................................................................. 265

The Flip Side of the Cold War ........................................................................................................... 273

Chapter 10 - From a Golden Era to Reality Checks ....................... 281

Chapter 11 - Pixels of a Very Big Picture .......................................... 303

Biotechnological Pixels ......................................................................................................................... 307

Hair-Thin, Glassy Pixels ........................................................................................................................ 312

Superconducting Pixels ........................................................................................................................ 317

Pixels of Fire ........................................................................................................................................... 322

Solar Pixels.............................................................................................................................................. 325

iii
iv ♦ contents

Chaotic Pixels ........................................................................................................................................ 327

Digital Pixels ........................................................................................................................................... 330

Internet Pixels ........................................................................................................................................ 334

Electronic Warfare Pixels..................................................................................................................... 336

Nobel Pixels ........................................................................................................................................... 339

Magnetic Pixels....................................................................................................................................... 349

Pixels of Battlefield Omniscience ...................................................................................................... 354

Unsung Pixels ......................................................................................................................................... 356

Chapter 12 - Pushing the Horizon .................................................... 357

References and Notes......................................................................... 363

Bibliography......................................................................................... 383

Acronym Glossary .............................................................................. 391

Appendix.............................................................................................. 395

Index .................................................................................................... 397

iv
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

At the end of 1996, the Naval Research Laboratory’s committee

organizing the Laboratory’s 75th anniversary celebration hired me to

write a narrative of NRL’s story. At the time, I knew just a little about

the Laboratory. As a science writer, I had written a few articles—

maybe three or four—about NRL research. So when I accepted the

job, I had no real sense of what NRL was, which is to say I had no idea

what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that I had taken on the

charge of writing a full-length book in about fourteen months.

Those months have passed . . . and here’s the book. The experience has been humbling. I leave this project knowing that NRL is a

magnificent research institution. I leave knowing that its lineage of

researchers has contributed significantly and consistently to the evolution of technological landscapes in both military and civilian venues. I leave the project with a better understanding of how institutions work—how personalities, passion for truth, the drive to develop

technology, personal ambition, world events, domestic politics, social trends, fluctuating budgets, and many other factors sum into the

winding course that institutions take as time unfolds. And I leave this

project knowing that the book I offer here is really just a front door

into what has been, and remains today, a vast enterprise of discovery

and invention. NRL is far more than any book could ever convey.

It is with this attitude that I ask readers to approach this book. For

each topic I cover, there are scores, even hundreds of others that also

v
could have been included. For each person named, there are many,

many others that also might have been. Indeed, the full story of NRL

cannot be chronicled between a single set of book covers; maybe not

even multiple sets of covers as in an encyclopedia. There simply are

too many chapters. In time, more of these chapters will come out in

the pages of annual NRL Reviews, NRL reports, PhD dissertations, reviews by NRL long-timers, papers by NRL historians, and elsewhere.

Perhaps another writer in 25 years will find this book useful in the

preparation of a book for NRL’s centennial.

This book is the product of a collective effort, so there are many

people I would like to thank. First of all, I thank John Wegand, who

contacted me initially on behalf of NRL to see if I might be interested

in this project. I thank David Venezky, David van Keuren, Kathleen

Parrish, Dean Bundy, Tim Coffey, and whomever else decided to actually offer me the opportunity and challenge to write this book. Thanks

to Peter Imhof and Bridget Gutierrez in the Technical Information

Division for putting up with my erratic needs. I thank the staff in TID’s

Publications Branch whose professional skills are also embodied in

this book and whose office-camaraderie I greatly appreciated.

There is no way I could have written a book of this length and

breadth in so short a period of time had David van Keuren, NRL’s

historian, not been selfless with his time and in helping me in many

aspects of the research that went into this book. I cannot thank him

enough. I also thank previous NRL historians David Allison, Walter

Pitts, Bruce Hevley, and Herbert Gimpel, and such sometime-historians as A. Hoyt Taylor and Louis Gebhard for the various papers, oral

histories, dissertations, memoirs, and other history-rich documents they

have produced. In addition, I thank the several dozen NRL staff who

reminisced for me about their experiences at the Laboratory. A list of

their names appears in the reference section at the end of the book.

For reading and commenting on several drafts of the entire manuscript, I would like to thank David van Keuren (again), Jack Brown,

David Venezky, Tim Coffey, and my father Solomon Amato. I am advi ♦ acknowledgments
acknowledgments ♦ vii

ditionally indebted to Captain Bruce Buckley for his thoughtful and

useful review of the entire manuscript in the eleventh hour.

For looking over limited portions of the text, I owe thanks to Joel

Schnur, Tom Giallorenzi, Joseph Bucaro, Donald Gubser, Burton

Hurdle, Herbert Gursky, Homer Carhart, Guenter Brueckner, Louis

Pecora, Randall Shumaker, Lee Hammarstrom, Jerome Karle, Isabella

Karle, John Montgomery, Bill Howell, Chris Herndon, Gary Prinz, and

David Nagel. In this regard, I would like to especially thank Bhakta

Rath, whose diplomatic skills proved invaluable at a late stage of the

project. Despite all of this assistance in my quest to minimize errors,

I assume full responsibility for any errors that do make it into print.

It is one thing to write a book and it is quite another to take a

ream of paper and a stack of photographs and turn these into a handsome volume. For that transition, I thank Saul Oresky whose expert

and tireless copyediting (he copyedited this page, too) and insightful

reading helped in the 11th hour to improve the book. I thank Kathleen

Parrish for her many roles in overseeing NRL’s editorial services in the

making of this book. I also thank Jan Morrow for designing the book.

After all, a book is not just a collection of words; it also is an object

that, like all constructed objects, benefit from the skill and aesthetic

eye of thoughtful designers.

Almost finally, I want to thank all of my teachers in life. Among

them are my parents. And finally, I want to thank my family—my

wife Mary and my two little boys Simon and Max—for the foundation of love and home life without which luxurious intellectual pursuits like the one this book represents to me would not have been

possible.
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 1

C h a p t e r 1

The Navy’s

Invention Factory

n the eastern bank of the Potomac River, just after

the river’s waters have left the heart of Washington

on their southward journey to the Chesapeake Bay,

resides a 130-acre campus with over 100 buildings

of all shapes and sizes. Guards screen every person

or vehicle entering the compound. Some of the buildings have no

windows. Many are equipped with radar dishes and antennae of many

varieties.

Travelers flying through the Ronald Reagan National Airport, which

is just across the Potomac, can look down from their planes and catch

glimpses of the industrial-looking site. Most don’t notice it. If the

campus even flashes onto their retinas, practically all let it pass like a

stretch of anonymous landscape along an interstate highway. Attentive flyers, however, might notice some large blue lettering above the

windows of the building from which juts a weathered old pier that

once hosted the traffic of oceanographic research vessels. The letters

spell out “Naval Research Laboratory.”

To unwittingly fly or drive by the Naval Research Laboratory is

akin to going right by a Bell Laboratories, a NASA, a Microsoft Corporation, or the headquarters of some other world-changing organization without recognizing the place for how it has contributed to the

technological character of modern times. Despite its lack of name

recognition, NRL, the Navy’s own corporate laboratory, has become a

1
2 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

world-changing place during its first 75 years. This book tells some of

NRL’s story, at least that part that isn’t still secret.

The history of an institution like the Naval Research Laboratory

resembles a family history that unfolds in time, taking this turn and

that depending on the strengths and weaknesses each new generation

brings with it or inherits or on the traits it develops in response to its

internal and external pressures.

When NRL opened for business in 1923, it was a cluster of five

buildings surrounded by farmland. It was a place of clean air and dirt

roads. It was then bucolic enough of a setting that “Bellevue” (literally “beautiful view” in French), the name given to the property by an

earlier owner, intended no irony.

The 20th Century has taken its toll. The sounds of nature have

given way to the roar of National Airport’s every-two-minute airline

traffic and of military aircraft from nearby Andrews Air Force Base

and the din of car traffic from nearby Interstate 295. Often, and especially when the wind comes from the South, a sickly stench from the

neighboring and sprawling Blue Plains sewage treatment plant infiltrates the air to become an unwelcome olfactory banner for NRL. There

can be no argument that the name “Bellevue” has become in time a

brazen misnomer.

From its initial humble role on this changing stage of Bellevue,

however, the Naval Research Laboratory has evolved into a massive

and major actor in the world’s ongoing love/hate affair with science

and technology. In scientific and technological contexts, NRL itself

has been the origin of plenty of “beautiful views,” these in the form

of new insights about oceans, skies, and stars, and new technologies

based on those insights.

What started 75 years ago as a 271⁄2 acre, five-building main campus has expanded to encompass 130 acres and 102 main buildings, as

well as 14 other smaller research sites outside of Washington, DC.

These include a satellite-tracking station in Pomonkey, Maryland; a

fire research vessel in Mobile, Alabama; a center of mostly oceano-
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 3

graphic research at NRL’s second largest facility located on the grounds

of Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi; and a meteorological modeling and prediction laboratory in Monterey, California.

More important than this physical expansion has been NRL’s ascent

to join those world-class institutions whose footprints mark much of

the technoscape that characterizes modern times.

The external appearance of NRL bespeaks of arcane science and

technology. Building 43, the building with the big blue lettering on it

and the seat of the Laboratory’s top administration is capped by a

striking 50-foot radar dish pointing heavenward. In the 1950s, that

dish became part of the first communications circuit to use the moon

to reflect signals. Many more dishes and antennae of all shapes and

sizes adorn scores of roofs at the Laboratory making for a strange,

metallic skyline.

Some of NRL’s buildings are gargantuan and windowless, the kind

of structures on which rumors are built and within which scientists

and engineers usher astounding concepts for military technologies

into hardware. It seems that half of the buildings on campus have

their own, ice-caked refrigerated tank of liquid nitrogen, a household

fluid for a place like this. Some of the newer buildings could be on

any modern college campus except that they are identified coldly by

numbers rather than by the names of the institution’s overachievers

or major benefactors.

On top of one of these in the northwest corner of the campus (the

one bordering Bolling Air Force Base) are four large white communications radomes perched there like enormous golf balls soon to be

launched across the Potomac by a giant golfer. Pretty much all that

can be said about this building is that the business that goes on there

is secret.

South and a bit east of the big golf balls is a stretch of rattier looking buildings, some with dented corrugated metal siding and big, insulated pipes running in and out of them helter skelter. Some of these

have little red warning lights by the doors that blink to warn those
4 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

outside that powerful lasers for fusion research, nuclear weapons research, and materials science are running.

The only portion of NRL that looks like someone planned it out

ahead of time is the central mall that grew from those first five buildings. A series of gardens, parking lots, and sparsely but tastefully landscaped open areas leads from the main entrance to Building 43 and

its oversized radar dish. At the mall’s entrance is a bigger-than-life

bust of Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1915 vision of military research

and the future of warfare inspired the creation of NRL.

 Flanking the mall on both sides are buildings hosting a number

of NRL’s cast of research groups: the Radar Division, the Naval Center

for Space Technology (NCST), the Acoustics Division, the Materials

Science and Technology Division, the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and the Marine Physics Branch (of the Marine

Geosciences Division). The rest of the buildings further to the right

and left look as though they were intermittently dropped from a great

height and allowed to land where there happened to be space. The

result is a strange brew of geometry, architectural styles, old and new

construction, decay and growth. It’s the kind of crazy quilt landscape

that reflects an institution’s sometimes less-than-optimal solutions

to evolving problems and needs.

The types of buildings and the equipment inside of them say much

about what can go on at an institution. What does in fact go on, however, is determined by the people in those buildings. NRL today employs more than 3,000 individuals, about 2,950 more than it did in

1923. About 1,700 of them conduct research and more than half of

these investigators have PhDs.

Among the research staff are chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, optical

scientists, electronic warfare specialists, satellite engineers, ocean scientists, meteorologists, earth scientists, systems engineers, acoustics

experts, molecular biologists, and a huge range of other technical types.

With a spectrum of expertise like that, the NRL staff can mix and match
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 5

amongst themselves so as to assemble the skills and intellectual stuff

that it takes to keep the Navy on the myriad forefronts of military

technology.

The rest of NRL’s staff makes sure the research can go on by wrestling with mountains of paperwork (mostly budgetary and accounting), preparing food, mending pipes, planting flowers, acquiring and

managing books and journals, plowing snow, maintaining security,

operating and troubleshooting computer systems, cajoling sponsors,

minding military protocol, and publicizing results; in short, by doing

all the tasks required to keep NRL breathing every day.

NRL started out 75 years ago as a far more specialized place than

it is now. It essentially was a small radio engineering laboratory—

along with an important cadre of underwater sound experts—at a

time when radio technology was growing from its birth in the late

19th Century into a seminal 20th Century technology. Rather than developing broadcast radio to reach most of the people most of the

time as was the case in the civil sector, the Navy provided an entirely

different context. The Navy hoped that radio technology would provide a new communications system that would link distantly separated parties on widely separated ships, shore installations, and aircraft.

The technical issues involved in such a system pushed the existing

envelope of radio technology to the point that the NRL engineers

were driven to investigate scientific issues—such as the role of the

electrically charged upper atmosphere (which became known as the

ionosphere) in the propagation of radio waves—as a necessary step

in meeting the Navy’s needs. In other words, the call for leading-edge

technology by necessity inspired scientific curiosity. In turn, investigations into how the state of the ionosphere and other environmental conditions affect radio communications opened pathways to the

development of more technology.

This powerful bootstrapping dynamic of a technological need

driving both engineering and basic science research, whose results
6 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

then lead to new technological visions that, in turn, drive more scientific research, is the soul of NRL. At NRL, science and technology have

never stopped raising the bar for each other. The most world-changing first fruit of this mutual bootstrapping during NRL’s early years

was the discovery of the scientific and engineering principles from

which the U.S. Navy’s first generation of radar equipment was designed and built. Military historians often say that nuclear bombs

merely ended World War II while radar was the technology that won

it.

As much as NRL’s pre-WWII staff was prepared and motivated to

push into new scientific territory, the Laboratory’s primary sources of

funding until the end of the war ensured that NRL’s original engineering mindset would remain dominant. Most of the research money

came from specific Navy Bureaus, most notably the Bureau of Engineering, whose commanders had specific problems they wanted

solved. Those Navy officers who knew anything about NRL perceived

it as a place where they could go for help in solving their particular

technical problems. They were not interested in throwing their Bureau’s

money at researchers trying to ask and answer basic questions about

how the world works.

As it was for mostly everything else at the time, World War II was

a turning point for NRL. The war reinforced the Laboratory’s problem-solving, engineering culture. It was a time when research and

development simply had to yield real equipment that real soldiers,

sailors, and airmen could use ASAP. It was engineering on tight deadlines whose results literally meant life or death. To carry out this work,

NRL’s ranks swelled fivefold from several hundred before the war to

more than 2000 afterward. It was a frenetic period marked by the

unmatched passion, unity, and sense of mission that swept America

during World War II.

During that expansion, the growing NRL research community

pooled its collective and ever more varying expertise to equip U.S.

fighters with the best, newest, and most capable equipment. Radar
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 7

sets were designed, built, and shipped on short order, sometimes within

days. Newly invented chemical brews for repelling sharks, marking

sailors lost at sea, and neutralizing chemical warfare agents went out

by the thousands. Like Edison’s famous labs in Menlo Park and West

Orange, New Jersey, the Naval Research Laboratory had become an

invention factory run by brilliant scientists and engineers working with

well-equipped crews of superlative machinists and craftsmen who

could flesh out the most sophisticated and complex blueprints.

At the same time, World War II became a showcase for the way a

close marriage of engineering bravado with leading-edge basic science

can change all of the rules. Most emblematic of what could come of

such a union was the Manhattan Project and its terrifying nuclear weapons. Radar (a simultaneous invention in several places around the

world), synthetic rubber to replace embargoed sources of natural rubber, antibiotics, and the proximity fuse (which made anti-aircraft ordnance and field artillery more lethal by triggering detonations when

the weapons got to an optimum distance from targets) were some of

the other more consequential offspring from this marriage. The massive organizations of civilian scientists that formed to expedite these

crash R&D efforts ended up setting a national trajectory for science

and technology that only in the past few years has come into question.

As the end of war approached, there was no question in the minds

of NRL’s ranking researchers and decision makers that a culture of

curiosity-driven science, one emulating the academic model of scientific research, had to become a partner with the problem-solving engineering culture that had taken root from the beginning and was

strengthened during wartime. World War II was the most scientific

war ever. It forcefully showed that today’s science was the seed corn of

tomorrow’s technological harvest. What’s more, the war experience

proved how short the transition from science to technology can be.

The adoption of this more speculative research culture at NRL became possible, in good part, because of the post-war creation of the
8 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Office of Naval Research (ONR), which was chartered to foster the

long view of naval technology built on basic science. NRL became

ONR’s science-oriented in-house laboratory. Today, ONR, which distributes roughly $860 million1

 to research groups at universities and

industries, still typically supplies close to thirty percent of NRL’s research funding, which has amounted to over $800 million in recent

years. The shift to ONR meant that NRL no longer would rest within

an administrative parent like a Navy bureau whose focus on solving

near-term problems would curtail NRL’s potential to push scientific

as well as engineering frontiers. The door had opened to NRL’s becoming the Navy’s corporate laboratory in the way Bell Laboratories

(now Lucent Technologies) was the corporate laboratory for AT&T.

The beginnings of yet another research culture arrived at about

the same time that ONR came into existence. In a 14-year sequence

that began with the capture of German V-2 rockets at the end of the

War and ended in 1958 with the creation of the National Aeronautic

and Space Administration (NASA), NRL became one of the nation’s

hotbeds of both rocket engineering and rocket-borne science. These

efforts were in the young tradition of the Manhattan Project in that

they required large teams working on many pieces that had to be

integrated into large systems. Even after most of NRL’s homegrown

rocket scientists and engineers became a major foundation pillar of

NASA in 1958, the culture of satellite engineering remained at NRL

and then grew into a third major research and development culture—

the others being basic science, and a more ground-based arena of

applied science and engineering. Much of what this third culture at

NRL has done remains secret since its major clients and supporters

were the likes of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

In addition to these three prominent intermingling research cultures at NRL, other cultural factors have also helped determine NRL’s

unique research venue. Perhaps most prominent among them is the

balance between unclassified research and classified work. On NRL’s

research staff are those who would prefer to stay as far away from

classified research as they can. They essentially are university profes-
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 9

sors at a military laboratory. To many of them, doing science in secret

is anathema to the free and open communication by which the scientific tradition normally operates. Of course this does not stop the “academic” types at NRL from finding applications of their work within

classified projects, especially if hard-to-find funding can be had.

Others at NRL have lived their research lives entirely within the

classified arena. Ask one of these researchers what they do and you

stand a good chance of eliciting the most hackneyed joke amongst

the classified research tribe: “I could tell you, but then I would have

to kill you.” Of course, with a little care and with assistance from NRL

editors and security experts, many of NRL’s classified projects do yield

unclassified publications. It’s often simply a matter of removing keywords from manuscripts or leaving out actual values of measurements.

That is how many researchers at NRL successfully straddle the classified and unclassified research worlds.

Another important determinant of NRL’s multifaceted research

culture is the way the research gets chosen and funded. Since ONR

funds only a portion of the annual research budget, the rest of the

budget must come from other sponsors, who may choose to fund

work at NRL or instead choose to put their money into other government, industry, or academic labs. These sponsors include other units

in the Navy and elsewhere in the military establishment; units of the

nation’s intelligence network including the National Security Agency

(NSA) and NRO; and civil organizations such as NASA, the Federal

Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Department of Transportation (DoT). Since the 1980s, NRL researchers have been working more

and more with private firms on a cost-shared basis under Cooperative Research and Development Agreements, or CRADAs. So the sponsor roster is long and diverse and getting more so. This multi-sponsor

arrangement means that NRL scientists usually have to compete with

other suitors for support. For better or worse, the system tends to turn

NRL researchers into entrepreneurs of sorts.

 NRL’s blend of research cultures and resources has yielded important results, earning the Laboratory a place in the big leagues of
10 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

institutions that have influenced the technoscape. Consider this small

selection of NRL trophies:

♦ Just as the Laboratory was opening its doors in 1923, Harvey

C. Hayes, NRL’s top scientist in underwater sound, was witnessing

heartening results from a new apparatus he had designed that used

the speed of sound in water to rapidly determine ocean depth. Using

the apparatus (then called the Sonic Depth Finder and now known as

a fathometer) aboard the destroyer USS Stewart, Hayes and his crew

began surveying enormous swaths of the ocean floor with unprecedented accuracy and speed. This was the beginning of NRL’s unending project to understand the ocean environment.

♦ In the 1930s, NRL scientists and engineers developed the

United States’ first generation of radar technologies at a critical time

when a half-dozen other countries were independently and secretly

doing the same thing.

♦ As World War II intensified in the early 1940s, NRL initiated a

top secret program with the prescient goal of developing nuclear propulsion for submarines. As a result, NRL became the first U.S. government laboratory to separate uranium isotopes, a first step to producing and harnessing nuclear chain reactions. The isotope separation process, called thermal liquid diffusion, was developed initially

on the NRL campus by physicist Philip Abelson. In 1944, his process,

which by then had been scaled up to a large pilot plant operation at

the Philadelphia Navy Yard, became a crucial component of the technical infrastructure behind the world’s first nuclear bombs when it

was put into operation at a then secret isotope separation plant in

Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The uranium that emerged from this process

became important feedstock for a final enrichment process that led

to the explosive heart of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

♦ Just after the war, others at NRL began sending a range of atmosphere-measuring instruments to unprecedented altitudes using

captured German V-2 rockets. As a result, NRL researchers simultaneously developed expertise in the fledgling fields of rocket engineering and rocket-borne science. Not only would this nascent research
chapter 1 – the navy’s invention factory ♦ 11

community succeed in launching one of the world’s first artificial satellites in 1958, but it also helped launch the National Aeronautics

and Space Administration later that same year by providing the new

NASA with its first 157 uniquely trained and experienced scientists

and engineers. In other words, NRL provided a cornerstone upon

which the ongoing Space Age has been built.

♦ One of the most far-reaching offshoots of NRL’s foray into

space was its extensive role in the conception and realization of the

satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS grew from

several seeds, including the series of Timation satellites in the 1960s

and 1970s, that NRL developed to bolster the navigational capabilities of the country’s nuclear-missile carrying, nuclear-propelled submarine force. The GPS evolved quickly into an exceptionally valuable

resource for a whole range of military and civilian uses, only some of

which were envisioned by the system’s originators.

♦ As laser technology matured after its invention in 1960, NRL

became a center of high-power laser research, thereby joining the community of researchers questing for controlled nuclear fusion using

lasers. The work was funded by the Navy and the Department of Energy (DoE). Although the center of gravity of this work (as measured

by dollars) would move to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) by the mid-1970s, NRL never stopped developing a base

of expertise in high energy lasers, laser interactions with matter, and

laser fusion. That expertise has proven crucial both scientifically and

for guiding the big decisions that go with any national, multi-billion

technology goal such as the quest for laser fusion. Today, laser fusion

research continues at NRL with a DoE-funded hangar-sized kryptonfluoride laser system that can direct massive amounts of energy onto

tiny material samples. The aim is to clarify the basic mechanisms by

which energy concentrates or disperses within targets, which is a fundamental component of the overall challenge.

♦ In 1985, two researchers, one of whom remains at NRL after

more than 50 years of service, were awarded science’s most coveted

and respected award—a Nobel Prize—for their work that rendered X-
12 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ray diffraction a far more versatile and powerful tool for revealing the

crystal structures of molecules and materials.

♦ In 1994, a team of satellite engineers at NRL’s Naval Center

for Space Technology oversaw the design and construction of the

Clementine spacecraft, which mapped the Moon with unprecedented

detail while proving the capability of new, lightweight sensors and

other technologies for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

(BMDO). Completed within a remarkably short time of 22 months

from the time of the project’s conception and at a bargain price of

$70 million, the Clementine project embodied the “smaller, better,

cheaper,” mantra that NASA officials have said their agency would

adopt following an era of ever bigger and more expensive projects.

The Clementine mission became an instant classic in the space community for its innovative convergence of engineering, design, and execution.

These are among NRL’s prouder (unclassified) institutional moments, like the births, marriages, and deaths in human biographies.

The following narrative will show how the pathways to NRL’s high

points are punctuated by many fascinating and consequential twists

and turns. Moreover, they will show that the Laboratory’s peaks of

performance and achievement could have emerged only from underlying scientific and technical strata that are sturdy, dependable, and

sometimes striking in their own right.

It all began in 1915 with a global tragedy.
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 13

C h a p t e r 2

The Laboratory

That Almost Wasn’t

13

It was an ocean away, but the spreading European war began coming home to the United States with lethal force in the early Spring of

1915. On March 28, as part of an intensifying campaign of intimidation by German submarines against merchant and passenger shipping in the war zone around England, the British passenger steamer

Falaba was torpedoed and sunk. Among the dead was Leon C. Thrasher,

an American citizen. On April 28, the Cushing, an American vessel,

was attacked by a German airplane. Three days later, a German submarine torpedoed the American vessel Gulflight, causing the deaths of

two more U.S. citizens.1

Then, on May 7, 1915, the commander of a German submarine

gave orders to torpedo the British ocean liner Lusitania, which was

carrying more than 1200 passengers. As the ship steamed by the southeast coast of Ireland on its way from Liverpool to New York, a torpedo

struck the ship on the starboard side and exploded. Within 20 minutes, the 32,000 ton vessel sank. Of the 1,198 passengers who lost

their lives, 128 were U.S. citizens.2

The sinking of the Lusitania was traumatic to the collective American psyche. Large-scale death dealt from underwater ships of a foreign navy was a particularly cold, technological form of warfare born

of applied science and technology. The submarine menace bolstered

the resolve of the “preparedness lobby,” whose members in Congress

and the Navy had been criticizing the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus
14 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Daniels, and the administration of President Woodrow Wilson for

failing to build up the nation’s arsenals at a time when American

interests clearly were threatened.3

Within a week of the Lusitania tragedy, President Wilson began

sending stern warnings to the Imperial German Government that its

hostile actions had raised the ire of the then neutral United States.

“The Imperial German Government will not expect the Government

of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the

performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United

States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment,” stated an official letter to the German Ambassador.4

It was at the end of this ominous month of growing global tension that an article appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine

that would lead to the creation of a military research establishment in

Washington, DC that would change the world. While the byline identified reporter Edward Marshall as the author, the article was an almost unbroken quote by Thomas Alva Edison, the 68-year-old American icon of inventive genius whose light bulbs, phonographs, and

movies had been transforming daily life, about how America should

respond to the European War.

When the article appeared, the part that resonated the most in

Secretary Daniels came toward the end:

“I believe that . . . the Government should maintain a great

research laboratory jointly under military and naval and civilian

control. In this could be developed the continually increasing possibilities of great guns, the minutiae of new explosives, all the

technique of military and naval progression without any vast expense . . . When the time came, if it ever did, we could take

advantage of the knowledge gained through research work, and

quickly manufacture in large quantities the very latest and most

effective instruments of warfare.”5

For Daniels, these highly visible words by one of the most famous and respected men in the world breathed life into the longbandied opinion amongst Navy brass that such a lab made good sense.
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 15

The Naval Research Laboratory

was conceived in 1915 during a

correspondence between the then

Secretary of the Navy, Josephus

Daniels (seated at his desk on the

right), and Thomas Edison, who is

shown here standing at his desk.

Edison’s words also provided Daniels with a potential means to

quiet his political critics. When the article appeared, the Wilson administration, Daniels included, was under increasing criticism for failing to prepare for what to many was the inevitable participation of

the United States in the war that had been raging in Europe for nine

months. At the start of 1915, the Wilson administration not only had

been holding to a policy of neutrality, but it had even amplified its

apparent disinterest in war preparation with a concomitant intention

to decrease military expenditures. Even after the Lusitania went down,

Wilson’s initial intention was to remain neutral while slowly building up the U.S. military force over many years.6

So when Secretary Daniels read the words of Thomas Edison several weeks after the sinking of the Lusitania, he perceived a means for

navigating a politically narrow strait between Wilson’s slow-go approach to military preparedness, on the one side, and the preparedness lobby’s ever louder calls for a much faster buildup and mobilization, on the other.
16 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Edison’s characterization of the war as “a matter of machines rather

than men” in the New York Times article was the key to a potential

compromise, Daniels surmised. According to the great inventor, the

foundation of success in modern warfare was not massive military

expenditure and immediate mobilization of large standing military

forces. Success would come instead through the unparalleled ability

to quickly develop and manufacture the best and latest military technology via the kind of inventive insight and research that had become the modus operandi at a growing roster of science-based industrial laboratories. Researchers and engineers at General Electric, Corning Glass Works, Westinghouse, E.I. duPont de Nemours, and, of

course, Edison’s own invention factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, all

were applying science in pursuit of new and better things. “Better living through chemistry” was how DuPont would later describe its essence. As Daniels saw it, a military version in the form of a naval

research laboratory would yield military brawn through the exercise

of brains focused on inventions of military consequence.

On July 7, Daniels sent a letter to Edison asking for his help. Echoing the great inventor’s own ideas described in the New York Times

article, Daniels wrote:

 “One of the imperative needs of the Navy, in my judgment,

is machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive

genius of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare as

shown abroad, and it is my intention . . . to establish, at the

earliest possible moment, a department of invention and development, to which all ideas and suggestions, either from the service or from civilian inventors, can be referred for determination

as to whether they contain practical suggestions for us to take up

and perfect.”7

Daniels, a former newspaper editor well-versed in the power of

the media, laid bare in his letter the crucial public relations role

Edison could play:

“Such a department will, of course, have to be eventually supported by Congress with sufficient appropriations made for its
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 17

The Naval Consulting Board as well as some Navy Department

officials surround Thomas Edison and Josephus Daniels, who are

seated behind the desk.

proper development . . . To get this support, Congress must be

made to feel that the idea is supported by the people, and I feel

that our chances of getting the public interested and back of this

project will be enormously increased if we can have, at the start,

some man whose inventive genius is recognized by the whole world

to assist us in consultation from time to time on matters of sufficient importance to bring to his attention. You are recognized by

all of us as the one man above all others who can turn dreams into

realities and who has at his command, in addition to his own

wonderful mind, the finest facilities in the world for such work.”8

Having become a de facto catalyst for this high profile courtship,

the New York Times was happy to print a front page story on July 13

about the first outcome. The headline read “Edison Will Head Navy

Test Board.” Daniels, who was interested in appeasing the preparedness lobby, could have written the sub-headline of the article, “Best

Engineering Genius of the Nation to Act with Naval Officers in Strengthening Sea Power.”9 The crux of the article was that Edison had agreed

to help organize what became known as the Naval Consulting Board

(NCB), whose charge would be to identify and shepherd state-of-theart military inventions that would prepare the United States for what-
18 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ever military challenges might spring up. On July 16, the New York

Times quoted Daniels saying he hoped to have “a great naval laboratory in Washington.”10

Of the board’s two-dozen initial members, 22 were selected from

11 national science and engineering societies. For the most part, they

were luminaries in the realm of science and technology. From the

American Chemical Society, for example, came Leo H. Baekeland, already famous and on his way to great wealth for his invention several

years earlier of Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic material that

would show up in everything from telephones to washing machine

agitators to brush handles. Willis R. Whitney, another illustrious member of the board, was director of the General Electric Company’s corporate research laboratory, a pioneer facility founded in 1900 that

became a model for company after company. Running the Naval Consulting Board as its chairman was Edison. His assistant, Miller Reese

Hutchinson, who later claimed to have orchestrated the entire creation of the Naval Consulting Board including the arrangement of

the Edison interview with Edward Marshall, was appointed to the

board as a special delegate.11

Edison broached the idea of a naval laboratory during the very

first meeting of the board on October 7, 1915. The following March,

a five-member delegation of the board, including Edison, briefed the

Committee on Naval Affairs in the United States House of Representatives. During his remarks, Edison surprised other members of the

board’s delegation when he described a grandiose and hardly realistic vision of a lab capable of fantastic feats of engineering and manufacturing, such as building a new submarine in 15 days. More cautious members of the delegation felt compelled to delicately assure

the committee that the lab they were proposing would operate at a

less reckless pace. Even during this pitch to the very governing body

that would recommend for or against federal funding for such a laboratory, internal differences on the board were evident.

The Congressmen apparently were neither alarmed by Edison’s

hyperbole nor by the failure of the delegation to clearly and uniformly
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 19

define the purpose of the “Experimental and Research Laboratory,” as

the proposed facility first became known. On August 29, 1916, following the recommendation by the Committee on Naval Affairs, Congress appropriated $1,000,000 for the ill-defined facility.

What would become the Naval Research Laboratory, or NRL, now

existed on paper. The act of Congress appropriating the Laboratory’s

initial funding for fiscal year 1917 included the following description

of the Laboratory’s mission:

EXPERIMENTAL AND RESEARCH LABORATORY: For laboratory and research work on the subject of gun erosion, torpedo

motive power, the gyroscope, submarine guns, protection against

submarine, torpedo and mine attack, improvement of submarine

attachments, improvement and development in submarine engines, storage batteries and propulsion, aeroplanes and aircraft,

improvement in radio installations, and such other necessary work

for the benefit of Government service, including the construction, equipment, and operation of a laboratory, the employment

of scientific civilian assistants as may become necessary, to be

expended upon the direction of the Secretary of the Navy (limit

of cost not to exceed $1,500,000), $1,000,000.12

The amount of funding, which did reach the legally defined limit

of $1,500,000 in a supplemental appropriation in March, 1917, fell

significantly short of the $5,000,000 startup cost and $2,500,000 annual operating cost that the Naval Consulting Board had estimated

would be needed.

Inadequate funding, however, was the smaller of the obstacles that

would end up delaying the birth of the Laboratory. Two different

clashes—one on the scale of individual human beings, the other on a

planetary scale—would bring the paper lab close to a stillbirth ending.

The local clash focused on the function and location of the new

lab. Of the 61 locations submitted by board members and others,

including Congressmen looking to pump up the prestige and visibility of their districts, three became serious contenders: Annapolis,

Maryland; Washington, DC; and Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
20 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Annapolis quickly became the majority choice. It was close to

Washington, DC. It was already the home of the Naval Academy. And

it was situated on an accessible yet protected harbor in the Chesapeake Bay. What’s more, it already hosted an Engineering Experiment

Laboratory that was suitable for relatively efficient and inexpensive

expansion into the more versatile Navy laboratory.

Edison, however, vehemently argued that Sandy Hook was the

wisest site. It was close to New York, from which all types of supplies

and skilled labor could be had, he argued. It, too, was accessible to

Navy vessels. But the real meat of the rift was the link between the

location and the way the new lab would be run. Sandy Hook was just

40 miles south of Edison’s West Orange laboratory. He believed the

proximity would enable him personally to do what was necessary for

the naval lab to succeed, an outcome he was sure public opinion placed

on his shoulders. At Sandy Hook, Edison could more readily wield

control over the lab without interference from Naval officers and government officials whom he would never trust to run a useful research

laboratory.

The “laboratory always in my mind has been for only one purpose, to work under civilian conditions away from naval and government conditions,” he told the board at a November 1916 meeting. It

was to be a civilian laboratory that has “nothing to do with the Navy

except that if any naval officer has an idea, he can go there and have it

made.”13

Part of Edison’s strong disdain for, and opposition to, direct naval

participation in the lab likely derived from a well-publicized inquiry

earlier in the year that blamed a new type of storage battery for submarines being developed by Edison’s company for a deadly hydrogen

explosion on a submarine as it sat moored in New York harbor. Despite the eminent inventor’s vehement protest, the inquiry squarely

blamed the Edison battery, while Edison pegged the blame on operating procedures on the submarine. The Navy’s Bureau of Engineering adopted the inquiry’s assignment of blame.14
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 21

The location debate culminated in a December 1916 meeting of

the board. The majority opinion in favor of the Annapolis site won

out over Edison’s lone demand that Sandy Hook be the place. The

board’s recommendation put Secretary Daniels in a difficult position.

Had the lone dissenter been anyone but the iconic Edison, Daniels

may have been able to simply let democratic process play out. At the

same time, there was no way he could accede to the Edison plan,

which amounted to using Navy money to build a laboratory in which

the Navy would essentially be subordinate to civilians. Daniels chose

a third option: inaction. His hope was that Edison still might be

swayed.

But the world did not stop turning as the Edison vs the board

match came to this stalemate. In 1916, German submarines had sunk

nearly twice as much tonnage of British merchant ships than in 1915.

The maritime carnage continued to escalate in 1917 to a point where

the Germans appeared within reach of their stated goal to break the

island nation of Great Britain economically. That is when the U.S.

entered the war.

Submarines were emerging as perhaps the pivotal technology in

the war, but other products of military science and technology were

wreaking new and awful kinds of death that would forever change

the relationship of war and technology. For one thing, ever-improving mass manufacturing practices were churning out unprecedented

amounts of war materiel, arms, and munitions. More ominous was

the German introduction on April 22, 1915 of the first large-scale use

of chemical warfare agents. From cylinders, they released 168 tons of

ground-hugging, yellow-green chlorine gas into the trenches on the

Western Front in Ypres, France. The Allies suffered 5,000 casualties.15

It now had become a chemist’s war, too. There would be no turning

back—warfare and science had become inextricably connected.

Meanwhile, Edison remained unmoved in his opinion that Sandy

Hook was the appropriate location for the unborn Navy laboratory

and no forward action was taken to make the laboratory real. As his-
22 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

torian David Allison put it, “the same stubbornness that had characterized the inventor’s search for a practical light bulb, which the world

of science had called impossible, now determined his stand on the

research laboratory.”16

In lieu of the new corporate Navy laboratory where researchers

should already have been at work on research crucial to the Navy, the

Navy expanded efforts at its Radio Research Laboratory, then housed

at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) on Connecticut Avenue in

Washington, DC, and at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory at the Anacostia

Naval Air Station. Some antisubmarine work was underway at the

Engineering Experiment Station in Annapolis, but the Navy set up

new groups in this field at Nahant, Massachusetts and at New London, Connecticut.

In an attempt to end the delay in the opening of the Navy’s corporate laboratory, Frank J. Sprague, a member of the board who had

graduated from the Naval Academy and became well-known for developing electric trolley trains in the U.S. and other countries, including Germany, wrote to Edison:

“This is a frank attempt to compose the present unfortunate conditions of affairs and save the Naval Consulting Board and possibly the Secretary of the Navy, from very unpleasant criticism. A

year and a half has passed since Congress appropriated a million

dollars for the creation and operation of ‘An Experimental and

Research Laboratory.’ At the time of this appropriation a large

part of the world was at war, but despite the fact that for nearly

ten months we have ourselves been involved in this vast conflict,

the end of which no one can foresee, the naval laboratory remains a dream. No site has been selected, no detailed plans determined, no constructive steps whatever taken. And why? Because of differences of viewpoint which have thus far prevented

that unanimity of decision which the Secretary of the Navy has

so strongly urged as a basis for his official action.”17

In this letter, dated January 30, 1918, Sprague gave Edison an ultimatum. Either join in a compromise in which the Laboratory is built
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 23

at a Washington, DC site known as the Bellevue Magazine, or disband the board entirely. The latter choice undoubtedly would lead to

humiliating Congressional inquiries and the in utero death of a lab

that everyone involved still wanted to be born.

Everyone except for Edison, that is. His response to Sprague’s entreaty was to stop participating in the planning of the Laboratory.

Distasteful as the jilting might have been, it also meant that the great

inventor was no longer blocking the way. Board members quickly

recommended the Bellevue site to the Navy Department and they

drew up plans for the Laboratory’s physical plant. By mid-year, the

plans had been approved and were in the hands of Secretary Daniels

and the heads of the Navy’s materiel bureaus, such as the Bureau of

Steam Engineering and the Bureau of Ordnance, for whom the Laboratory was intended to serve. Daniels remained troubled by Edison’s

estrangement, however. Without Edison’s imprimatur, Daniels still

refused to sign off on the project.

By the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, the Laboratory

remained trapped in blueprints. By now, the board, which still felt

the Laboratory ought to be built, felt impotent to take the matter any

further. If the Laboratory was ever going to become a real place, the

momentum would have to come from elsewhere.

Almost a year later, on October 1, 1919, that momentum arrived.

At the urging of the recently promoted Rear Admiral William Strother

Smith, who had been the Navy’s liaison to the Navy Consulting Board

throughout World War I, the chiefs of the material bureaus (Bureaus

of Steam Engineering, Construction and Repair, Ordnance and Yards,

and Docks) sent Secretary Daniels a memorandum recommending

the “construction of the Naval Experimental and Research

Laboratory . . . after the general lines of the report of the Naval Consulting Board.”18

Now coming from his own Navy brass, Daniels finally acknowledged the recommendation and authorized construction of the Laboratory at the Bellevue site. A construction contract was granted a year
24 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Secretary Daniels

breaks ground for

Building 1 in 1920.

later and ground finally was broken on December 6, 1920. By mid1923, the Laboratory’s original cluster of five buildings along the

Potomac River just across from Alexandria would be ready for its tenants.

The site was in a section in the southeast sector of the capitol city

just south of where the Anacostia River flows into the Potomac River.

Although a new pier had to be built to accommodate Navy vessels, it

was a convenient location for the new lab. For one thing, the U.S.

Navy had purchased a portion of these grounds in 1873 in order to

relocate an explosives-laden Naval magazine at the U.S. Navy Yard

that had been on the other side of the Anacostia River. That move

occurred after the city’s Board of Health deemed the original location

of the magazine too close to the White House for comfort.19

Just before work on the grounds began, Daniels made one lastditch attempt to secure the support from Edison that had proven as

elusive as it was desired. In the letter, Daniels said he was going to

push for civilian direction (in cooperation with Naval officers) of the

Laboratory and he wanted Edison to outline the “plans and direction” of this arrangement. The 73-year-old inventor answered by formally resigning from the Naval Consulting Board.

As it turned out, Edison’s fear that the Laboratory would be run

by Naval officers was borne out. Part of the transition of the Wilson
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 25

administration to the administration of the new president, Herbert

Hoover, was the replacement of Daniels with the new Secretary of the

Navy, Edwin Denby. In a prescient letter to Denby dated March 17,

1921, the chairman of the Naval Consulting Board, William Saunders,

recommended that Naval officers ought to be the executives who carry

out Navy Department policy at the Laboratory, but that technically

trained civilians unencumbered by Navy traditions ought to be in

charge of the experimental work. “It is the hope of a large majority of

this Board that you will decide to place a civilian director in charge of

the laboratory,” wrote Saunders.20 Nevertheless, six months later,

Denby appointed Rear Admiral William Strother Smith as the

Laboratory’s first director in recognition of his important role in the

Laboratory’s gestation. But Smith retired two days later, and his successor, Captain E.L. Bennett, was named to the post several months

later. (A listing of all of the military directors and commanding officers for NRL’s first 75 years appears in Appendix A.)

Meanwhile, the Laboratory buildings were also slowly emerging

from farmland on the Bellevue site in 1922. However, a potential

show-stopper loomed. Congress had not appropriated a single dollar

for running the Laboratory in 1923 when it looked like the new facility would actually be ready for business. With neither a war, nor

Daniels, nor Edison, to champion the Laboratory’s cause, legislators

in Congress were unmoved by the pleas for a piddling $100,000 of

operating funds for fiscal year 1923 by Captain E.L. Bennett, who

already had succeeded Admiral Smith as the unbudgeted Laboratory’s

director.

Although Congress did finally come through with that small sum

in 1924, the money didn’t even cover overhead and staff salaries. So if

any of the Navy bureaus wanted the Laboratory to look into some

problem, they’d have to pay for the work from their own budgets.

Only the Bureau of Engineering opened its purse and embraced the

Laboratory as an opportunity. At the urging of officers under him, the

Bureau’s chief, Admiral J.K. Robinson, authorized his Bureau’s own
26 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

research in radio and sound, which focused on submarine detection

(and that had been dispersed across many facilities and the Navy Yard),

to be centralized at the new Bellevue laboratory.

Even before the Laboratory’s commissioning, Admiral Smith received a request by the Bureau of Engineering to set up shop in the

top floor of the new building designated for research. He then paid a

visit to Commander Stanford C. Hooper, head of the Bureau’s Radio

Division and the man who initiated the Bureau’s connection with the

Laboratory. “[Admiral Smith] told me that not a single desk of any

Bureau had requested any space or help there at the Naval Research

Laboratory except my division,” Hooper later recalled. “So he said,

‘You can have the whole place. You just tell me what you want to do

down there and send down your men and the money and I will have

it done just the way you say and your men will be directly under your

division.”21

The Laboratory finally was no longer merely ideas in peoples’

minds or drawings on paper. Its first buildings were nearly completed.

It had a director. And there were two dozen researchers at the Naval

Radio Research Laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, the

Aircraft Radio Laboratory at the Naval Station in Anacostia, and at the

Annapolis Experiment Station in Maryland (where sound researchers

working on submarine detection previously in New London had been

transferred) waiting to move in.

The NRL that awaited its christening on the hot sunny morning of

July 2, 1923 was composed of a cluster of white, painted buildings of

industrial appearance on 271⁄2 acres of weedy, construction-marred

grounds. Building 1 served a hodgepodge of functions. It had the only

research facilities while also housing administrative offices, a humanoperated telephone switchboard, and the library. The Machine Shop

and Foundry were equipped with a state-of-the-art complement of

heavy and industrial machinery: lathes, milling machines, drills, borers, grinders, metal punches, band saws, jigs saws, metal melting furnaces, forges, and strap hammers. A railroad track owned by the B&O
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 27

NRL in its first year, 1923.

Building 1, which housed

the Laboratory’s first

research spaces, stands by

itself in the foreground.

Starting from the bank of

the Potomac River and

forming a line opposite

Building 1 is the coal-fired

power station, pattern shop,

foundry, and machine shop.

Railroad company ran directly into the largest machine bay so that

especially heavy equipment could be unloaded by crane directly from

the cars.

Forming a line with the shop buildings toward the river was a

power station with a tall smokestack. Its location along the edge of

Potomac River made boat delivery of coal a relatively easy affair.

Just south and east of the grounds were cornfields, overgrown

riverbanks, a home for the aged and infirm, a burial ground for hundreds of Washington, DC’s indigent dead,19 and farmland destined to

become the Blue Plains Sewage Treatment plant.

Peering upriver from the Laboratory’s power station, the eye would

have been drawn to the audacious Washington Monument. The stark

obelisk’s skyward attitude aptly symbolized both the Capitol’s growing geopolitical importance and also the literally extra-global reach

the Laboratory itself would earn in both military and civilian arenas.

The primary official speaker at the ceremony was the Assistant

Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., son of former Presi-
28 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

dent Teddy and cousin of the future president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He stood on the front steps of a brand new three-story building that

his Navy’s Bureau of Docks and Yards had built. Having had averted

several near abortions during its troubled seven-year gestation since

its conception in 1915, the Laboratory finally had made it to an actual birthday.

Theodore, Jr.’s address was not recorded, but historian David K.

Allison surmises the young Roosevelt likely reiterated a sentiment he

had conveyed earlier to the House Subcommittee on Appropriations.

“I feel very strongly that the Navy must not be allowed to petrify,”

Roosevelt told the Subcommittee the previous year. “We will petrify

unless we are constantly reaching out for new and better things. The

research laboratory is in direct line with this thought.”22

On the day of the commissioning, the Assistant Secretary was almost certainly unaware that one of those “new and better things”

had already dawned. Two of the Naval Research Laboratory’s first hires

in the Radio Division, A. (Albert) Hoyt Taylor and Leo C. Young, had

registered, even before the Laboratory’s doors officially opened, an

historic observation of radio waves reflecting from the wooden steamer

Dorchester that happened to be passing by on the Potomac. It was one

of the first glimpses of what was to become known as radar. Taylor’s

and Young’s observation presaged NRL’s role in effecting dramatic

changes not only in the U.S. Navy but in the entire technological

landscape.

 Listening to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at the commissioning ceremony were Navy officers, members of the laboratory’s first few dozen

employees, and their guests. Also attending were several members of

the Naval Consulting Board. Notably absent was Thomas Edison. If

he were there, he probably would have had a smirk on his face. As he

saw it, the Laboratory was not the way he thought it ought to be and

so was destined to become a cash- sapping government facility where

used-up Navy officers would go and from which nothing useful would

emerge.23
chapter 2 – the laboratory that almost wasn’t ♦ 29

Not a single reporter from Washington, DC ventured to the other

side of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers to attend the ceremony,

although the July 1 Washington Star did mention the Laboratory’s imminent opening.

“For the rest, the opening of the new venture passed almost unnoticed,” wrote A. Hoyt Taylor as he recalled the first 25 years of NRL

many years later. He had by then become world famous for his role in

the invention of radar.24
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 31

C h a p t e r 3

First Steps

31

NRL’s original physical endowment indeed was humble. Its starting complement of about 20 researchers and technicians, all of them

men, brought their own research equipment with them, some of it

even arriving by barge. The hangar-like shop building might have been

nearly empty at first had the Navy not received 34 train cars of surplus machinery and equipment from the Army. Another 25 train cars

worth of scrap materials—cables, antenna wire, hunks of brass and

copper, meters, and countless components from old or not-yet-built

radio and sound equipment—that would affectionately become

known as “the dump” arrived at the Laboratory along with the two

submarine detection researchers who came from the Naval Experiment Station in New London to comprise NRL’s entire original Sound

Division.

Albert Hoyt Taylor, the only card-carrying physicist on the Radio

Division’s original staff of 18 and who was destined to achieve the

kind of institutional stature that gets campus streets named after you,

rated “the dump” as a godsend during the Laboratory’s “lean and

hungry days of the middle and late ‘twenties,” as Taylor described

them later in a memoir. Wrote Taylor: “The Foundry was able to make

use of a great many of the metal parts [from the dump], recasting

them into devices designed by the Laboratory engineers . . . It was no

uncommon sight to see two or three engineers poking around through

this pile looking for some usable item.“1
32 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

These were years when direct Congressional appropriations for

NRL inched slowly upward from zero dollars in 1923 to $200,400 in

1929. Total funding, with the majority coming from the Navy’s Bureau of Engineering and Bureau of Ships, rose from about $296,000

to a high of $569,000 in 1928.2

 The original vision of the Naval

Consulting Board called for an operating budget of nearly five times

that peak value. Frugality, therefore, was more of a necessity than

a virtue.

Money was just one of the early worries. The electrical distribution system was far from complete when the Laboratory opened. Power

to run the research equipment in Building 1 was run from the master

switch box through temporary wires running along walls and floors.

Night-time work was done under a maddening flickering light since

the homemade system for converting the 25-cycle-per-second electrical supply from the Potomac Power Company into a conventional

60-cycle-per-second supply (a frequency high enough that human eyes

do not discern its ebbs and flows through lights) was shut off every

day at 4:30 PM. For years, there was no heat in the winter for the

offices on the top floor of Building 1.

Balancing such shortfalls in the physical plant at the Bellevue site

was the abundance of talent amongst NRL’s first scientists, engineers,

Albert Hoyt Taylor, senior radio scientist at the Laboratory

until his retirement after World War II
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 33

The “dump,” a heap of military surplus, junked electrical equipment, wire,

and scads of other items, was a prized resource for the Laboratory’s early,

extremely money-conscious researchers.

machinists, draftsmen, toolmakers, laborers, and administrators. Collectively they brought with them the kind of laboratory experience,

engineering skill, and machining and manufacturing know-how needed

to devise and build state-of-the-art equipment, mostly in the category

of radio communication gear. One particularly valuable ingredient of

NRL’s brew of human capability was the kind of raw scientific acumen

that sees seeds of important discoveries or technologies in otherwise

unassuming movements of dials, in static on speakers, in stacks of silent data, or even in previously trodden technical territories deemed

unpromising by less imaginative scientific prospectors.

The predominance of radio research during NRL’s debut years was

partly due to the Bureau of Engineering’s initiative to consolidate its

handful of physically separated radio research efforts. It also was a reflection of the technological and cultural ascendance of radio during

the first decades of the 20th Century.
34 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The technology of wireless transmission of electromagnetic signals, which became known as radio, began to take form in the 1880s

when the German physicist Heinrich Hertz first demonstrated the

practical ability to send long distance signals virtually instantaneously

between two locations without the use of wires physically connecting

the locations. Like many physicists of his day, Hertz was inspired by

the work of the Englishman James Clerk Maxwell, who in the 1860s

and 1870s laid out the general principles—whose mathematical manifestations have gone down in history as “Maxwell’s equations”—by

which electricity and magnetism combine as the fountain of electromagnetic phenomena. Within this wide-ranging category of nature

are such things as the way electrical currents and magnetism can give

rise to each other and the manner by which radiation such as light

and radio waves travel, propagate, reflect, and otherwise find their

way from an origin to a destination.

Until Hertz’s demonstration of wireless transmission of signals,

the most advanced communication was wire-carried telegraphy, which

already by the time of Hertz’s demonstration included transoceanic

cables. (Before radio was known as radio, it was called “wireless telegraphy.”) There was no practical way to link ships at sea to telegraphic

systems, however. So before wireless communication, ship-to-ship and

ship-to-shore naval communication had always been limited to a visual range within which lights, hand signals, or flags could be used.

When a ship left its station, it could be a long time before word passed

between the two.

The potential tactical power of wireless communications was not

lost on the world’s navies. In the final months of the 19th Century, the

U.S. Navy had demonstrated its first wireless communication using

equipment built by the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. A

year later, Marconi would dazzle the world by achieving the first transatlantic radio communication. By 1915, the year NRL was conceived,

radio transmitting and receiving equipment was proliferating on Naval vessels and on much newer types of airborne vehicles, including
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 35

Louis Gebhard was one of NRL’s early radio engineers. To his left is one

of the Navy’s first high-power, high-frequency radio sets that Gebhard

designed for the dirigible Shenandoah.

aircraft and dirigibles. All of this radio equipment remained in early

stages of development and was beset with limitations in range, quality of reception, and user-friendliness.3

It would have been nice if the Navy could have ridden the radio

wave that was sweeping the land. When NRL opened its doors, public

interest and commercial investment in radio broadcasting was in a

rapid ascent. In these early days of radio, commercial development

sensibly focused on the vast market for home radios. For one thing,

the Navy had specialized communication needs including compact

and mobile transmitters suited for a fleet of far-flung seagoing ships

and submarines and aircraft whose constraints were even more pronounced. And given the Navy’s role in the world, Navy brass wanted

radio systems capable of providing private, rather than public, communication whose whole point was to reach whoever wanted to listen. The specialized needs meant that any development costs borne

by industry to develop Navy equipment would likely gather far less

return on the investment than would be possible in civilian-based
36 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

markets. Moreover, the Navy was downsizing and so it represented a

much smaller and less promising market.

The “consolidation of the Navy’s research and development activities at NRL in 1923 made the Laboratory the Navy’s sole in-house

organization with full responsibility for advancing the Navy’s radio

capability, with little outside assistance,” according to Louis Gebhard,

one of the original radio engineers at NRL who also would achieve

the status of an eminent elder.4

 Even before NRL opened, he had

worked with Taylor at the Great Lakes Naval Radio Station when they

were both serving there in the Navy Reserve. Taylor, a Chicago-born

physics professor before WWI, joined the Naval Reserve in 1917 and

by 1923 had risen to become the Navy’s leading radio scientist. The

two of them, Gebhard and Taylor, remain forever connected at NRL

at the intersection of two campus roads named after them.

Besides Taylor, who was the sole physicist, head of the Radio Division, and an “ideas man,” according to Gebhard,5

 most of the original employees in the division were people more inclined to put ideas

into hardware; that is to say, they were engineers. Those pushing the

frontiers of radio technology resembled today’s computer aficionados. Many of the radio men at NRL had grown up fiddling with wire

induction coils (that could drive speakers), quartz crystals for selecting frequencies, batteries, electron tubes (to amplify tiny signals from

the crystals), antennae; in other words, the guts of radios.

In these first decades of the 20th Century, the anatomy of technology was more self revealing. Knobs turned, metal touched metal, dials swung from number to number, parts moved. The ways things

worked were more obvious than in present day technologies in which

so much action takes place as invisible electronic flows coursing

through microscopic components packed inside thumbnail-sized

chips. It was with their tools in hand and radio parts all asunder that

many in the Radio Division had developed an intuitive relationship

with the unseen electromagnetic waves that are the essence of radio.

When work was starting at the Laboratory, Taylor made a fateful

decision about the direction the Radio Division would take. That move
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 37

would end up helping to pull the Laboratory out of the tenuous ‘20s

when funding remained minimal and survival was not even guaranteed. “Probably the most important service of the Radio Division in

the early days was the ‘selling’ of the high-frequency programs to the

Navy, and, indirectly, to the radio communication industry,” Taylor

later assessed. The real buy-in from the Navy’s Communication Service was won when Leo Young, who previously with Taylor had observed the radio reflections off of the Dorchester, showed that a 50-

watt high-frequency transmitter (the power of a single light bulb) could

outperform a gargantuan 250,000-watt long-wave transmitter at Annapolis in the task of communicating with Navy facilities in the Canal Zone.6

Taylor’s initial decision to focus on high-frequency technology at

first seems arcane. Radio pioneers like Marconi who were aiming for

long distance transmission found that electromagnetic radiation of

low frequencies was more practical than high-frequency radiation for

broadcasting radio signals. Lower frequencies were easier to produce

to begin with and also to amplify on the receiving end. Taylor opted

to buck the trend. He directed his men toward higher frequencies.

The move won him early skeptics amongst his funders at the Bureau

of Engineering who knew how erratic both transmission and reception were at these frequencies; the quality of radio communications

actually depended on what time of day or year it was. On the other

hand, the energy carried by higher frequency radiation seemed to dissipate faster, so it held promise for more secure ship-to-ship communication that unwanted listeners further off would not be able to receive.

Part of this trend-bucking decision, however, was made for Taylor, not by him. Despite Navy objections, the commercial radio broadcast industry had won control of the lower frequencies between 550

kHz (kilohertz: thousand cycles per second) and 1.5 MHz (million

cycles per second).

Still, part of Taylor’s decision was a leap of faith into unfamiliar

frequencies. “Although, we did not see the tremendous possibilities
38 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Leo Young stands by a high-frequency transmitter whose

novel crystal frequency control system enabled communication between Australia and Washington, DC.

[beyond expected gains in areas such as ship-to-ship communications]

for the use of high frequencies in the field of naval communications,

we did see that they would certainly be extremely valuable, provided

we could sufficiently stabilize transmitters and receivers to make use

of such frequencies practical under naval conditions,” Taylor later recalled.7

Taylor’s penchant for the higher frequencies had additional roots

in an earlier time in 1922 just months before NRL officially opened

up. At the time, he was at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory at the Naval

Air Station in Anacostia, just upstream from the construction going

on at the Bellevue site that was to become NRL. There he worked

closely with Young, then a 31-year-old radio engineer raised in Ohio.

Like Gebhard, Young

joined the Naval Reserve and ended up

working with Taylor at

the Great Lakes Naval

Radio Station before

coming to NRL. To

enter radio territory of

ever higher frequencies, Taylor and Young

tweaked circuits, amplifier tubes, and anything else that might

seem to help. All

kinds of technical difficulties arose in going

to higher frequencies,

not the least of which

was amplifying the

comparatively weaker

high-frequency sig-
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 39

nals with enough fidelity so that they could reproduce the intended

transmitted signal.

Making the task seem doable to Young was a new device, which

became known as a superheterodyne. Young had read about it in a

technical paper published in 1921. After reading the paper, Young,

who had been building his own radio sets since 1905 when he was 14

years old, made a copy of the device. In a receiver, a superheterodyne

could convert hard-to-amplify high-frequency signals to lower frequencies, which were much easier to amplify. The “device gave us a wonderful tool for developing receivers for the higher [frequency] band,”

Taylor recalled.8

The radio men were now set to bushwhack into new radio territory. When still at the Naval Air Station, Taylor and Young field-tested

a high-frequency (60 MHz) transmitter and a portable receiver they

had built as part of their general search for new frequencies, or channels, that would be of use to the Navy. They noticed something that

would prove to be spectacularly important.

The first clues came from experiments in which the two radio scientists took the receiver for a car ride around the station. Not only

could objects between them and the transmitter block transmission

completely, but buildings reflected the radio waves. The reflected signals would fade in and out as the antenna accepted the invisible series of electromagnetic peaks and valleys of the reflected radio waves.

Still, with all of those buildings of different sizes and shapes, there

were a lot of reflections at a lot of different angles and it was difficult

to see what was going on.

To get a cleaner picture of the signal pattern, Taylor and Young

drove their receiver to nearby Haines Point, a tongue of land (now

known as West Potomac Park) at the confluence of the Potomac and

Anacostia Rivers. With only a half-mile of water between them and

the transmitter, they figured there would be little to interfere with

their radio waves. When they put the receiver onto the sea wall away

from trees and other potential direct obstructions, they indeed re-
40 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ceived good solid signals. Then they noticed something odd. “We

began to get quite a characteristic fading in and out—a slow fading in

and out of the signal,” Young later recalled. “It didn’t take long to

determine that that was due to a ship coming up and around Alexandria.”9

 Radio signals from the transmitter across the river were bouncing off the wooden steamship Dorchester and into the receiver at Haines

Point.

This “detection of moving objects by radio,” as the men first described the general technique destined to become radar. It was an

idea that several independent groups around the world were independently happening onto. Their respective work subsequently would

undergo intense, parallel development in secret to become a military

technology that was pivotal to the outcome of World War II.

The idea of using radio for more than just communication was in

the air in the early 1920s. Just a month before the Haines Point experiment, for one, Marconi reported he had observed the reflection

of “electric waves” from metallic objects and that such reflections might

become the basis of detecting and tracking ships.10 He later would

become involved in radar development in Italy.

Within days of their own observations, Taylor shot a letter off to

the Bureau of Engineering asking for further financial support. He

believed the radio technique could be developed so that Navy ships

at sea could use it for detecting enemy vessels. “Possibly an arrangement could be worked out whereby destroyers located on a line a

number of miles apart could be immediately aware of the passage of

the enemy between any two destroyers in the line, irrespective of fog,

darkness or smoke screen,” Taylor suggested to the bureau in his letter.11 The bureau did not bite.

Taylor and Young shelved the radio detection project. Several

months later, they packed their gear and moved to their new professional home at the Naval Research Laboratory where Taylor became

chief radio scientist of the Radio Division. Young and Gebhard became top assistants.
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 41

The Radio Division’s primary role in life throughout the 1920s

amounted to doing whatever design and development work was necessary to get high-frequency radio equipment into the Fleet. This meant

the staff had to work in several areas: antenna development, frequency

control tactics, electron tube technology, and new power generation

techniques. As the division worked these problems out and built prototypes, specifications for production models went out to private companies like the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and Westinghouse

Electric and Manufacturing Co. The military-industrial complex is not

new.

 This task was squarely within the realm of engineering, but the

task of bringing high-frequency systems into dependable operational

condition also ushered the Radio Division into basic science. It was a

case in which a specific task of technology development drove the

researchers to ask scientific questions whose answers might lead to

new technology whose behavior, in turn, might lead to new scientific

questions. That mutual bootstrapping of science and technology would

become an NRL trademark.

To harness high frequencies for radio technology the Navy could

depend on, there were basic mysteries about the behavior of radio

waves that researchers had to solve. For one thing, they needed to

better understand the environmental factors that, for better or worse,

affect high-frequency radio waves as they propagate from the transmitters to receivers. They needed to understand the limits and characteristics of the waves’ propagation at different times of the day and

year, and at different frequencies.

These basic questions brought the Radio Division face-to-face with

the upper reaches of the atmosphere, which theorists for 20 years had

been suggesting could become electrically charged and thereby function like a mirror for radio waves.

The idea of an upper-atmosphere radio mirror made general sense

of some remarkable observations and feats. For one thing, Marconi

had sent radio signals clear across the Atlantic in 1901, which meant
42 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

radio waves somehow were bending around the curvature of the Earth

instead of reaching the horizon and then ”falling off the Earth” by

continuing forward at a tangent toward space. Over the next two decades, theorists worked on explanations for this Earth-hugging property of radio waves. By 1924, the British scientist Sir Joseph Larmor

had developed a mathematical model of radio wave reflection in which

free electrons in the upper atmosphere comprised a “conducting layer”

that worked like a radio mirror. This conducting layer become known

as the ionosphere.

Meanwhile, Taylor and his NRL colleagues had been making some

remarkable observations of long distance transmission of high-frequency radio waves. With help from a network of globally scattered

radio amateurs who could report back to NRL by postcard, the NRL

scientists found that a signal could reach a distant receiver while skipping past receivers in between. “Skip distances” is what Taylor called

the gaps of radio silence. Larmor’s theory was relevant, but it could

only explain reflection of lower frequency radio signals.

In an exercise of pure physics, Taylor teamed with Edward O.

Hulburt, who had just arrived at NRL from Johns Hopkins University

to head the Laboratory’s first new division, the Heat and Light Division. The two aimed to develop a more generalized mathematical

account of the ionosphere that would explain propagation of both

low- and high-frequency radio waves. Hulburt later credited this work

with putting NRL on the scientific map because its significance went

beyond technical details of military communication and into the realm

of basic science. Much later, a panel of the American Physical Society

would rate this work as one of the 100 most important applied research papers of the century.12

Even before Taylor and Hulburt published their theoretical work

on ionospheric reflection in 1926, Young and Gebhard had been

drawn into the ionosphere research community by Gregory Breit and

Merle A. Tuve, who were major players in the field at the nearby

Carnegie Institution of Washington. By using the atomic lattice of a
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 43

quartz crystal to stabilize otherwise unsteady oscillations within the

radio transmitter circuitry, Young and Gebhard had built a state-ofthe-art transmitter whose high-frequency emissions were uniquely

unwavering. For Breit and Tuve, that constancy was the key to confidently measuring the height of the ionosphere. They had access to

other transmitters, but the emission frequency of these fluctuated.

For them, transmitters flawed by these fluctuations were akin to using

a ruler with drifting length markings. With Young and Gebhard’s stable

high-frequency transmitter, the Carnegie duo was able to determine

that the ionospheric height varied both during the day and the time

of year within a range of 55 to 130 miles.

Give scientists an inch and they want a mile, of course. To look at

the upper atmosphere with radio waves was to know there was something in nature that was very interesting but still out of direct reach.

The radio measurements, after all, remained an indirect means of probing the ionosphere. When word about William Goddard’s pioneering

experiments with rockets started circulating in the late 1920s, the upper

atmosphere seemed to get closer to forward-looking researchers. In

the Spring of 1927, Breit and Tuve along with Hulburt of NRL, started

to drum up support in the Navy, Army, and elsewhere for the possible

development of rockets that could reach the upper atmosphere. They

reasoned that the military might fund development on the gamble

that ordnance-tipped rockets could conceivably supplant the need

for big and tremendously expensive long-range guns. And if that were

so, the rocket-based means of delivering ordnance to an enemy could

also serve as the means to bring the tools of scientists higher in the

sky than they ever had been before.13

Though it would take almost another 20 years before rocket-based

atmospheric research got off the ground, the interest of Hulburt presaged what for NRL would literally become a cosmic journey that

would only begin with the upper atmosphere and go upward and

outward from there. What started as an engineering task to develop

new communications tools for the Navy forced NRL radio scientists
44 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

to look upward at an atmosphere whose properties were hardly known.

The mysteries of the atmosphere happened to entangle with the radio

waves the Navy researchers were learning to exploit. This entanglement, in turn, would help turn NRL into one of the most important

pioneer outposts of the Space Age.

As the Radio Division looked beyond its vacuum tubes, circuitry,

and antennae toward the upper atmosphere, NRL’s other original division, the much smaller Sound Division, was directing its attention

downward toward the vast oceanic arena of “the hidden enemy”—

submarines. The division

initially consisted of two

men: Harvey Hayes and

O.E. Dudley. Hayes had

been working on submarine

detection and other soundbased tools such as the

Sonic Depth Finder with a

group of scientists at the

Navy Engineering and Experiment Station in Annapolis. After he and

Dudley established the

Sound Division beachhead

at NRL, the group grew

slowly, one man at a time,

until it leveled off at about

a half-dozen researchers. Their primary aim in life was to develop

more capable means of detecting and tracking submarines.

The terror and carnage wrought by submarines during World War

I was part of the reason NRL was conceived in the first place. Technology for detecting submerged submarines was extremely limited. It

consisted mostly of sailors listening to the audible sounds of the sea

picked up by stethoscope-like underwater microphones called hydroHarvey Hayes was head of the Sound Division

when the Laboratory opened and would oversee

the development of much of the basic sonar

technology that was state of the art throughout

World War II.
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 45

phones. At best, a listener could tell the direction from which a submarine sound was coming, but not the sub’s distance. A hydrophoneequipped submarine resting silently, and therefore invisibly, on the

bottom actually would be in a better position to detect a sub-searching surface ship than the other way around.14

Moreover, if the surface ship was moving faster than about 6 knots

(merely a jogging pace for a weekend runner), its own cruising noise

would feed into the hydrophones and drown out any submarine

sounds. As a result, listening only made sense in slow-moving ships

whose sluggish pace rendered them more vulnerable to torpedo attack. Though Hayes and others developed various hydrophones while

working for the Navy in New London, Connecticut, late in the Great

War, hostilities ended with essentially no reliable means of detecting

the thoroughly demonstrated military menace that submarines presented.

After the submarine detection work was relocated to Annapolis,

Maryland, Hayes came to the conclusion that devices listening passively to underwater sound in the audible range would never completely solve the problem of submarine detection. When he, Dudley,

and a few truckloads of equipment arrived at NRL in April, 1923,

they brought with them this challenge: to develop a sound system

that the Navy could use for determining a submarine’s bearing and

distance from echoes of inaudible, high-frequency (ultrasonic) signals deliberately piped into the sea. In short, they were out to invent

an active listening system that later would became known as sonar, a

hybrid of three words: sounding, navigation, and ranging.

A technical key to this challenge had already been supplied by

several French researchers. In the 1880s, Pierre (who would marry

Marie Sklodowska 15 years later) and Jacques Curie reported observing a curious property in quartz crystals. They found that mechanical

stresses, such as pressure waves associated with sound transmission,

applied to the crystals resulted in a voltage generated across the crystal, a phenomenon that became known as piezoelectricity. That means
46 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

a piezoelectric crystal can detect sound. It can “listen.” When impinging upon a piezoelectric crystal like quartz, a rapid series of fluctuating pressures moving through air or water (which is one way of describing sound) generates a corresponding train of subtle mechanical

stresses and, thereby, a corresponding sequence of fluctuating voltages that can drive an oscilloscope, audio speaker, or a gauge’s needle

indicator.

A piezoelectric crystal also can “talk.” Apply a fluctuating voltage

across the faces of the crystal and it will oscillate mechanically. This,

in turn, generates sound in the medium hosting the crystal. To generate ultrasonic sound with a piezoelectric crystal, all the NRL scientists

needed to do was drive the crystal with an electric circuit that oscillates at the desired frequency.

There was precedent for this task. During World War I, the French

physicist Paul Langevin and coworkers sandwiched thin piezoelectric

quartz crystals between steel plates to build high-frequency transmitters. Although, these never saw war duty, commercial vessels began to

use them for rough depth soundings in the early 1920s when Hayes

was still in Annapolis.15 When the Sound Division began work with

quartz-based devices, no one knew what frequencies would work best

in the ocean or how to get enough power out of the ultrasonic sound

projectors to detect submarines at sufficient distances.

Just as in the Radio Division, technology and science quickly fed

on one another in the Sound Division. To determine optimal frequencies for detecting submarines, the division conducted many field

tests covering a large range of ultrasonic frequencies from those just

above the audible level (20,000 Hz) up to about 100,000 kHz. Many

of these tests were carried out in the Chesapeake Bay from a Navy

coal barge. The barge had been converted for sound research by the

addition of an oblong well in the middle into which sound projectors and microphones could be placed.

By 1928, the division was ready to test a couple of the quartzcrystal units in a more realistic naval setting. Hayes and three col-
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 47

leagues went down to Key West, Florida, where they installed the units

on two submarines. At times, the equipment on one submarine obtained echoes suggesting the location of the other submarine. More

often, however, the researchers were humbled by the curveballs nature threw them.

The ocean may appear to be a vast body of water without physical

boundaries, but it is far from that within the context of sound transmission. Hayes and his colleagues learned just how confounding oceanic venues can be. The ocean is riddled with different territories

marked by different temperatures. The horizontal or vertical boundaries separating these territories can act like mirrors to sound. Ultrasonic sound impinging at the boundaries of these strata bends to different degrees or scatters into a useless haze or even to silence. Hayes

and his team could see from their many tests that pushing acoustic

technologies for detecting objects in the oceans would require more

than making piezoelectric transducers. It also would require thoroughly knowing the environment. Interpreting underwater sound

would require basic underwater acoustic research and oceanography.

In submarine detection, therefore, the medium had become an inextricable part of the message.

Even before this realization of the need to push forward the basic

scientific understanding of the naval environment , another technical

issue springing from ultrasonic detection launched what would become a pursuit of ubiquitous importance to the evolving NRL. The

issue at hand was a search for new, better, and more capable materials. The Sound Division knew that if piezoelectric crystals were going

to become the basis of underwater detection for the world’s military

and civilian fleets, then the demand for good quality quartz crystal

was going to skyrocket. The only known supplies of such crystals were

in Brazil and Madagascar, faraway places that could easily become cut

off in the event of war. So critical was the crystal supply issue that the

Laboratory’s military director himself, Captain Edgar G. Oberlin, traveled throughout the country in search of a source of quartz crystal
48 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

that could supply the one-inch square slices then needed for the transducers.

It fell onto the shoulders of Elias Klein, a new hire to the Sound

Division in 1927, to solve the quartz supply problem. Born in Poland

in 1888, Klein earned a PhD in physics from Yale University in 1921

and taught in the Physics Department of Lehigh University in

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania before Hayes hired him into the Sound Division. Klein’s task: to develop a synthetic piezoelectric crystal superior to any others.16

Other scientists previously had found that a more complicated

crystal known as Rochelle salt had a far more powerful piezoelectric

property than quartz. It was one of the crystals that the Curie brothers

had used in their original work on the piezoelectric phenomenon.

After the Great War, Rochelle salt was becoming the stuff of phonograph pickups, microphones, loudspeakers, and other gadgets requiring electromechanical material. That included underwater sound

equipment. It turned out Rochelle crystals were better at detecting

underwater sound than quartz crystals even when the latter were ten

times larger. What’s more, the synthetic crystals were sensitive enough

to distinguish sounds of a submarine propeller from those of a searching ship. They were also good at generating underwater sound—those

famous “pings”—which meant they could work in active, echo-ranging tasks as well as in passive listening devices.

Rochelle salt had its downsides, however. For one thing, it dissolves in water. That’s no small problem when underwater technology is at issue. For them to be useful, Klein had to find some way of

encasing the material without simultaneously preventing sound from

coming into or out from the crystal. He was convinced that some

kind of rubber material could be found or made that would serve

both as a sound window and as a protective housing for the crystal

transducers. He, in turn, convinced the B.F. Goodrich Company to

take on the problem. They responded with a new kind of rubber,

rho-c.17
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 49

Piezoelectric transducers using quartz and Rochelle salt became

the heart of an early generation of Naval underwater detection systems. In 1928, the NRL extensively tested their so-called XL equipment, which consisted of slabs of quartz crystal cemented between

steel plates. They found it could detect submarines by actively sending out and listening for echoes only at distances of about three-quarters of a mile. Over the next few years, the group developed the Rochelle-salt-based JK equipment with a roughly three mile detection range

based on passive detection of propeller noise.

Hayes summed up the Naval meaning of these two systems. “The

combination of XL and JK, perfected by 1932, represented a distinct

advance in antisubmarine equipment, since the JK could be used during search operations to discover and bring a target within range of

the XL, which then took over and directed the attack.”18

These early systems enabled Naval personnel to get a feel for the

type of equipment that would remain central to Naval operations ever

since. However, the gadgets that came out of this work did not remain

state-of-the-art for long. For one thing, by the mid-1930s, Hayes’ team

was able to combine the functions of the XL and JK systems into a

single more capable system known as the QB. Improved versions of

the QB “played a stellar role in the Battle of the Atlantic,” Hayes would

recall after World War II had ended.

Even as the piezoelectric-based technology was emerging, a completely different class of transducer materials came to the Sound

Division’s attention. At Harvard University, G.W. Pierce had shown

that some materials will mechanically deform in the presence of a

magnetic field. By controlling the magnetic field, therefore, these socalled magnetostrictive materials could be made to oscillate as an ultrasonic speaker. Conversely, these materials respond to incoming

sounds by generating an oscillating magnetic field, that could be converted into an electrical signal. Like piezoelectric materials, magnetostrictive materials can talk and listen. These materials, rather than piezoelectric quartz or Rochelle salt, became the heart of early standard
50 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

detection systems for destroyers made by the Submarine Signal Company.19

This work by the Sound Division on transducer materials, the electronic components that drove them, and the conversion and interpretation of raw signals into interpretable information became the

basis for most of the sonar equipment that would end up in critical

service during World War II. “Intensive work was carried on during

the war which resulted in numerous improvements, but no fundamentally new sonar systems actually got into antisubmarine operation,” wrote Taylor.20

NRL’s first two divisions, Radio and Sound, were born with an

established constituency in the Bureau of Engineering and with a clear

sense of what they needed to achieve—wireless communication equipment and better tools for detecting submarines. In expediting these

technology development tasks, researchers in these divisions sometimes found they had to delve into basic science as well. Because the

ionosphere is a major player in any high-frequency radio equipment

intended for long range communication, the Radio Division had to

study the upper atmosphere if it wanted to give the Navy reliable highfrequency communication equipment. Likewise, researchers in the

Sound Division had to ask questions about the relationship between

ocean water and sound propagation.

In 1924, the Laboratory added its first new division. Unlike Sound

and Radio, the new Heat and Light Division was born with basic science in mind. It had no natural link to any particular bureau of the

Navy, so its funding at first came entirely from the meager Congressional appropriation supporting the Laboratory’s operation. In 1924,

that amounted to $100,000 for the entire Laboratory. But this independence also meant the new division would have more freedom in

selecting the problems it would pursue. In its first years, the division

consisted of Edward O. Hulburt and three assistants.21

Hulburt was born in South Dakota in 1890 but moved to Baltimore after his father got a job as a mathematician at Johns Hopkins
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 51

Edward O. Hulburt, shown here in a 1947

photograph, joined the Laboratory in 1924 to

head the then newly formed Heat and Light

Division. Two years later he would coauthor a

paper with A.H. Taylor that helped push radio

technology while simultaneously revealing

fundamental properties of the ionosphere.

University. By 1915, he had

earned all of his college degrees at Hopkins. His doctoral work was in optical

physics, a field for which the

university was then world renowned. During WWI he

worked at the Army’s Signal

Corps Radio Laboratory in

Paris. There, he and his coworkers would build various

radio sets in an old house in

the Latin Quarter and then

immediately bring them to

the troops on the front lines.

If the equipment worked

well enough, they would

send specifications to manufacturers to have thousands

of sets made. With that background, Hulburt was a kindred soul of

those in the build-test-and-ship mode in the Radio Division.22

 Like many subsequent NRL hires, Hulbert got his job after NRL

staff sent letters to contacts in industry and academe in search of topnotch candidates. A professor at Hopkins recommended Hulburt. He

got the job and became the first at NRL to be turned loose unencumbered by any mandate to pursue specific problems of interest to some

bureau. Given the breadth of Naval operations, however, Hulburt

would have been hard-pressed to find an area in physics that was not

somehow relevant to the Navy.

One of the first major projects Hulburt set his new division onto

was measuring the atmospheric transmission and absorption of all

optical wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum ranging from

the invisible infrared through all of the visible colors and into the
52 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ultraviolet range. Moreover, Hulburt and his colleagues made these

measurements at different times of the day and under various meteorological conditions.23 There simply was no other way of getting a

database on the most general behavior of light in the atmosphere.

This work eventually would feed into all kinds of Naval applications

areas, ranging from the colors and shapes of signal flags, to Naval

camouflage, to detector technology, to the choice of blue lights for

nighttime at-sea operation.

Taylor’s work on long-range transmission of shorter radio waves

also caught Hulbert’s eclectic attention. Hulburt later recalled Taylor’s

method: “Taylor and other amateurs were discovering skip distances

just by calling in the dark and seeing who answered. He’d say, ‘stand

by boys, I’m working tomorrow night on three meter [radio] waves.

What do you hear? Send me postcards.’”24

Taylor was a radio man and Hulburt was an optics man. So to

Hulburt, radio waves were merely much longer versions of the optical

wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that he had come to

know intimately during his graduate school days. The same rules of

reflection that apply to optical wavelengths ought to apply to radio

waves, he reasoned. From the skip distance data that Taylor and others at NRL had been accumulating for several radio wavelengths,

Hulburt and Taylor were able to infer much about the upper atmosphere and thereby to account for the otherwise cacophonous data

on radio propagation.

What they knew from the network of amateurs was that the average skip distances for radio wavelengths of 16, 21, 32, and 40 meters

were 1300, 700, 400, and 175 miles, respectively.25 The longer the

wavelength, the shorter the skip distance.

Building on earlier theoretical work by others, they assumed that

the atmosphere contained free electrons whose population could vary.

The general picture they derived was of an ionosphere composed

largely of free electrons whose population and thickness at different

parts of the world depended on the amount of solar energy reaching
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 53

it. The amount of solar energy varied over the course of a day and

night, over seasons, and even over cycles of many years. So the ionosphere over anyone’s head was constantly changing. It was as though

the radio mirror were constantly being raised or lowered. Part of the

challenge with high-frequency communications, therefore, was to have

to shift frequencies to accommodate these ionospheric vicissitudes.

From this work, Hulburt and Taylor were able to predict the behavior of different wavelengths and they could explain the fading of

radio signals to interference. They published their work in 1926 in

the journal Physical Review.

26 Besides helping the Navy guide its use of

high-frequency radio communication lines, this work was put to quick

use during the 1929 flight over the South Pole by Admiral Richard E.

Byrd. For several legs of his 1440 kilometer flight, Admiral Byrd used

a high-frequency aircraft radio system built specially for the mission

by the Radio Division and he used three operating frequencies chosen in accordance with the newfound knowledge about the ionosphere.

In the 1920s, the NRL team was one of several around the world

that were simultaneously unveiling the personality of the ionosphere.

For their part, Hulburt’s and Taylor’s 1926 paper stands as one of the

seminal publications in the field. In providing a more thorough theory

of the ionosphere, it was a contribution squarely within the arena of

basic science. In providing a means for the Navy to determine how to

use high-frequency radio communication more effectively, it was a

practical contribution to the Navy’s operational capabilities. It was

the perfect mix of basic science and military technology in one.

Heat and Light, the name of Hulburt’s division, covers a lot of

ground. It stands to reason that the division quickly got its hands into

widely divergent projects. One research program begun in 1925 falls

under the category of engineering research. The idea was to build

models of ship components and other Naval structures out of transparent plastic and then to apply known mechanical stresses to these

models. These stresses affect measurable properties (such as the po-
54 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

larization) of light passing through such models, a phenomenon

known as photoelasticity. From these photoelastic measurements, the

division researchers could determine the concomitant internal strains

throughout the plastic model. And since the results from the model

depended on the structure and not on the model’s material, this

photoelastic method provided a convenient way of experimentally

determining internal strain levels within even huge iron or steel ship

components in which direct measurements were not possible. This

work later transferred to the Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin, an older

Navy laboratory devoted to ship engineering studies and located just

north of Washington, DC.27

One particularly consequential new hire into the division in 1928

was Ross Gunn. The range of his initial work included the engineering and design of new portable electric field meters and amplifier

systems for infrared detection equipment as well as scientific investigations of magnetic and electrical phenomena of the Sun and Earth,

which also figure greatly into radio communication.28 In 1939, 11

years after his arrival at NRL, Gunn would usher NRL into what became a crucial and lasting role in the establishment of the Nuclear

Age (see Chapter 6).

The scope of NRL again expanded in the later 1920s and early

1930s as several more institutional saplings were planted. Some of

these, most notably the Division of Physical Metallurgy and the Division of Chemistry, would grow into enormous research trees with

branches spanning the scientific and technological landscape. Others, like the Ordnance Section, which was funded by the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance to look into tightly specified engineering problems,

would see the light of day for awhile and then recede, be absorbed by

other divisions, or disappear entirely. Even in the Laboratory’s early

years, the organizational chart would undergo frequent changes reflecting the various internal and external forces governing the perception of the Laboratory’s place in the Navy.

One of the more robust new saplings was planted on September

1, 1927, when the Division of Physical Metallurgy joined the Radio,
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 55

Sound, and Heat and Light Divisions. The Navy is metal from stem to

stern, from port to starboard, from wing tip to wing tip, from breech

to barrel. Ore becomes metal becomes slabs and rods and sheets. These

have to be bolted and welded and connected into ships and guns and

shells and helmets and armor and thousands of other Naval accouterments that have to serve reliably in bitter dry cold places or in moist,

tropical settings, all the while in near or direct contact with the salty

and notoriously corrosive medium known as ocean water. Moreover,

many of these metal objects need to withstand metal-on-metal rubbing, constant vibration, and intermittent shocks of massive force

without rattling apart into uselessness.

To look at a rocky mountain of ore and then at the massive ships

that come of it is to realize that practical experience by metal workers

over the past few millennia has achieved much. But getting metal to

perform in ever more capable ways so that it makes a difference in the

outcome of a 20th Century military war meant getting down to the

physics of metal. The Division of Physical Metallurgy was established

to do just that.

The division started with six full-time staff. Leading them was

Robert F. Mehl, who had been a research fellow at Harvard University.

As Mehl later recalled, Harvey Hayes of the Sound Division and a

Harvard man himself, asked a friend on the Harvard staff if he knew

of anyone who might want to come to NRL to head one of two new

divisions slated to begin operations. Mehl’s name came up. When

Commander Oberlin, NRL’s assistant director, met with Mehl at NRL

soon thereafter, he hired the young scientist on the spot.29 There was

no need for a personnel office while an Old Boy network like this was

in operation.

In keeping with a trend set by the other divisions, the earliest

projects in Mehl’s humble fiefdom at NRL were split between basic

science and applied work. The Bureau of Engineering, then the largest

source of funds within the Navy for the Laboratory, was the division’s

main customer. One of its early requests was for the new division to

look into new alloys for antennae wires on ships. On this task, the
56 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

new division worked with the Radio Division in testing a large series

of alloys. It was a humble foreshadowing of the way NRL could put

together different types of expertise to solve problems for which less

well-rounded approaches would fall short or fail.

The division also took on a set of more fundamental studies into

the internal structures (phases) in metal that determine important

material properties such as hardness, malleability, toughness, brittleness, and weldability. More specifically, Mehl focused this more scientific work of the division on the then-unknown mechanisms by

which phases change in metals and alloys. Phases are domains within

materials characterized by either a specific chemical composition or

by specific crystalline or noncrystalline arrangements of those chemical compositions. Knowledge of these phases and the mechanisms by

which they form becomes the basis for more intelligent decisions about

what alloys to use for specific purposes, how to prepare and process

them, and how the properties of these alloys might change over time

under specific operational conditions in the Fleet. The papers that

came out of these studies contributed to a young but growing body of

worldwide knowledge that at the time was unlocking the internal

mysteries of what made metal stay good and what made it go bad.

Some of the work straddled the categories of basic science and

engineering. Very soon after Mehl arrived, it occurred to him that the

Navy in particular could use ways of inspecting their metal castings

for ship construction without having to literally cut into and destroy

samples. This type of inspection goes by the name nondestructive

testing. “The Navy also had a problem of cracks in loaded 16-inch

shells in which I tried to keep my interest quite academic,” Mehl later

recalled.30 At the time, industry was just developing electrical, magnetic, and sound-based methods for probing the interiors of metal.

The idea was to infer the quality of the structure inside a piece of

metal from the measurable changes in the electrical, magnetic, or sonic

signals emerging from a sample.

Mehl and division colleague C.S. Barret, who had expertise in using X-rays for determining the crystalline phases in metal samples,
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 57

decided to see if they could use a radioactive substance like radium

(which was then a hot anti-cancer tool in the medical community) to

reveal flaws in both cast and welded steel. The idea was that gamma

rays from the radium would stream through the steel onto a photographic emulsion. This would produce a shadowgraph revealing the

steel’s inner anatomy, warts and all. And the warts were what was most

important to find. Mehl later described the early foray into this project:

“We did our first experimental work in the basement of

the Howard Kelly Hospital in Baltimore, a hospital which

then owned the largest stock of radium in the world, some five

grams. We used this in the form of small capsules of radium emanation. The work turned out to be quite successful; excellent radiographs were made of a number of objects, including a piece of

12-inch steel.”31

The NRL team wrote up their findings and sent the report to the

Bureau of Engineering at a time when, in Mehl’s words, “the Navy was

experiencing very serious trouble with the stern post castings on a number of new . . . heavy cruisers, particularly the Chester and Augusta.”32 It

was not lost on the department that the new method might help solve

the problem. Mehl recalls what happened:

“Accordingly, Barret and I procured radium from the Howard

Kelly Hospital and went to the Norfolk Navy Yard where the

Chester was in dry dock. The stern post casting was a shell casting (a hollow cylinder) about 11⁄4-inch thick, sitting, of course, on

the stern of this cruiser, above the rudder. The Chester had been

out to sea, and in its trials, the stern post casting had cracked and

had then been welded at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but much doubt

was left in the minds of the department as to its serviceability,

indeed, as to whether it could go to sea again with this repaired

casting in place.” 33

The two scientists took dozens of radiographs, which indeed were

revealing. Recalled Mehl: “They show the castings to have been very

badly made, to have been full of blow holes and shrinkage casts and

showed also that the welding which had been done was quite inadequate to remove the faulty metal.”34
58 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

With a source of radioactive radium inside of

this large metal casting,

Robert Mehl and a colleague place photographic paper on the

outside. The gamma rays

from the radium pass

through the casting onto

the paper, revealing

details of the casting’s

interior quality and defects. The bottom photo shows how the investigators were

able to use the technique of gamma-ray radiography to examine many objects—

in this case, large plumbing fixtures—simultaneously.

The aftermath of this was astounding to the 30-year-old scientist.

After briefing a large collection of admirals and captains about the

radiography results, he was asked if the 120,000 ton Chester ought to

be put to sea. Though feeling under-ranked to say so one way or the

other, he said no. Later, during a sea trial, the sternpost of the Chester

broke again and it had to be towed back to port. In the end, all ten

cruisers of this class ship were modified to preempt the sternpost prob-
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 59

lem. “I think this work on the Chester was the thing which established

gamma-ray radiography in this country,” Mehl later assessed.35

The Bureau of Engineering subsequently requested that the Physical Metallurgy Division take a more systematic look into steel casting.

Enough money came in to hire more people and to equip the

Laboratory’s already impressive foundry with expensive new casting

and metal working equipment including a state-of-the-art electric steel

melting furnace (in which alloys with fewer property-degrading contaminants could be made). Some of the work done by division scientists in this period included determining the rate at which molten

steel freezes during castings and assessing the strength of steel at high

temperatures. All of this work was published in the open literature. In

Mehl’s assessment, this body of work helped these men and NRL earn

respect and visibility within the nation’s steel industry.36

Mehl himself remained at NRL for only four years. In 1931, he left

to take a position first, at the American Rolling Mill Company and,

subsequently, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh,

where he would emerge as one of the giant figures in a field that in

the 1950s and 1960s would become known as Materials Science.

In the same fit of programmatic expansion that brought a Division of Physical Metallurgy to NRL came the Chemistry Division. Like

fraternal twins, the two new divisions would grow up in the same

house but follow utterly individual and multiply-branching evolutionary paths that would help render NRL one of the most broadbased research institutions in the country.

The Chemistry Division owes its initial momentum to Commander Oberlin’s success at getting the Bureau of Ordnance to think

of the Laboratory as a place to do business the way the Bureau of

Engineering already had. By the spring of 1927, the Bureau of Ordnance had assigned NRL two torpedo-propulsion problems that became the maiden topics for the new division. These were, in the words

of Taylor, a “trial balloon.”37
60 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The Chemistry Division began as a heterogeneous mixture of two

small programs already underway at NRL along with several new hires.

Among the latter was Dr. Francis Russell Bichowsky, who left a faculty

position at Johns Hopkins University to head the new division. One

component of the division came from a three-man Ballistics Section

(later the Ordnance Division), which the Bureau of Ordnance had

moved from the National Bureau of Standards to NRL a month after

NRL opened. For the most part, this section acted as a job shop for

the Bureau of Ordnance. Its projects included the development of a

high-speed camera for photographing projectiles in flight, the measurement of pressures in the main gun batteries of battleships, and

work on torpedo-ranging apparatus in collaboration with the Sound

Division.38 A second component that became part of the Chemistry

Division was a one-man analytical laboratory run by Milton Harman.39

The crux of the torpedo propulsion issue at the time was to find

some way of replacing the compressed air that had been used in World

War I torpedoes with something else that would enable the torpedoes

to travel farther, faster, and without a visible surface track. One technique, which a researcher at the Westinghouse Corporation had been

looking into near the end of World War I for the Bureau of Ordnance,

was to rely on a heat-generating chemical reaction that would convert

water into steam for propulsion. The other tack the division looked

into was to build on an idea of several officers at the Newport Torpedo factory to replace compressed air, which is nearly 80% nitrogen,

with compressed air enriched with oxygen, or even with pure compressed oxygen.40 The thought here was that the same volume of oxygen-enriched compressed gas would propel a torpedo much faster,

farther, or both.

 The previous attempt at Westinghouse to build an exothermic

torpedo involved the mixing of two hazardous materials—fuels including aluminum or alcohol and a substance that would supply the

oxygen needed for combustion—that were hard to handle and prone

to spontaneous explosions. The oxidizer in this case was solid so-
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 61

dium chlorate. Bichowsky thought it better to try two liquid components—alcohol for the fuel and the oxygen-jammed perchloric acid

to supply the oxygen.

As in child rearing, the solution often becomes the problem. The

heat generated by this alcohol-acid reaction was intense enough that

it required the development of a new “pot,” or combustion chamber,

which a colleague was able to do on fairly short order. Once the new

chamber was in hand, the pure oxygen torpedo became a straightforward engineering problem. By 1930, the oxygen torpedo already had

entered a test phase. It demonstrated again how NRL’s diversity of

expertise could mix and match to solve new and difficult problems.

By that time, early rocket researchers had shown that the combustion of alcohol with the oxygen-rich vapors of perchloric acid—a

cranky and explosion prone reaction—could generate tremendous

thrust. “Furthermore,” Bichowsky noted, “the use of organic perchlorates [more energy-packed chemical variations of perchloric acid]

seemed to offer the possibilities of developing explosives of unheard

power.”41 With such tantalizing potential, Bichowsky was able to hire

additional chemists, including Dr. Parry Borgstrom who would come

to head the division.

One of the new hires who would work on this problem was Walter

Rosett. He had a penchant for taking on some of the odder and smallerscale problems that would filter into the division. These included the

development of secret inks and fluorescent materials for ultraviolet

signaling. He also ended up stuck with the perilous job of preparing

ethyl perchlorate, a material that looked promising for producing explosives of unprecedented power. Bichowsky recalled what happened:

“This material was known to be explosive. Every preceding worker

with it had been hurt by its explosion, but we felt that by keeping it

under water we would be the exception . . . We made about 5 cc [a

thimbleful] without trouble and were engaged in measuring its properties. I had 1 cc and Walter had the remaining, when, suddenly, the 4

cc in Rosett’s hand blew up, and followed a few seconds later by the
62 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

explosion of the 1 cc in my hand. Rosett’s hands were blown to pieces.

He lost a thumb and two fingers on one hand and three fingers and a

part of the fourth on the other hand. I had had time to lower my

hand and the explosion lacerated a palm of the right hand and one

leg.”42

Bichowsky was not so easily dissuaded from promising leads. Although the explosions led to an official banning of work on organic

explosives, Bichowsky recruited another chemist and together they

secretly repeated the experiments. They learned that by replacing the

pure water that Bichowsky and Rosett had tried with a slightly alkaline solution, they could handle the perchlorate relatively easily and

safely.43

As a balance to all of the applied research, Bichowsky at least aimed

to have about one third of his division’s work devoted to basic science. He suspected that was the way to create an environment where

young, top-notch scientists might want to come to work, especially at

a time their skills were in demand. One early attempt to work on

basic issues was an investigation into the mechanisms of chemical

reactions occurring inside vacuum tubes. Though basic on the surface, there was a potential technological spin-off in the form of new

types of more energy-efficient tubes for electronic devices.

 Before they could build much momentum in that project, however, a more imminent concern diverted their attention. The submarines of this era carried banks of over 100 battery cells, each one containing a reservoir of sulfuric acid. These batteries intermittently caused

explosions for unknown reasons, sometimes with tragic results.

Bichowsky recalls finding clues to battery explosions while crawling on hands and knees with E.G. Lunn, a colleague in the division,

in the “smelly hole of a disreputable pig boat,” by which he meant a

submarine. They found that the ventilating ducts were covered with a

spray of sulfuric acid. The slower the ventilation, the more acid there

was. On the bottom of the ducts, there was evidence of many minor

fires. They later showed these were produced by small sparks gener-
chapter 3 – first steps ♦ 63

ated when the motion of the ship broke the conducting film of acid.

And with plenty of hydrogen generated from the action of acid on

metal, the elements for fires were well in hand.

This conclusion led to the need to determine the rate of battery

ventilation. Bichowsky described what Lunn came up with:

“ . . . the technique was to get a good [cigar] smoker and have

him, on the signal, puff in a small puff of smoke into the entrance of

the glass tube [associated with each battery cell]. Dr. Lunn, with a

stop watch, would measure the time taken for the smoke to travel

down the tube and, thus, the rate of battery ventilation . . . Eventually,

Dr. Lunn had to invent a chemical cigar smoking machine to furnish

the necessary puffs.”44 He later took on the natural sequel, which was

to find a way to reduce the acid spray from the batteries. Part of the

solution was to supply each cell with its own ventilation rather than

the common ventilation pathway that proved hazardous. Part was to

redesign the batteries.45

Like the torpedo work, this project was very much in the realm of

applied science. Aside from a few small forays into more basic issues

such as chemical reactions in a vacuum, however, the division’s initial work focused almost completely on short-term problems that their

sponsors in several Navy bureaus needed solved. Besides the several

submarine-related projects, the division’s repertoire diversified into

such areas as the search for anti-fouling paints, better dielectric materials for making high-frequency radio components, illuminated gun

sights, and ways of recovering water from the exhaust of the engines

of dirigibles (lighter than air vehicles) to compensate for weight lost

to the burning of fuel.

As the Laboratory’s technical scope diversified and expanded

throughout the 1920s, increasing amounts of money from the Bureau of Engineering were funneled into the fledgling NRL. Since the

Laboratory’s administrative location was within the office of the Secretary of the Navy, it was one step removed from direct bureau oversight, however. It stood to reason that a new round of questions about
64 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the Laboratory’s appropriate place in the Navy was bound to arise.

The crash of the stock market in 1929 and the general money consciousness this would produce in every sector of the economy helped

fuel a major soul search at NRL in the early 1930s.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 65

C h a p t e r 4

An Orphan Proves Itself

65

For all of Thomas Edison’s opposition and bellyaching after the

Laboratory’s overlong gestation during the Great War and the early

1920s, the Laboratory actually opened its doors much as the great

inventor had envisioned it should. Save for a few PhD scientists, the

technical staff was populated by engineers who did not mind getting

dirt under their fingernails. Most of the work was aimed at inventing

new gadgets, rather than adding to what Edison believed was an

already enormous heap of untapped basic scientific understanding.1 Moreover, the Naval Consulting Board saw to it that the

Laboratory had a state-of-the-art shop with a staff that could make

just about anything. Although NRL had not become a place where a

submarine could get built from scratch in 15 days, as Edison had once

told Congress the Laboratory ought to be able to do, it had begun

life as a small-scale invention factory not so unlike Edison’s own in

New Jersey.

One of Edison’s main fears did appear to come true, however.

Rather than civilians, Naval officers were at the top of Laboratory

management. Realistically, it could never have been otherwise. It

was the Navy after all that was footing the bill for the Laboratory.

And the whole point of its existence was to keep the Navy at the forefront of military technology. Captain E.L. Bennet was the first official

director. But NRL was only one of his many responsibilities and his
66 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

office was at the Navy Department, not the Bellevue site. It was

Captain Oberlin, by title the Laboratory’s first assistant director, who

was the hands-on manager of NRL. He made most of the

decisions for NRL during his tenure, which lasted until 1931.

Captain Oberlin was keenly aware of the naturally conflicting relationship his new laboratory would have within the context of the

U.S. Navy. For one thing, NRL would have to answer to its financial

supporters at the Navy materiel bureaus and in Congress. Yet Oberlin

zealously believed the Laboratory needed to defend its autonomy from

any specific bureau. Otherwise,

he feared, it would become just

another Navy engineering facility instead of the unique broadbased research Mecca its conceivers had wanted.

Captain Edgar G. Oberlin was the

Laboratory’s first assistant director

and its sixth director proper. Early in

1930, he went head to head against

powerful Navy officers in the Bureau

of Engineering who wanted to wrest

control of the young Laboratory.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 67

The Laboratory’s initial administrative placement under the Secretary of the Navy, rather than under any particular bureau, helped to

enforce a degree of autonomy. Most of the money for doing research

in the early years of the Laboratory, however, did come from the Bureau of Engineering, which had specific communications and submarine detection problems it wanted the Laboratory to solve.

In spite of these realities, Captain Oberlin championed the cause

of expanding the Laboratory’s technical base into areas of more basic

science for which funds might not be so readily available. The Heat

and Light Division came to be in 1924 only after Captain Bennet reluctantly approved its creation on faith that the Radio Division’s Taylor, Hayes of the Sound Division, and Captain Oberlin knew what

they were doing in proposing it.2

 The new division had no automatic

constituency in the Navy. The main argument for its creation was that

NRL ought to be able to do any kind of research work so long as it

held some promise to be useful to the Navy. A Navy relies on heat and

light so a Division of Heat and Light was not so outlandish.

Like the Heat and Light Division, the Division of Physical Metallurgy began without bureau support but then quickly proved its worth

with such successes as the gamma radiography revelations of the Navy’s

metal casting problems. The start of the Chemistry Division more resembled the Radio and Sound Divisions in the sense that it had Bureau support from the start. In the Chemistry Division’s case, however, the Bureau of Ordnance played the role of sponsor rather than

the Bureau of Engineering. Although still in its infancy at the end of

the 1920s, the Laboratory had achieved a solid footing.

At the end of 1929, when the stock market crashed and the country began falling into the Great Depression, the Laboratory, which by

then had a total budget of $559,655,3

 actually was not hit so hard. As

Taylor recalled it years later, the Depression had little immediate effect on the Laboratory. Two scientists were dismissed for an initial

total savings in salary of $12,000 per year. Later during the Depression years, every civilian employee in the Government took a temporary pay cut.4
68 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The Depression did, of course, raise fiscal consciousness everywhere, including in the Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, which perennially had been supplying more than half of NRL’s total budget. Money

for less-than-imminent Navy concerns like, say, leading-edge basic

research, was becoming even more scarce.5

One reflection of the scarcity of money became apparent in 1930

in the aftermath of a momentous discovery on June 4 by Lawrence

Hyland and Leo Young in the Radio Division. The discovery nearly

died on the vine for lack of financial support.

Years later, Young recalled the moment:

“We were conducting experiments relative to guiding planes into

a field using high-frequency beams . . . We were flying a plane

determining just what effects were in the air when the plane was

trying to follow these beams and what not.”

“In making some field measurements on this set-up, Mr. L.A.

Hyland had field strength [measuring] equipment out at what is

now the lower end of Bolling field, just north of the Laboratory.

And of course, as soon as planes began flying around, he noticed

the meter bobbing all up and down . . . [He] determined that he

was getting some kind of effect from planes that flew through

those beams. When he came in he immediately brought it to our

attention, and of course, we immediately realized that we were

getting the same effect from planes that we had from a ship back

in 1922.”6

What Hyland had observed in his receiver was an intermingling

of two signals. One came directly from the transmitter and normally

would have produced a continuous signal. Instead, a secondary beam

reflecting from the plane was interfering with the primary signal, creating an interference pattern. As the plane moved, and with it the

origin of the reflected beam, so did the ebbs and flows in signal strength

characteristic of an interference pattern. When that little dial bobbed

down, the signal was waning; and when it swung back up, the signal

was waxing. Although it wasn’t the first time anyone had detected a

moving object using radio signals, this was a historic moment for the
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 69

Naval Research Laboratory. It marked the beginning of its effort to produce the U.S. Navy’s first generation of radar technology.

Hyland had found that radio could be used to detect airplanes.

Since airplanes were becoming a serious component of warfare, his

observation presaged the U.S. development of radar with more force

than Taylor’s and Young’s radio detection of a wooden ship on the

Potomac from Haines Point eight years earlier just before they moved

to NRL.

Throughout the summer and early fall, Hyland, Young, and Taylor

performed more experiments. They varied the antennae shape. They

used different frequencies. They even drove a receiver around in a car

so as to simulate the motion of a ship as it might try to detect a plane

in the air. By early November, Taylor was ready to inform the Bureau of

Engineering of the development. In his 11-page letter he wrote:

“The Laboratory has at present two definite objectives in this work:

the first is to detect the presence of moving objects in the air or on

water, possibly later even on the ground, at such distances that

their detection by other well-known methods is difficult or impossible. It may be noted that the personnel piloting any moving object would probably not know that any observations were being

taken upon them. Second, to develop . . . a method of measuring

the velocity of moving objects at great heights or at considerable

distance, or on the surface of the water . . . It is not desired in this

report to give the Bureau the impression that the work is anything

like in a finished state but it does appear to this Laboratory to be

far enough advanced to warrant much further and intensive investigation over a considerable period of time.”7

The bureau was not immediately moved by Taylor’s letter to send

NRL more support to pursue the technology. In January, 1931, Commander E.D. Almy, who then was NRL’s acting director, bolstered

Taylor’s pitch with a letter to the bureau. He wrote:

 “The Director considers [this] subject matter of the utmost importance and of great promise in the detection of surface ships and

aircraft. No estimate of its limitations and practical value can be

made until it has been developed. However, it appears to have
70 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

great promise and its use [appears to be] applicable and valuable

in air defense, in defense areas for both surface and aircraft and

for the fleet in scouting the line.”8

The letter apparently carried some weight. Just days after receiving the letter, the bureau assigned the Laboratory a problem designated as W5-2, which it emphasized as confidential. The now historic

problem specified that the Laboratory “investigate use of radio to detect the presence of enemy vessels and aircraft.”9

 The written acknowledgment by the bureau that it was interested in detection of objects

by radio was welcome. The bureau’s assignment of problem W5-2

amounted to an unfunded mandate, however. The bureau still did

not allocate additional money, which meant any radio detection studies would have to compete with existing radio projects of higher priority to which men and money already were committed.

A page from patent

1,981,884 for a “System

for Detecting Objects by

Radio,” whose later

incarnations would be

known as radar.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 71

Later in the year, Captain Oberlin took over the full-fledged directorship of the Laboratory. In that capacity, he wrote a desperate letter

to the Secretary of the Navy on November 2, 1931. In it, he lamented

the practice of the bureaus, whose funds were already overly subscribed,

to sidestep real support of longer-term research in order to expedite

short-term projects that promised economic return. Aside from a few

written words, Oberlin noted in the letter that no money came from

the bureaus to pursue the promising lead of detecting airplanes by

radio. “On the other hand,” Oberlin continued by way of example,

“recent discoveries which affect radio transmission were immediately

taken up by the bureau as they showed a means of meeting a longrecognized need and perhaps of effecting considerable economies.

The last example further supports the contention that the bureau’s

immediate financial interests are the controlling factor in their use of

funds available.”10

 If that were the case, and Oberlin feared it was, then there would

be no place for long-term research. And without long-term research,

the Navy would have no role in advanced science or even more speculative engineering. Yet that was just the kind of role the NRL leadership thought its Laboratory ought to have in the world. Patient, adequate support for research was required to transform discoveries like

Hyland’s bobbing radio receiver dial into valuable new tools for the

Navy.

The future of NRL’s soul was not merely an abstract concern for

Captain Oberlin at the time he wrote his letter to the Secretary of the

Navy. By secretly arranging to shift NRL from its administrative location within the office of the Secretary of the Navy to reside instead

within the Bureau of Engineering, the Bureau’s top officers had been

orchestrating a veritable coup d’état to win control of the Laboratory.

That the bureau meant business was made painfully obvious to

Oberlin on one Saturday morning in the fall of 1931. As he recounted

in a letter to an officer friend written soon after, a low-ranking officer

from the Bureau of Engineering dropped into his office without warning. The officer had orders to take over the Laboratory! Oberlin soon
72 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

learned that Admiral Samuel Cooper, head of the Bureau of Engineering, had been in secret correspondence with the Secretary of the Navy,

Claude Swanson, about the fate of the Laboratory for some time. Just

days before Oberlin saw the take-over order, this correspondence resulted in the official transfer of control to the Bureau of Engineering.

The first item of “Navy General Order 223” of November 3, 1931,

which was signed by the Secretary, read, “The administration of the

Naval Research Laboratory is hereby placed under the cognizance of

the Bureau of Engineering.”11 The transfer of NRL to the bureau was a

done deal, yet Oberlin, the Laboratory’s director, never had a say in

the discussion leading to the decision.

The conspiracy of the men behind the transfer became painfully

clear to Oberlin once he got hold of the relevant memoranda and

letters. The conspiracy had began to reach its crescendo on October

10, 1931, when Stanford C. Hooper, the Director of Naval Communications within the Bureau of Engineering and a long time critic of

NRL as too research-oriented, wrote a memorandum to his superior,

Admiral Samuel M. Robinson, head of the bureau. “In confirmation

with our discussion yesterday on the subject of Bellevue [NRL],”

Hooper wrote to Robinson, “my feeling is that if the Laboratory is to

be retained by the Navy it must be administered directly under a Bureau, otherwise the cost of the Laboratory will continue to mount out

of all bounds, and the Laboratory [will] become so headstrong that

little good for the Navy will come out of it.”12

After portraying NRL as an inferior impostor to the nation’s great

research laboratories where he believed the most advanced Navy research ought to take place, Hooper continued his diatribe with a cynical edge: “Frankly, I have never been able to get the results desired

from Bellevue, and we never will get these results because we cannot

possibly spend enough money there, so, insofar as research is concerned, I would favor abolishing the laboratory . . . ” All that should

remain, he continued, are maybe a half-dozen “research technicists

[sic]” whose role would be to keep the bureau abreast of work going

on at commercial laboratories.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 73

Robinson concurred with Hooper. More than that, he packaged

Hooper’s memorandum with a like-minded memorandum of his own

dated October 14, procured the signatures of approval of the chiefs of

the Bureaus of Ordnance, Construction and Repairs, and Aeronautics,

and sent the documents to the Chief of Naval Operations. Robinson

called for a draconian reduction in NRL staff, a shift of the Laboratory’s

mission to the testing of equipment developed by commercial firms,

and placement of the diminished facility directly under the Bureau of

Engineering.13 The next morning, the Secretary of the Navy approved

the memorandum.

A week later, by which time the bureau had sent its Saturday messenger to NRL, Oberlin desperately began countering the events that

had transpired behind his back. To his mind, the stakes could not have

been higher for the Navy and he was willing to put his career on the

line to steer NRL out of the lethal danger that others had exposed it to.

In an October 22 memorandum to the Chief of Naval Operations, he

wrote that “it would be far preferable to close down the Laboratory

entirely as a research activity than transfer it as such to any bureau.”14

Eleven days later, on November 2, Oberlin sent a 13-page memorandum to the Secretary of the Navy in which he identified the battle

over NRL’s place in the Navy with the bigger and more important issue

of the Navy’s general policy on research. “I am convinced that placing

the Laboratory under any bureau will totally defeat the purpose for

which the Laboratory was authorized and intended,”15 he wrote. For

one thing, the Laboratory would no longer be able to consider the

Navy as a whole but rather it inevitably would become an organ of the

single bureau. For another thing, engineering work to solve immediate problems would supplant any long-term research to prepare the

Navy for future challenges.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. On page 10 of his memorandum,

Oberlin wrote:

“ . . . a research laboratory does not exist for solving immediate

and pressing needs for materiel development, although under certain circumstances it might render assistance along those lines.
74 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Whether the Navy is warranted in expending funds for general

research is a question on the answer to which the future of the

Naval Research Laboratory should depend.”

At the end of the lengthy memorandum, Oberlin drew a line in

the sand:

“I stand ready to stake my professional reputation and future

naval career upon the prediction that full investigation and unbiased judgment by a qualified body:-

(a) will find that the decision arrived at and policies adopted

when the Laboratory was first established remain correct;

(b) will pronounce the Naval Research Laboratory a vital part of

the Naval Establishment;

(c) will decide that naval research is an economical and

essential assurance of national defense; and

(d) will be convinced that placing the Laboratory under any

bureau will stifle if not entirely eliminate research and will

narrow the work to that bureau’s needs rather than render it

of value to the Navy as a whole, thus effectively nullifying

the purpose for which the Laboratory was established.”

In a prescient closing, Oberlin wrote that “the principles involved

are of too great naval importance to warrant the least consideration of

any personal or selfish interests.”

The issue ascended to the Navy’s highest advisory body, the General Board, which subsequently made a thorough inquiry into the

questions of the proper function and administrative location of NRL.

The opinion, which they issued on February 9, 1932, vindicated

Oberlin. It endorsed his belief that the Navy needed a laboratory like

NRL whose mission was long-term research. Moreover, the Board recommended that NRL remain in a more central location of Naval administration, specifically suggesting the Office of the Chief of Naval

Operations.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 75

It looked like Oberlin’s gambit would work. A few weeks later,

however, a ruling came through from the same Secretary of the Navy

that had approved Robinson’s original memorandum suggesting NRL’s

administrative transfer. NRL would remain under the cognizance of

the Bureau of Engineering. Strike two for Oberlin.

The determined Oberlin made one more attempt to reverse

the decision, this time trying to go over the head of the entire Navy by

appealing to the Subcommittee of Naval Appropriations of the House

of Representatives Appropriations Committee. He succeeded in getting the topic of NRL onto the agenda of the subcommittee’s upcoming hearings, partly due to support from Miller Reese Hutchison.

Hutchison, Edison’s long-time assistant, remained a member of the

extant though inactive Naval Consulting Board from which NRL

sprang, and he was a friend of one of the Congressmen on the subcommittee.16

Before the hearings began, however, Oberlin’s maverick campaign caught up with him. His superiors and enemies were able to

relieve him of his NRL directorship and place him into a veritable

holding pen as “the Technical Aide to the Secretary of the Navy,” a

position that was little more than a title.

The aftermath of the subcommittee hearings on NRL followed a

path similar to that followed after the General Board of the Navy gave

their assessment of the situation. Like the General Board, the subcommittee identified the Laboratory as a place of long-term research

centered on basic science and not on engineering and testing. A strong

endorsement of Oberlin’s view came from subcommittee member Representative William Oliver. In a rebuttal to Admiral Robinson’s argument for transferring control of NRL to his bureau, Oliver said,

“So long as you lend undue emphasis to the testing side, or, as

you call it, the experimental side of the work there, you will soon

lose sight of that which is equally, yes, far more important, perhaps, the scientific and research study of great underlying problems, that not only will cause you to advance, but will invite
76 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

others from the outside to come in and willingly lend their aid

and assistance to you in advancing.”17

Moreover, the subcommittee agreed that NRL ought not to be under the wing of the Bureau of Engineering.

Despite all of this, Secretary Adams was unmoved. NRL remained

under the Bureau of Engineering.

Captain Oberlin’s half-year long battle against the Naval establishment to keep NRL out of the hands of the Bureau of Engineering

resulted first in his dismissal as NRL’s director and thereafter to his

retirement on July 15, 1932. His cause was not entirely lost, however.

The philosophical endorsement for the Navy’s need of long-term, basic

scientific research from both the governing board of the Navy and the

U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee of Naval Appropriations

had lasting effects. Without these high level reiterations of Oberlin’s

passionate vision of what NRL ought to become, the Laboratory might

well have evolved into just another engineering laboratory as other

officers in the Naval hierarchy would have had it.

Ironically, NRL’s transfer to the Bureau of Engineering might have

been what saved the Laboratory from capsizing during the financial

and administrative whitewaters of the early and mid-1930s. As A. Hoyt

Taylor assessed the situation in hindsight, “ . . . it is doubtful whether

our research would have been so plentifully supplied with operating

funds had we remained under the Secretary during the financial depression.” What’s more, the strong administration of the bureau helped

to stabilize the Laboratory during a rapid succession of five different

military directors during the three years following Oberlin’s departure in 1931.18

The Laboratory still had quite a way to go before becoming a fullfledged member of the Naval community. That the Laboratory was

strongly in need even of name recognition, let alone recognition for

the work of its staff, becomes clear in an oft-told and probably apocryphal account in which a Naval officer yachting by the Laboratory

nearly swatted NRL from the Earth as though it were a fly that had

alighted on his arm.19
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 77

In Taylor’s version of the story, it happened this way: “A certain

high-ranking official was taking a weekend trip down the Potomac in

the Secretary’s yacht. On passing the grounds of the Naval Research

Laboratory, he pointed to the white buildings on his left and asked

what that place was. Finally, somebody said it was the Naval Research

Laboratory. ‘Well,’ said the official, ‘What do they do there?’ It appeared that no member of the party knew what the Laboratory was

doing and so the official made a memorandum then and there, noting that in the interest of economy the activity might as well be abolished. Several official moves in that direction had already been made

when we heard of it.”20

Nevertheless, the Laboratory did not go down like some hapless

fly. On the contrary, the technical brew of the Laboratory was beginning to reach a critical mass. Unplanned and unexpected confluences

of human insight and state-of-the-art equipment began to yield results that would help to change not only the nature of warfare but

also the human relationship to sky and ocean.

The Laboratory’s humble complement of a half-dozen divisions,

each with its own staff and range of expertise, began to mix and match.

New divisions budded from existing ones. From the Chemistry DiviThe Laboratory staff on April 4, 1935. Just shy of 100, the entire staff

fit easily into a single portrait.
78 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

sion, for example, came the Thermodynamics Division, which inherited and expanded its parent division’s original problem of converting heat from chemical reactions into propulsive power for torpedoes. Only three years later, this new division would merge with the

Physical Metallurgy Division to become the multisyllabic Thermodynamics and Physical Metallurgy Division. The Mechanics and Electricity Division was an outright newcomer that later would be recast

as the Mechanics Division. Divisions could come and go on short

order, too. The short-lived Aeronautics Division, after failing to attract support from the Navy’s Aeronautics Bureau, was resorbed into

the Radio Division from which it had temporarily sprung.

To those involved in the bickering and maneuvering of 1931 and

1932 at the highest levels of the Navy and beyond, it was the very soul

of NRL that was at stake. The actual changes in the Laboratory and its

research agenda were small and temporary. To curtail speculative research and instead stress the short-term needs of the Navy in the financially strapped times of the Depression, for example, the bureau

increased the number of testing problems for the Radio and Sound

Divisions from 10 in 1930 to 68 in 1934. The bureau also split the

Radio Division into a 20-man engineering division and a smaller, 9-

man research division. The split proved too artificial and counterproductive, and the two were reunited within a year.

By 1935, the political and economic context that had so harassed

Captain Oberlin began to disappear. As the economy began recovering from the Depression during the long administration of Franklin

Delano Roosevelt, money for long-term research began to dribble in.

Congress even appropriated an extra $100,000 to the Laboratory.

At about the same time, Oberlin’s nemesis tag team at the Bureau

of Engineering, Captain Hooper and Admiral Robinson, both left the

Bureau of Engineering. Taking Robinson’s place as the Navy’s “Engineer-in-chief” was Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen, who was personally interested enough in NRL to place it directly under his authority

in the bureau instead of under the bureau’s Radio Division where it
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 79

had been during Robinson’s reign. Unlike Robinson, Bowen was a

great supporter of basic research. And now he had NRL as a research

instrument of his own.

Under the banner of Bowen’s Bureau of Engineering during the

1930s, NRL researchers began to score the kinds of successes that would

end debates about whether the Laboratory should exist or not. These

came largely from the creative genius of engineers and inventors rather

than from basic scientific discovery. The most emblematic success

during this period was the development of radar whose name is credited to Captain Sam Tucker of the Bureau of Ships. He contracted

“radio detection and ranging” into “radar.”21

NRL was one of a handful of places around the world that simultaneously and secretly had been learning to take radio waves beyond

their conventional role as carriers of communication into such new

arenas as detecting navigational obstacles or attacking aircraft. The

spectacular results at NRL would help earn the Laboratory the right to

become a place where engineering research focused on harnessing

known principles in the quest for better military technology would

form a unique, creative synergy with basic research aimed at scientific

discovery.

The radar project became a top priority at the Laboratory in 1934.22

This was not so much because anybody really knew what was the

technological potential of radio-based detection of ships and planes.

But a technology that enables you to detect things that you otherwise

could not see is impressive, the kind of thing that could impress people

who control money. Members of the Naval Appropriations Subcommittee were slated to visit the Laboratory. The ability to demonstrate

a new detection tool like radar, which then was still known as radio

detection, could only help the Laboratory’s cause.

At this point, the radio detection group in the Radio Division was

basing its work on Hyland’s original observation in 1930 of radio

reflections by an airplane. Radio signals reflecting from an object like

an airplane interfere with a stronger set of signals arriving at the same
80 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

receiver more directly from the transmitter. Someone monitoring a

distant receiver could detect an object reflecting radio waves by the

presence of characteristic variations, or beats, in the incoming signal.

That is what Hyland saw when the needle of his receiver bobbed back

and forth. If there is no object present that can reflect the signal, there

will be no interference pattern to make the receiver signal bob back

and forth. One key technical detail of this type of radio detection is

that a high frequency transmitter must emit radio waves continuously

like a singer who holds a note forever without stopping to take breaths.

The demonstration with the continuous waves apparently contributed to a good time for the visiting subcommittee members. That

definitely contributed to their approval of an extra $100,000 in the

Laboratory’s direct appropriations. But there were worrisome technical drawbacks in the continuous wave approach. One of the major

problems was that in order to get discernible signals, the transmitter

and receiver had to be farther away from one another than a ship is

long. Said differently, the system couldn’t fit on a ship.

In an intuitive leap, Young came up with a dramatically different

approach that he thought just might work. The path from his conception to the Navy’s first working model of a radar set illustrates

what can happen when a critical mass of diverse expertise and equipment is assembled in close proximity, as it was at NRL.

Young was familiar with using radio pulses as a probe because

that is how Merle and Tuve of the Carnegie Institute did their measurement of the ionosphere in the 1920s using the crystal-stabilized

transmitter he and Louis Gebhard had built. But since the ionosphere

was so much larger than objects like airplanes, and since the wavelengths necessary for getting echoes from planes were so much shorter

for probing the ionosphere, Young reasoned in 1930 that pulses would

not work for detecting planes. He opted instead to pursue the continuous wave approach.

Young changed his mind three years later. For one thing, the continuous wave work simply was not lending itself to shipboard equip-
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 81

ment. Another reason for the shift derived from his work on a purely

technical bug that plagued shipboard radio operators using high-frequency transmitters. A radio operator sending code signals inadvertently generated troublesome bits of radio noise on a wide range of

frequencies. These so-called “key clicks” hampered any shipboard reception that might be going on simultaneously at a nearby receiver.

To a Navy in wartime, the key click problem could be disastrous. When

Young analyzed these clicks, he realized they had about the same power

as the continuous waves that already had proven successful for detecting airplanes. So pulses, the right kind of pulses, could work.

Meanwhile, another part of Young’s conception for a new approach

to radar had been a mainstay of work in the Sound Division. There,

Harvey Hayes and his associates already had developed a technique

in which an echo from an underwater pulse of high-frequency sound

would show up as a blip on a circle sweeping out on an oscilloscope.

In a way, sonar is an underwater, sound-based precursor of radar!

Since the circle swept around with clocklike precision, and since sound

travels in media like water at known speeds, the position of the blip

along the circle was sufficient for determining the distance of the object from which the sound pulse bounced. It was clear to Young and

the rest of the radar group that the same concept would apply to reflecting radio signals.

 With the problem pretty well-defined, it fell onto the shoulders

of Robert Page, who had been drawn into the radar group to help

with the 1934 demonstration, to engineer Young’s ideas into reality.

Page, son of a sometime lay minister, had joined NRL in 1927,

just two weeks after receiving a bachelors degree in physics. The seventh of nine children, he had grown up on a farm in Minnesota and

got his first experience in the world of electricity during high school

when he earned money by helping his electrician brother wire houses.23

He originally planned to become a minister himself and enrolled

in the church-supported Hamline University in St. Paul. Once there,

however, science became his mission. His physics professor, who was
82 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

a friend of Taylor’s, recognized Page’s talent and encouraged him to

pursue a career in science. When Taylor offered the young man a job,

he took it.

Page arrived at the Laboratory with no experience in radio engineering. It did not matter. He soon developed a conspicuous aptitude

for coming up with practical solutions for those in the division he

was assigned to assist. Although he was driven by the joy of innovation itself, he also became strongly motivated by NRL’s policy at the

time of allowing inventors on its staff to own full commercial rights

to patents from their work.

“I became imbued with the idea that I was going to be inventor,

that I was going to invent things and that I was going to have patents

on them and that the commercial rights were going to be worth something,” Page recalled thinking during even his earliest days at NRL.

His prediction was a good one. By the time he left NRL in 1966, he

had 65 patents to his name.24

Robert Morris Page was central in

the invention and design of the

Navy’s first radar systems that

were completed prior to the U.S.

entry into World War II. In 1948,

he would become the Laboratory’s

first civilian director of research.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 83

In 1934, when Page joined Young and several others on the radar

project, his mission was to put his inventive juices to work on the

technical challenges involved in making pulse radar a reality. By the

end of the year, he had pretty much solved the transmitter side of the

problem. He had rigged up vacuum tubes with circuitry of his own

design to generate trains of electrical pulses. He designed more circuitry that fed the shorter signals of this train into a transmitter that

he had drastically modified specifically for the short pulses it would

have to amplify and then broadcast. By December, he had built a

transmitter that could emit pulses lasting a mere 10 millionths of a

second (microseconds), wait for the next 90 microseconds or so, and

then emit another 10 microsecond pulse, rest again for 90 microseconds, and so on.25

It would take him almost all of the following year to tackle the

receiver, which had to distinctly display a transmitted radio pulse and

the echo from an object despite the fact that both of these fast-aslight signals would reach the receiver virtually simultaneously. To do

this he had to build complex, multistage amplifiers, which required

new developments in circuit design that had only months earlier been

published in a French periodical. He had to prevent any feedback or

instabilities that would degrade the receiver’s ability to discern the

hardly separated pulses coming from the transmitter from those reflecting from objects. This required him to include components to

filter out unwanted frequencies and to shield other parts of the system from troublesome electrical fields. To get the receiver to work, he

even had to modify the latest generation of vacuum tubes that RCA

had just introduced.

Page, as well as other talented engineers such as Art Varela, who

would design sets to work at higher frequencies, made all of this

progress despite the absence of financial support earmarked for the

project. Page and colleagues worked on the radar project when they

weren’t working on other more conventional radio problems that were

directly supported as part of some specified problem assigned by the
84 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

bureau. Taylor, who undoubtedly recalled his and Young’s squelched

radio detection discovery in 1922, even camouflaged some of the work

by making it look as though it were part of another funded communications problem. He later admitted that the practice probably was

illegal.26 Meanwhile, Page made sure to file patents, some of which

stand amongst the earliest radar-based patents in the world.

In early 1935, as Page began chipping away at the obstacles to

building a workable receiver, Taylor became even more fervent a champion of radio detection. After Taylor secured nods from Captain

Greenlee, then the Laboratory’s director, and from Admiral Robinson,

the same bureau chief that Oberlin had fought so hard against, he

and Hayes from the Sound Division went uptown to Capitol Hill and

made a pitch to James Scrughum, the most influential member of the

Naval Appropriations Subcommittee, which had visited the Laboratory in 1934. Taylor recalled the events:

“We put up a strong plea for a substantial addition to the small

direct, appropriation which the Naval Research Laboratory usually received from Congress, this increment to be earmarked for

long time investigations, particularly in the field of microwaves

and supersonics [an early term relevant to sonar development].

Mr. Scrughum listened in silence, asked a few questions, but promised us nothing. We left his office feeling very much discouraged,

but on the following Monday morning, he telephoned to state

that the Committee had agreed to give us an extra $100,000.00

to be spent on this work.”27

At that time, Taylor recalled, this “looked like ten million dollars.” The money went into hiring new personnel, purchasing equipment, as well as a handful of research projects. The radar project shifted

into double-time. Taylor assigned another man, Robert Guthrie, to

work under Page, and the two men then worked nearly full-time on

the radio detection equipment. With money now specifically slated

for the project, Taylor stepped up his own pressure to get results. Perhaps the hottest prod for Page and Guthrie, however, was news that in

the summer of 1935, the French liner Normandie had been equipped
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 85

with a radio-based device for detecting icebergs. Radio was a worldwide phenomenon, a worldwide technology, and people beyond NRL

had noticed intriguing reflections of radio signals for years. The

Normandie report only confirmed that the arena of radio detection

had become a technology horse race.

In the spring of 1936, after having worked a number of major and

minor modifications into the system roughed out two years earlier,

Page, Guthrie, and the other engineers were ready to begin testing. To

save the expense of having to build a large new antenna, they had

designed and built their test equipment so they could use a large “curtain array” antenna already at the Laboratory. This was a conspicuous

transmitting structure that stretched, web-like, between a pair of 200-

foot towers. The receiver was in the penthouse of a nearby building

and attached to a less assuming antenna on the roof with a “giant

killer” cable whose extra thickness ensured that weak signals coursing

into it would not be lost to resistance.

When they flicked on the equipment on April 28th, they watched

the trace on the oscilloscope race horizontally. Then they saw frenetic

vertical blips leaping up from the traces that renewed themselves on

the left when they came to an end on the right. These blips were due

to planes a few miles away that were reflecting radio signals emitted

from the curtain array. The first day, they could detect planes that

were 21⁄2 miles away. The next day, when they used more power, that

distance doubled. As the tests continued, hints of the power and versatility of this technology emerged. During one set of tests in the summer of 1936, a pilot had gotten lost in thick weather about 25 miles

away. Taylor recalls what happened next:

“We told him to fly five minutes in an easterly course. He did so

but we saw no pip on the scope . . . We told him to fly ten minutes

in a westerly direction. Soon the pip appeared, whereupon we

told him he was on the beam. He came home safely. Probably

this was the first instance of a plane being brought home by radar

in thick weather.”28
86 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Proving the principle in laboratory tests is one thing, but getting

the Navy to buy into new technology is another thing entirely. The

pace toward operational radar for the Fleet quickened yet more after

June 10th when a pair of high-level officers of the bureau’s Radio and

Sound Divisions witnessed a perfect test of Page and Guthrie’s equipment. They became immediate champions of the technology. Two

days later, their boss, Admiral Bowen, chief of the Bureau of Engineering, wrote a letter to NRL. In it, he requested the Laboratory give

the “highest possible priority” to the development of shipboard equipment.29 Moreover, Bowen wrote,

“It is requested, upon receipt of this letter, that the subject problem be placed in a secret status, that all personnel now cognizant

of the problem be cautioned against disclosing it to others, and

that the number of persons to be informed of further developments in connection therewith be limited to an irreducible minimum.”30

Even before the first shipboard tests were conducted, Captain

Cooley, who took over the Laboratory’s directorship in 1935 soon

after Bowen took over the Bureau of Engineering, was able to use the

testing equipment to lure the topmost layer of the Navy hierarchy,

including the Secretary of the Navy, to the Laboratory. Even before it

had yielded anything for the operational Fleet, the radio detection

team was helping the Laboratory with its name recognition problem.

It still was up to Page and his expanding team of researchers to follow

through on Bowen’s request for practical shipboard equipment. For

one thing, no ship commander was going to put a couple of 200-foot

towers on his vessel.

Page knew that scaling the antennae down meant using shorter

wavelengths, and that meant both redesigning a lot of circuitry and

somehow getting hold of more capable components. What’s more, if

Taylor had it his way, the next design prototype also would feature

something that Page initially considered to be impossible: a single

antenna that would both transmit and receive. With this, Taylor wished
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 87

to minimize the size and complexity of any proposed addition to an

ship’s already-encumbered structure.

Page’s initial thought was that Taylor’s idea was utterly impossible to realize. But when he got beyond his own skepticism and summoned his innovative talents, he came up with an electronic switch

that would make a one-antenna system possible. Called a duplexer,

the mechanism protected the delicate receiver circuitry and components from the strong transmitter pulses on their way to the antennae

and then shunted the weak radio echoes picked up by the same antennae back to the receiver.

With the duplexer in hand, Taylor was anxious to get the equipment in the field for tests. By April 1937, the radar team had installed

the latest version of their 200 MHz radar detection equipment aboard

the destroyer USS Leary, which had been docked at the nearby Washington Navy Yard. These tests successfully detected planes at distances

of up to 17 miles. Although it showed that radio detection of unseen

airplanes was possible from a ship, the result was disappointing since

tests at the Laboratory by then had detected aircraft up to 40 miles

away. Page knew what they needed: more power feeding into the transmitter.

By the end of the year, pressure was coming in for the Laboratory

to complete its work for the 200 MHz radar equipment. Commander

Wilber J. Ruble, head of the bureau’s Radio Division, was even asking

the Laboratory to set down production specifications so that manufacturers could begin supplying the Fleet with the new tool. By the

end of the year, after more design and engineering iterations, the first

production prototype of a 200 MHz radio detection system was in

hand. At 17-ft square, the antenna was still so big and cumbersome

that only the larger ships of the Fleet could accommodate it, and then

only if their commanders were willing to take it on.

The guinea pig ship turned out to be the USS New York. This was

the flagship of Admiral A.W. Johnson, commander of the Atlantic

Fleet who already had seen NRL’s radar. In keeping with Bowen’s se-
88 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

crecy order, the sailors of the New York were kept in the dark about the

strange new equipment and oversized antennae, which they mocked

as the “flying mattress.”31 The NRL radar developers installed this prototype radar set, called the XAF, early in 1939 so that it would be

ready to sail to the Caribbean for exercises slated to take place through

March.

The “flying mattress,” visible two-thirds of the way up the tower of the USS

New York, was the antenna for the XAF, the first production model of NRL’s

200 MHz radar.
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 89

Unknown to Page and his associates, their equipment was actually about to go head-to-head against another radio detection prototype, the CXZ, built by RCA’s Production Department under a secret

request by the Bureau of Engineering in 1937. Five years earlier, researchers at the company had begun looking into a new generation

of radio communication using microwaves, which are shorter and of

yet higher frequency than NRL had been using. By 1937, the RCA

team had realized the lessons they were learning from this work could

serve for non-communications applications like detecting navigational

obstacles as the French had done. They even had happened onto the

same pulse method that Young came up with. In 1937, during which

the Bureau of Engineering had disclosed the NRL results in keeping

with the practice of relying on outside contracts for production, an

experimental radar based on microwave pulses was on the company

roof in Camden, New Jersey. And it was detecting echoes from

Philadelphia’s skyscrapers a few miles away over the Delaware River.

For the at-sea expedition and competition with the NRL engineers,

the RCA engineers had installed a 400 MHz radio detection set aboard

the USS Texas.

As it turned out during the expedition, the XAF outperformed the

CXZ in every respect. The XAF could detect ships at 10 miles, at least

2.5 miles farther than the CXZ. The XAF detected planes up to 48

miles away; the CXZ would go blind to planes farther than 5 miles

out. The XAF could detect buoys, the flight of 14-inch shells as well as

their splashes 8 miles away. Page even recalls watching the system he

helped shepherd into existence as it detected large birds. Moreover,

the XAF worked nearly continuously under all weather conditions

and was not bothered by the shock of gunfire. The CXZ, on the other

hand, couldn’t take the heavy gunfire nor did it stand up well to the

moisture of the oceanic environment.

The feat that clinched a place for radio detection in the U.S. Navy

occurred in the dark on January 16. A number of vessels that had

been sent over the horizon had orders to turn around at a designated
90 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

time unknown to Page and to come toward the USS New York. The

Admiral of the Fleet, A. W. Johnson, asked Page to see if he could use

the XAF to detect the ships during their return. The Admiral then went

to the movies. Page recalls what happened after that:

“When the movies were over, he came up. He started watching

the scope—he watched it and watched it—and he knew it was

time for the attack, and he didn’t see anything. Finally, he gave

up and said he had gotten tired of watching the scope. He turned

to leave. [When] he got to the doorway, he stopped for some

reason and turned around and came back to look once more before he went down. Within a couple of rotations of the antenna,

as we swept past, he saw the destroyer. He saw it, and like a kid

he jumped, ‘There she is!’32

Page recalls that the destroyer was nearly 6 miles away when the

Admiral saw its echo on the scope. After the NRL team gave him the

destroyer’s bearing, the Admiral ordered the New York’s searchlights

to be trained on that bearing. “We didn’t see a thing,” Page recalled.

“It was slightly hazy and we got the reflection off the haze and the

lights and couldn’t see very far. [But] the next day, the officers from

the destroyer [and] the destroyer skipper came aboard. [The skipper]

was just a little bit shaken. He said ‘what’d you have on that ship last

night? When you turned on your searchlights, you illuminated my

lead destroyer.”33

In subsequent nighttime tests, even when approaching destroyers

had been forewarned of the new detection tool, they still could not

avoid detection. “That really impressed the officer,” Page recalls. “From

then on they were sold on the stuff and they would give us anything

we wanted.”34

The official response to this demonstration could not have been

more gratifying to the NRL team. The Captain of the New York officially recommended immediate installation on those vessels that could

accommodate it. More glowing, however, was the assessment from

Admiral Johnson, Commander of the Atlantic Squadron. In his report to the Bureau of Engineering in April, 1939, he wrote “ . . . the
chapter 4 – an orphan proves itself ♦ 91

equipment is one of the most important military developments since

the advent of radio itself. Its value as a defensive instrument of war

and as an instrument for avoidance of collisions at sea justifies the

Navy’s unlimited development of the equipment . . . ”35

In May of 1940, RCA, which had outbid Western Electric Company for the contract to produce the Navy’s first shipboard radar sets,

began delivering the first of six units, that had been specified to be

exact copies of the XAF. The next 14 units, which were slightly modified and designated as CXAM-1, came a little later. But by the time of

the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,

most of these units were installed and operational aboard 20 of the

U.S. Navy’s heavy cruisers, carriers, battleships, and seaplane tenders.

In official reports at the end of WWII, this type of radar would get

credit for contributing to major Naval victories in battles at the Coral

Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal.36 Most subsequent historical accounts

of the development of radar in the U.S. during World War II would

This summer of 1940 picture shows Building 12 with its rooftop contingent

of experimental and production model radar antennae.
92 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

highlight the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab, which the U.S. established during World War II as a national center for radar development

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a result of this slant,

NRL’s earlier pioneering work in Naval radar has appeared diminished.

Nonetheless, with radar, NRL had given the Navy something entirely new—the ability to see the enemy in the dark and through clouds

and in many other ways not yet discovered. That group of radio men

at NRL who first developed radar for the Navy in the United States

had counterparts in the United States, England, Japan, Germany, and

elsewhere where researchers were exploiting the same physical principles and natural laws to develop a smorgasbord of first-generation

radar equipment. There may even have been a greater sense of urgency in Europe where Hitler and his Nazi party were rallying in everincreasing belligerence. A mere half-year after Page and Guthrie returned from the Caribbean in 1939 with the pleasant knowledge that

their dogged radio detection work was on its way to becoming what

historian David Allison has called a “new eye for the Navy,” the Nazis

marched into Poland. The second Great War in Europe had begun

and radar would be in it for the duration, and way beyond. NRL’s

radio men and their colleagues had no idea how much their lives and

the Laboratory were about to change.
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 93

C h a p t e r 5

An Adolescent NRL at

the Crossroads of History

93

For NRL, the prewar years were lean. They were also promising.

Even though the Bureau of Engineering steered research at NRL toward short-term problem-solving and engineering just as Captain

Oberlin had feared, the bureau also had proven to be a responsible

and stable guardian for the Laboratory. The Laboratory’s budget had

risen from about a half-million dollars in 1935 to well over $800,000

by 1939 when administrative control of NRL again shifted, this time

from the Bureau of Engineering to the office of the Secretary of the

Navy.

Over that same period of time, the size of the Laboratory’s staff

approached about 300. The technical diversity of this laboratory also

expanded to cover ever more of the scientific spectrum. The number

of divisions had grown to seven—Radio, Sound, Physical Optics (formerly Heat and Light), Mechanics, Metallurgy, Chemistry, and Interior Communications, whose staff focused on the problems of integrating the growing panoply of on-ship communications equipment

into the infrastructure of Naval vessels.

There was another sign that the very existence of the Laboratory

no longer would be a serious question: construction picked up after

the dearth of building during the Depression years. You usually don’t

build a house unless you expect to move in and live there for awhile.

The first chemical laboratory went up by 1938 and already had been

expanded by 1941. By then, the Radio Materiel School, at which thou-
94 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

sands of uniformed Navy men learned how to use all of that new

radio equipment going into the Fleet, also had a new building as well

as barracks to house the students. A year later, the Radar Division, a

spin-off from the Radio Division, also got a badly needed new facility.

What remained in question about NRL, however, was just what

kind of laboratory it was supposed to be. During the 1930s, Captain

Oberlin’s prediction that NRL would become just another Navy engineering laboratory if it fell under bureau control came at least partially true. Work at NRL was dominated by short-term studies in response to problems specified by the Bureau of Engineering and other

Navy bureaus. That left little time, and even less money, for scientific

research.

The example of radar, on the other hand, demonstrated that NRL

nonetheless had evolved into a valuable institution that can produce

militarily significant surprises. NRL had become a place where the

ability to harness known principles in the quest for better military

technology, which is otherwise known as engineering, would form a

creative synergy with more fundamental research aimed at scientific

discovery. In that sense, it was on a track akin to the one that would

make Bell Laboratory’s Murray Hill research center in New Jersey and

DuPont’s Purity Hall in Wilmington, Delaware famous bastions of

science-to-technology innovation.

The development of high-frequency radar technology in the Radio Division during the 1930s was and will always be a standout in

the institutional life of NRL. It has become to NRL what the transistor

became for Bell Labs and what nylon became for E.I. Du Pont de

Nemours where that landmark polymer became a technological newborn during the same prewar years as the birth of radar. In all of these

cases, work toward improvements, spinoffs, and variations on the

original themes never stopped.

Even throughout World War II, the Radio Division was the largest, best supported, and one of the two oldest divisions at NRL. NRL

was never solely a radio laboratory, however. Just as the radar project
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 95

had begun its ascent in 1934 to become the Laboratory’s highest profile yet most secret activity, for example, Harvey Hayes and his cadre

in the Sound Division were christening their QB underwater detection system based on new Rochelle salt crystal transducers. With the

QB system and its improvements, a trained operator could determine

the bearings of a submarine more than 6 miles away even while his

own boat was cruising at nine knots.

As it turned out, the Navy Department did not initially accept the

NRL underwater detection gear for production. Taylor later speculated

that had these systems been installed in the Fleet prior to 1935, “the

battle of the Atlantic might have been won sooner and with fewer

casualties.”1

Despite the Navy’s slow acceptance of the equipment, the Sound

Division continued improving on the QB system during the rise of

Fascism in Europe in the mid- and late 1930s. One improvement was

the “Uni-Control System,” which helped operators keep amplifiers in

the transmitters and receivers tuned to a common ultrasound frequency. “This allowed the use of a narrow sound beam for directing

an attack and a wider low-frequency beam for underwater search,”

wrote Taylor.2

Another improvement completed by the end of 1940 was the

“dome shield,” a thin, smoothly contoured housing of reinforced steel

on the underside of the ship’s bow. This housing protected the transducers and yet allowed the passage of sound energy so that both echoranging and searching could take place even when the ship was moving up to 15 knots. Yet a third improvement in sonar systems came

not from hardware but from a better understanding of how oceanic

temperature affects the transmission of sound. Ever more detailed

and sophisticated environmental knowledge of this sort was the route

to extracting more tactically significant information from the same

signals.

Several other efforts of the Sound Division got into the Fleet more

readily. One was an improved depth finder, or fathometer, for ship

navigation. Like its sonar cousins, the sound transducers of these depth
96 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

finders incorporated the kinds of sensitive Rochelle-salt crystals that

Elias Klein had helped develop. Nearly every Navy ship carried these

devices during World War II, Taylor later wrote.3

On another front, the Sound Division solved the so-called “singing propeller” problem. The heart of the problem was a maddening,

high-pitch whine of mysterious origins that made life miserable and

nights sleepless for crews under certain cruising conditions. NRL’s

acoustics experts were able to pin the problem on the shape of a ships’

propellers. They suggested that machining the propellers to have

slightly different shapes whose resonant frequencies were outside of

the audio range would end the sonic torture. It worked.4

By the time the United States entered World War II in December

1941 following the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, NRL had become a substantial place where talents and tools could be mixed and

matched to solve real Navy problems or to open pathways toward

new and potentially valuable technologies. For challenges such as

developing better armor plate, or lightweight and portable aircraft

power supplies for radio sets, staff from different divisions were beginning to cross pollinate.

Part of this synergy came from the Chemistry Division.5

 A presentday motto amongst chemists is that “chemistry is the central science.”

What they mean is that chemistry has a place in just about any scientific question you might ask, whether it be on the propagation of

electrochemical impulses down the spinal cord, the chemical synthesis of pain killers, the corrosion of automobile chassis, or the composition of galactic clouds.

The NRL chemists proved they could become part of the solution

to technical headaches in the Radio Division. As Taylor’s radio men

kept pushing toward higher frequencies, they were running into problems with dielectric materials—electrically insulating substances used

in many electronic components such as capacitors and component

housings. The existing dielectric materials tended to allow electrical

current to leak as the oscillating radio waves coursing through them

increased in frequency. That leakage had all kinds of negative reper-
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 97

cussions when it came to building reliable and practical communications and other radio-based equipment. As members of the professional chemistry community, the NRL chemists not only knew what

they were doing in their own labs, but what their colleagues were

doing elsewhere. When the Naugatuck Chemical Company had come

up with a new type of plastic material that the company itself deemed

too costly for practical use, NRL chemists got hold of some and found

its dielectric properties to be superior to anything the Radio Division

had in hand. This led to a collaboration with company chemists that

yielded a new plastic–“Victron.” This new material was not a longterm answer to the electrical leakage problem, however; it melted too

readily and was too weak for war service. But it did serve as a stopgap

material that allowed the Radio Division to continue pushing into

new territories of high frequency.6 In that sense, this humble and

readily forgotten episode represents how NRL slowly became the forward-looking place that Edison and Daniels had envisioned in 1915.

The Radio Division was only one place NRL chemists were helping out. In the prewar years of the 1930s, the Navy was discovering

how central chemistry was to its own operation. From the corrosion

of metal by salt water to the combustion of fuel and from the transformation of molten metal into reliable ship parts to the protection

of troops against chemical warfare agents, chemistry was there.

Between 1935 and the beginning of the war, the staff of the Chemistry Division had expanded from 10 to 25. Two of the Division’s five

sections (later called branches, which even later subsumed sections

of their own), the Electrochemistry Section and the Physical and Organic Section, continued work on some of the division’s original problems in torpedo propulsion and submarine storage batteries. More

and more, however, new problems were making it onto the agenda.

Consider the Corrosion Section, which formed in 1938 when the

Chemistry Division had reached the 10 year mark. Inhibiting rust, the

age-old naval bugaboo, was high on the section’s to-do list, but its

purview was far bigger. The section embarked on the still active quest

of developing better anti-fouling paint that could dissuade organisms
98 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

like barnacles from mooring themselves on ships’ hulls, aircraft pontoons, and other surfaces. Unwanted colonization of such organisms

mar hydrodynamic contours, thereby slowing ships down. Slower ships

eat more fuel and are sunk more readily. It is conceivable that barnacles could lose a battle for you. Anti-fouling paint was, therefore,

not a mere convenience for the Navy.

Another problem the scientists in the Corrosion Section also addressed was that of corroding fuel tanks. Their solution was to search

for non-corrosive additives to fuel and lubricating oil. The section

also developed a de-icing fluid, water-repellent coatings for aircraft

windshields, and defogging agents for optical surfaces that the Army

and Navy both put to use.

The Chemistry Division’s most ominous-sounding section, whose

wartime activities would entangle NRL a half-century later in emotional litigation that went to the very heart of the morality of research

during times of national emergency, was the Chemical Protection

Section (see next chapter). Prior to NRL’s foray in 1940 into the arena

of chemical warfare, which had so traumatized the world psyche during World War I, the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service had a veritable

monopoly on research in offensive and defensive chemical warfare.

In 1940, however, NRL got into this business because there was great

concern that chemical warfare agents would become part of the carnage of World War II. The Laboratory received some initial mentoring

from researchers at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, about an hour’s

drive north in Maryland. During the war, the Chemical Protection

Section would grow more than any other in the Chemistry Division.

It would include the construction of the short-lived Building 44, complete with a gas chamber that could accommodate human test subjects, on the grounds of the Blue Plains sewage plant next door to

NRL.

While the Chemistry Division was diversifying and expanding into

new buildings, the Heat and Light Division was making do with a

small staff headed by Edward O. Hulburt. Until 1941, the division
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 99

remained minuscule, averaging about seven men. The division maintained its general studies into ways the atmosphere and the sea affect

the passage of visible, infrared, and other ranges of light. Developing

such items as better smoke screens or search lights depended on knowledge of this general sort. The division, whose name later was changed

to the Physical Optics Division, also developed anti-reflective coatings to reduce glare, thereby increasing the efficiency of optical devices such as submarine periscopes. Another problem on the division’s

agenda was the Fleet’s protocol during blackouts to remain concealed

from the enemy. The entire on-board lighting system for blackout

situations was changed from blue light to red light after Hulburt’s

team discovered that blue light was far more noticeable to enemy

aircraft than any other visible color of light.

In these years, camouflage remained largely in the realm of optics

and that meant Hulburt would be involved. He hired his next door

neighbor, Washington, DC, artist Charles Bittinger, to help out in this

regard. With Bittinger’s assistance, the division determined the optimum colors and patterns for all kinds of Naval vessels. Hulburt compiled these results in the “Handbook of Camouflage,” which became

the Navy’s bible of camouflage during the war.7

As aircraft became more militarily important, so too did aircraft

camouflage. The closer a plane could get to its target without being

noticed, the more likely it was that the plane could hurt the enemy

and get away unscathed. This was a time when radar, which would

not be tricked by painted camouflage, had yet to make its operational

debut. In the mid-1930s, the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics was interested in using camouflage to decrease the distance at which a plane

might approach enemy locations before first being noticed. They asked

Hulburt to look into the question: could artificial lights mounted on

an airplane cloak the aircraft by making its surface as bright as the

surrounding daytime sky?

The result of this inquiry showed how a laboratory with a critical

mass of expertise can help steer military decision makers away from
100 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

dead ends. The answer Hulburt’s team came up following test flights

with planes from the Anacostia Naval Air Station was “no.” For one

thing, so much light was required to sufficiently illuminate the entire

underside of the plane that the weight of the batteries to run the lights

would be impractical. Worse, Hulburt realized, to maintain concealment, the pattern of light and color would have to be readjusted for

every turn, bank or other maneuver a pilot might make. The idea was

just too complicated and impractical. In dropping the illuminationbased camouflage idea, the Bureau of Aeronautics heeded Hulburt’s

conclusion that a quest for “electric camouflage” carried with it “almost insurmountable difficulties.”8

Like the Chemistry Division, which was created at the same time

in 1928, the Physical Metallurgy Division increased from a staff of 11

in 1935 to 40 in 1941. Steel, the stuff of hulls and a thousand lesser

necessities of the Fleet, was its primary concern. And the improvement of steel casting remained its core activity. Taylor captured the

comprehensiveness of this involvement:

“By trials and nondestructive examination [like gamma-ray radiography pioneered by Robert Mehl, the Division’s first superintendent], the methods used in all of the stages in the molding,

casting, and testing of steel were improved. The best degree of

fluidity for pouring, the cooling-solidification rate which would

result in the least number of flaws, the best molding sand to use,

and the additives which would produce the highest quality of

steel for armor, ship frames, and fittings were determined.”9

In addition to its core strength in developing better steel casting

methods and means for analyzing solid metal pieces for flaws, the

division also began to study the materials and methods of welding.

This became an important topic in the late 1930s, when the Navy

decided to do away with the traditional method of building ships by

riveting steel plates together. Electric welding became the joining

method of choice. But with that shift in manufacturing practice came

a lot of scientific ignorance about the metallurgical details of welding
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 101

processes. If Naval defense was going to depend on welded hulls from

now on, the Physical Metallurgy Division was going to do what it

could to demystify what makes those all-important metal seams stay

good or go bad.

By 1941, the Mechanics Division had been renamed the Mechanics and Electricity Division. Its staff of 13 was spread thinly over six

widely ranging sections, all under the supervision of Ross Gunn, whose

second role as Technical Aide to the Laboratory’s commander would

help him become a pioneer in nuclear technology. One of the division’s

sections, Thermodynamics, had originally been established for the

torpedo propulsion problem and then operated for several years under the banner of the Physical Metallurgy Division. This kind of pinball migration of research units between organizational units of the

Laboratory became commonplace and remains so to this day.

Other sections under Gunn’s wing included Ballistics, Electricity

and Magnetism, Mechanics, Engineering Development and Instruments, and Physical Testing. The researchers in these sections pursued a dizzying variety of projects. As the Ballistics Section noisily

looked into the penetrating power of projectiles and the resistance of

armor, the Thermodynamics Section was developing a radical new

way of converting fuel directly into electricity. Meanwhile, others in

the division were devising instruments to instantaneously determine

horsepower from measurements on a ship’s propeller shaft as their

colleagues were looking into electrically and magnetically based methods of ship and submarine detection.10

 Whatever the division’s staff accomplished during the prewar

years, however, would be overshadowed in hindsight by a top secret

program that presaged critical components of the not-yet-imagined

Manhattan Project to create nuclear weapons. In 1939, within weeks

of the world’s first announcement by German scientists that they had

split atoms, Gunn initiated a secret project in the Mechanics and Electricity Division. The aim was to devise a means of separating the more

fissile (capable of splitting) uranium isotope, U235, from the less fis-
102 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

sile isotope, U238. By this act, Gunn helped earn NRL the distinction

of becoming the first government agency to do research on atomic

energy. The project would began as a preliminary investigation into

the possibility of using energy liberated from splitting uranium atoms as a means of generating heat to drive turbines for Naval propulsion. In that regard, it was a parochial effort for the Navy itself. But it

would end up involving a future luminary in the field of nuclear physics, killing two people in an unfortunate accident at the Philadelphia

Navy Yard, and then becoming an important component of the Manhattan Project and the development of the first atomic weapons.

Gunn’s project would become one of NRL’s most world-changing accomplishments (see next chapter).

Just as this historically consequential project was getting underway in one section of one NRL division, the entire Laboratory once

again was experiencing an administrative sea change. This time it was

returning from the Bureau of Engineering to the more central site of

the office of the Secretary of the Navy. Ironically, the man who was

responsible for this change was the new Secretary of the Navy, none

other than Thomas Edison’s son Charles.

Secretary Edison based this administrative shift on what he had

perceived as the now-proven predictions by Captain Oberlin that NRL,

if placed under the Bureau of Engineering, would become primarily a

testing and engineering laboratory. This was not so much a criticism

of the bureau as a natural consequence of the mission of the bureau

and the role its own labs would have in fulfilling that mission. Despite intermittent patches of basic research, the vast majority of work

that had been done at NRL, in fact, fell under the categories of engineering and testing. That is just what Oberlin feared would happen

and why he had fought so hard against shifting NRL into the Bureau

of Engineering earlier in the decade.

In 1939, as part of a much larger Naval reorganization that consolidated the shipbuildings bureaus (Bureaus of Engineering and

Construction and Repair), Edison returned NRL to the more central

supervision of the Secretary’s Office: “I feel the laboratory must at-
chapter 5 – an adolescent nrl at the crossroads of history ♦ 103

tach greater emphasis to research, and for this reason I have placed

the Anacostia Laboratory [NRL] directly under the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and proposed to provide a central organization to

coordinate and emphasize all naval research and development,”

Edison told a committee of the House of Representatives in 1940.

“We will utilize the facilities and the staff at Anacostia and gradually

extend the scope and activities of this organization.”11

The organization Edison spoke of here was established in late 1939

and became known as the Navy Department Research Council. It presaged the 1946 creation of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), which

plays this coordinating role today for Naval research in general. NRL’s

ascending place in the Navy’s overall research agenda was evidenced

by the designation of NRL’s Director as the chairman of the council,

which included representatives from the Navy’s materiel bureaus

(Aeronautics, Ordnance, Construction and Repair, and Engineering).

Secretary Edison articulated the changing status of NRL in a directive to his Chief of Naval Operation: “The primary duty of the Laboratory divisions—will be fundamental research designed for the benefit of naval science and national defense and such collected benefits

to private industry as may develop therefrom.”12

With research leadership at NRL already in the hands of talented

civilian scientists like Taylor, Hayes, Hulburt, and Gunn—all of them

PhD physicists from respected universities—there was no doubt the

Laboratory had the scientific stuff for doing more fundamental research. But to make that so in actuality also required buy-in along the

chain of military command from the commander of NRL on up. In

addition, a good portion of the money required to run the Laboratory had to come from sources that were not only friendly to basic

research, but were also patient when it came to demonstrable payoff

for the Navy. Under the bureau, money was there, but not when it

came to longer term, more speculative scientific research.

In Secretary Charles Edison, who was born and bred in one of the

most technical environments of his time, science in the Navy had a

very powerful friend. And that bode well for NRL.
104 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The Laboratory’s prospects were further strengthened by the ascendancy of Admiral Harold G. Bowen (see Chapter 4), the brusque

science-loving officer who had replaced Admiral Robinson as head of

the Bureau of Engineering, and who took over the NRL directorship

in October 1939.

When he took the helm at the age of 56, Bowen already had given

the Navy 38 years, beginning when he became a student at the Naval

Academy in 1901. In 1914, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical

engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. In 1931, he became

Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Engineering, and four years later he

became the bureau’s chief. In that position, he made friends and enemies in his hard-fought campaigns to modernize the Navy with such

changes as high-pressure, high-temperature steam for propulsion,

high-speed turbines, and alternating current.13 When he took over NRL,

he already knew that radar had the potential of being the most important electronic innovation since radio. His ambition was to upgrade Naval research and development as no one had before.

It would have seemed in late 1939 that NRL finally had the ticket

to become the Navy’s visionary “corporate” laboratory whose outlook spanned out to and beyond the horizon. The contemporaneous

outbreak of war in Europe, however, would postpone NRL’s ability to

fully redeem that ticket. Although direct U.S. involvement in World

War II was still two years away, the country needed its military forces

to be prepared for anything. The Nazis already had taken and occupied Poland earlier in the year. In 1940, they marched on Holland

and then on France, which was a mere British Channel away from

England. Basic research would have its place at NRL, but the times

were calling far more for NRL’s demonstrated genius at engineering.
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 105

C h a p t e r 6

NRL Goes to War

105

Just as the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915 had thrust

World War I onto the United States with acute drama, a singular tragic

drama on December 7, 1941 pushed the United States into the throes

of World War II. On that day, the attack on Pearl Harbor killed nearly

2,400 sailors, Marines, and army soldiers and civilians, sunk or damaged 21 ships, and damaged or destroyed more than 300 aircraft. The

next day, the United States declared war on Japan and the entire country

began mobilizing as it never had before. A. Hoyt Taylor later recalled

what the U.S. entry into World War II meant to the Naval Research

Laboratory: “The activity had to change, almost overnight, from a fairly

modest, almost academic-type laboratory into one of the greatest research institutions in the world.”1

The buildup was phenomenal. From 1941 to the end of the war

in 1945, NRL personnel increased by more than 400%, from 396 to

2,069. That was not the half of it, however. Attendance at the Radio

Materiel School, which had shared the NRL campus since 1924,

swelled as the need for persons trained in radio communications grew

along with the Navy’s surface Fleet and airborne units. By 1945, the

school grew to accommodate nearly 2,400 enlisted men as well as

200 officers, all sleeping and studying in a quickly built compound of

temporary barracks, classrooms, and even a chapel. “So much construction is in progress on the Station that NRL is beginning to look
106 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

like a modern boom-town,” read an article in a July 1944 issue of the

NRL Pilot, the Laboratory’s newsletter at the time.2

It took a lot more money to run the burgeoning Laboratory during the four frenetic war years. The Laboratory’s budget mushroomed

accordingly from $1.7 million to $13.7 million, a trend that would

not reverse after the war. The annual load of problems the Navy’s

bureaus were assigning to NRL divisions rose from about 200 to nearly

900 during the war.3

Before the war, the uniformed presence at NRL was minor. After

the attack on Pearl Harbor, civilian clothes began giving way to military uniforms as though it were an expression of high fashion. In

1941, there were 20 Naval officers working at NRL; by 1945, there

were 1,018. Most of the increase was due to a defensible scam. Cognizant of the crucial behind-the-scenes role a place like NRL might end

up playing in a technologically sophisticated war, the Navy Department had worked out a compromise with the local draft board in

which the Laboratory’s civilian scientists could be inducted into the

Navy but then assigned to work at the Lab. That prevented the likely

alternative of having a lot of badly needed research and engineering

talent getting drafted by normal routes and then sent anywhere in the

world they might be needed.

In this agreement with the draft board, those at NRL who could

have earned officer ranks received Naval commissions at grades that

reflected their ranks within the Laboratory’s professional hierarchy.

Those who couldn’t meet the physical requirements of officerdom

became petty officers. At times, this led to ironic arrangements in which

senior scientists were militarily outranked by their professional subordinates.

These were not the only additional uniforms that began showing

up for work at the Laboratory. Some 167 women, who had joined the

Navy to assist the war effort in noncombatant jobs, also came to NRL.

They were known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and took on much of the additional clerical work that
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 107

increased markedly along with the quickening of the Laboratory’s pace.

The WAVES also imported more romance than the Laboratory had

ever known. Every week, the NRL Pilot announced with the requisite

corniness of the times of some “hand holding” going on along the

river or, more seriously, another marriage of a WAVE and an NRL researcher or shop worker.

The roster of contract employees, who could be hired far more

quickly and efficiently than by relying on cumbersome protocol established by the Civil Service, also rose to a high of 750 during the

war years. Once here, these researchers and engineers often slid into

permanent slots at NRL.

 With all of these additional people coming to work at the Bellevue

site, there were more mouths to feed, more rooms to illuminate and

heat, more toilets to flush, more work to be done, more paper to

push, more phone lines to operate. Buildings were going up almost

overnight. Cars were in parking lots, day and night. Draftsmen (and

The Laboratory as it appeared in late 1944
108 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

draftswomen) hunched over tables at all hours drawing up plans for

hundreds of wartime gadgets. The shop was in a constant frenzy, loud

with model building and prototype construction so that the companies contracted to build production models would know precisely

what the Navy wanted them to make. More trucks were delivering

more supplies and hauling away more garbage. With all of this hiring

and procurement, there was more governmental red tape to navigate.

More fingers were dialing more phone calls and keeping the increasing roster of switchboard operators very busy. To use a jazz colloquialism, “this joint was jumping.”

To accelerate the transition of equipment designed at the Laboratory to operational status in the Fleet, several special liaison groups

sprang up. These groups linked NRL researchers and the industrial

contractors they worked closely with to produce equipment, on the

one side, with Navy personnel who would use the equipment, on the

other side.

One of these groups was the Airborne Coordinating Group (ACG),

whose airborne electronics specialists would number 140 by 1943.

Their job was to troubleshoot breakdowns and failures in all airborne

electronic devices, come up with corrective measures, and perform

maintenance. Radios, homing beacons, radar searching and jamming

equipment, identification equipment, and other more specialized gadgets were popping up all over the inside and outside of planes. The

men of the ACG carried out about 1,000 field missions around the

globe. A shipboard version of the ACG, the Electronic Field Service

Group of 325 officers, enlisted men, and civilians, did the similar

tasks for shipboard electronics, which involved a far more extensive

inventory.

A third special group, created in 1942, the Combined Research

Group (CRG), was tasked with coordinating work on an electronic

device known as IFF (Identification: Friend or Foe). “The CRG had its

start to unify the many beacon systems in use during WWII to direct

bombers to their targets,” recalls Henry M. Suski, then a project engi-
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 109

neer with the CRG.4 The group’s major goal, however, was to develop

a device that would enable the new radar systems entering service

during the war to distinguish between friends and foes. With so much

shooting taking place beyond ranges where visual verification was

possible, new techniques of determining who it was you were shooting at took on critical importance. This was especially critical in a

conflict like World War II, where multinational forces with a wide

variety of equipment joined forces against the enemy.

NRL’s Radio Division went part of the way toward the goal of a

multinational IFF system in 1942 by providing IFF equipment—designated as Mark III—that was adopted by both the United States and

United Kingdom. “The system was installed on practically every aircraft and ship of the U.S. forces,” Louis Gebhard of the Radio Division later stated. “It was used extensively, particularly during operation in the Pacific.”5

There were a number of technical problems involved with the Mark

III, not the least of which was the amount of time it took to make an

identification. The CRG was formed to solve these problems. The

group’s membership combined researchers from the U.S. Army, U.S.

Navy, the National Defense Research Committee’s Radiation Laboratory at MIT, the British Admiralty, Canada, and others, all under contract from the United States’ National Defense Research Committee.

As it turned out, the CRG made considerable progress toward what

became known as the Mark-V IFF, but the new system was just undergoing evaluation for Fleet use when the war ended.6

In addition to the explosive growth at the main campus along the

Potomac River, the Laboratory’s first major field station, the Chesapeake Bay Annex (now called the Chesapeake Bay Detachment), was

undergoing its own fantastic growth spurt on the western shore of the

Chesapeake Bay. Just before the war, Taylor, Young, and Gehbard had

identified and procured a site about 40 miles from the Laboratory

along cliffs overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. Its location made it an

ideal place to field-test experimental communications and radio de-
110 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

tection equipment, new antennae, and other large and small gadgets.

Radio and radar engineers could perform these tests under more realistic and revealing conditions because Navy vessels of any shape and

size could approach the annex in an open body of water. From 1941

to 1945, the newly acquired CBA grew to over 100 personnel and to

more than a dozen large buildings, including a barracks and mess

hall.

Staff of the Radio Division were not the only ones commuting to

the CBA. Researchers from the Optics and Sound Divisions also were

putting the facilities to use. And beyond NRL staff, engineers from

commercial contractors such as General Electric, RCA, and Bell Labs

took up barrack space at the annex so that they could field-test the

latest prototypes of the electronic gear their companies were building

under contract to the Navy’s bureaus or the National Defense Research

Committee.

 The wartime NRL was an adolescent laboratory in a raging growth

spurt on its way to adulthood. Such transitions inevitably bring growth

pains and the Laboratory was growing faster than could be easily

managed. The number of research divisions grew to ten. The

Laboratory’s functions and needs were becoming more varied and

complex at a time when the war was greatly amplifying the normal

challenge of procuring skilled workers, researchers, and the research

materials needed to do top quality work. This was a time, after all,

when rubber was scarce enough to ration, and nylon, which DuPont

had just commercially introduced during the war, had been pulled

from the general market to make its limited supply available for making parachutes, tire cords, and other militarily important equipment.

 The old, homey style of recruitment by which Laboratory superintendents would write letters and make phone calls to solicit recommendations from their trusted friends in the science world gave way

to brand new Laboratory bureaucracies dedicated to personnel issues.

Hiring became more of a crapshoot than the sure thing it once had

been. The population of lawyers, a sure indicator of an organization’s
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 111

loss of innocence, grew. As the Laboratory’s staff invented more and

more gadgetry at an ever-accelerating wartime pace, the Laboratory

installed a Patents Section (later generalized to become the Legal Department), which by the end of the war employed 16 attorneys.

Changes in the Laboratory’s drafting service also reflected the

wartime bustle. The drafting staff had always resided in the Radio

Division, but when their skills became more generally required

throughout the Laboratory, this technical drawing staff budded off

into its own Design and Drafting Section in 1943. The section got so

busy during the war that it advertised in the NRL Pilot for “girls interested in drafting.” Had it not been wartime, even humble opportunities like this in a male-dominated technical setting most likely would

not have been available for women.

Despite the nearly unmanageable growth and the concomitant

arrival of more bureacracy, the Laboratory was fully swept up with the

nation’s gung-ho, single-minded war effort. The NRL Pilot’s often

printed axiom was: “The difficult we will do at once—the impossible

may take a little longer.” To cope with tire shortages, the Pilot’s editors

implored employees to use car pools. Buying War Bonds and donating blood for use overseas near the battlefronts were other ubiquitous mandates drilled into the newsletter’s readers.

Each NRL Pilot served as both a pep talk and a paternal lecture. In

the first issue of 1944, the Pilot touted Mildred K. Ruth for the important work she was doing in testing light bulbs for their ability to withstand shock and vibration. “If the lights go out on a ship, many lives

are likely to be lost,” an article read. “[Mildred Ruth] has the satisfaction of knowing that she is contributing an important bit to the war

effort.”

The Pilot also intermittently brought the war down to the most

personal level. One article in the final issue of 1943 included the following short item: “NRL extends sympathy to Albert E. Meininger,

who received word last month that his son was reported missing in

action following an air attack over New Britain Island. Mr. Meininger
112 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

thinks his son might be a prisoner of the Japs, as his plane was seen to

crash in the harbor at Rabaul.” Another Pilot article reported that 36-

year-old Kermit Robey, a former NRL machine shop worker, was killed

in action. Every issue of the Pilot also recorded the minutiae of normal life: softball scores, birth announcements, rumors of romances,

weddings, and corny poems.

Meanwhile, World War II was having a profound effect on the

Laboratory’s overall character. The immediacy of war superseded any

plans Admiral Bowen and Charles Edison might have had for longterm and more fundamental research. With a war upon whose outcome the fate of the world literally rested, there were more urgent

matters that NRL researchers needed to address. In fact, much of NRL’s

work during the war involved the Navy’s version of consumer-testing

to make sure that equipment imminently slated for use in the Fleet

actually could assimilate into their intended settings and work reliably once they were there. There also was a constant stream of top

priority calls to solve emergency situations that cropped up as the

U.S. Navy went into all kinds of new environments with a combination of new equipment and machines, freshly trained sailors, and new

technologies.

On the administrative level, the Laboratory already had ricocheted

from the dominion of the Secretary of the Navy back to being an arm

of a Navy bureau. The shift occurred in July 1941 as the war in Europe

was intensifying but before the U.S. entered the conflict. This time,

NRL fell under the Bureau of Ships, which then Secretary of the Navy

Edison had created in 1940 by merging the former Bureau of Engineering and the Bureau of Construction and Repair. Given the times,

the administrative shift was just as well. As Taylor later put it: “the

matter of administration made very little difference to us during the

war, for by far the greatest percentage of our work was done for the

Bureau of Ships anyway.”7 The shift brought with it the advantage of

placing NRL administratively closer to those who would know technical details about the Fleet’s wartime needs.
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 113

To recount the stories of even 1 percent of NRL’s wartime projects

would turn this book into a sizable compendium that would read

like a catalog. The following handful of the more dramatic or consequential episodes played out on NRL stages is intended only to serve

up a taste of wartime NRL.

Electronic Warfare—The Solution Becomes the Problem

More influential than the administrative shifts within the Navy

on overall NRL’s activities was the creation in June, 1940 of the NDRC,

a high-powered advisory and funding body that became part of the

more encompassing Office of Scientific Research and Development

(OSRD). The NDRC was made up of the country’s most respected

scientific leaders. Its role was to coordinate war-related research across

the nation’s full complement of technical assets in academia, industry, and government. The world in which NRL could view the Navy as

where the buck stopped became a world where the Navy and NRL

became players on a much larger team.

Among the most fateful and historically significant decisions of

the NDRC to affect NRL was to shift the center of military radar research to a newly organized facility, the Radiation Laboratory (known

also as the Rad Lab), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT). This all-out, top-priority, top-secret research and development

facility produced results that rank along with nuclear weapons, synthetic rubber (to substitute for embargoed supplies of natural rubber), and the proximity fuze as among the most important technological developments of World War II.

The formation of the Radiation Laboratory and the character of

radar research in the United States changed dramatically following

the1940 Tizard mission, during which a cadre of British scientists led

by Sir Henry Tizard visited the United States, including NRL, as part

of an effort to coordinate war-related research amongst the Allies. Prior

to the Tizard mission, NRL’s radio detection work focused on highfrequency systems for ships. The British were more immediately vul-
114 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

nerable, especially at night, to German attack by way of bombers, and

later by way of unmanned V-2 “buzz” bombs flying in from air bases

located in occupied France. Understandably, their research effort centered on airborne radar.

Since planes are smaller than ships, however, the British were more

pressed to develop compact radar systems than was the United States.

A key difference between high-frequency and microwave-based systems (whose wavelengths are shorter) is that the latter enables engineers to design more compact systems using smaller antennae that are

more suited for aircraft. Another reason the British were technically

ahead in this microwave regime of radar technology, which others including NRL at least had dabbled in for several years, was the invention of a gadget—the multicavity magnetron—by a physicist at the

University of Birmingham.

Unlike the electronic tubes available in the United States, the

multicavity magnetron could electronically oscillate at the higher microwave frequencies with great enough power to generate strong radar

pulses and detectable echoes from distant-enough targets. Besides enabling the use of much smaller antennae, the multicavity magnetron’s

microwave frequencies could be used to generate more powerful and

sharply directed radar pulses. In turn, this helped clear the way for

specialized and more capable radar equipment for fire-control on

shipborne guns, nighttime operation of fighter planes, and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) by helping ASW attack planes locate their hardto-find targets. Another advantage of microwave radars was that, for a

substantial time, the Germans and Japanese were unaware of the

progress of the British in this regime and neglected to deploy detectors

to warn themselves when illuminated at microwave frequencies.8

The multicavity magnetron and microwave radar became the raison

d’être for the Rad Lab. NRL used the multicavity magnetron to design

its own airborne radar equipment, designated the ASB system. In time,

25,000 ASB sets were produced and installed in Naval air squadrons.

The radar experts on the Tizard mission did not return to Britain empty-
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 115

handed. One of the more important technical leads they took back to

their laboratories was the duplexer that Robert Page of NRL’s Radio

Division had developed in the late 1930s. The duplexer and its ingenious electronic switching mechanism enabled a single antennae to

serve as both the transmitter and receiver for a radar system (see Chapter 4).

Prior to NRL’s disclosure of the duplexer, British radar designers—

the most advanced in the world—had been relegated to using two

antennae, a cumbersome and performance-eroding arrangement for

fighter planes. When Winston Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister during WWII, gave his famous speech in which he said, “Never have so

many owed so much to so few,” the radar men honestly could include

themselves amongst the “few.”

Yet NRL’s place in the history of radar would never fully recover

from the creation of the Rad Lab and the emergence of microwave

radar over high-frequency radar as the pinnacle of World War II radar

technology. The Rad Lab, a temporary wartime entity, would go down

in history as the womb of radar in the United States even though it

had nothing to do with the earliest developments at NRL and by Army

researchers. A recently published 600-page history of radar by Robert

Buderi, The Invention that Changed the World, chronicles the Rad Lab’s

story in great detail while hardly mentioning the role of NRL’s Radio

Division.

The staff of the Radio Division, which by the end of the war had

grown to over 1,000, did in fact make critical lifesaving contributions

during the war. The high-frequency shipborne systems for search and

detection that NRL demonstrated in the late 1930s and the new airborne ASB radar that emerged following the Tizard mission’s disclosure of the multicavity magnetron became crucial instruments of war

that played significantly in the outcomes of many missions and battles.

The NRL radio men also helped prove to Naval officers that radar

was good for more than just providing early warning of enemy ships

and planes. Soon after the U.S. entry into the war, they demonstrated
116 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

that novel radar-based fire control systems to direct heavy gunfire could

improve upon the age-old optical fire-control methods. Recalls Taylor: “In the beginning, the ‘line’ officers of the Navy were very skeptical about radar fire-control, but after the second battle of Savo Island

(1942), when radar saved an American task force, the Fleet became

completely sold on its use.”9

Radar was so new in World War II that every aspect of the technology was ripe for improvement. The earliest radar operators were challenged to make sense of scratchy lines shooting nervously upward

from a glowing horizontal point sweeping across a fluorescent screen.

A sweeping line hardly corresponds to the three-dimensional volume

around a ship and plane, making this early type of display difficult to

read and interpret. NRL researchers worked quickly in the early part

of the war to improve the display of radar information by developing

the PPI, or Plan Position Indicator. The device displayed radar echoes

so that the farther they were from the receiver, the farther from the

display’s center the echo appeared on the screen. Moreover, the angle

of the displayed echoes corresponded more closely with the detected

objects actual bearing. With the PPI, operators could more readily

detect and track many enemy threats simultaneously. Many versions

of these displays were produced by the thousands and ended up in

the Fleet during the war. (They are still widely in use today in ship,

aircraft, and air traffic control displays.)

The increased electronification of warfare during World War II

brought an unprecedented weight down upon the shoulders of scientists and engineers. As soon as Allied or Axis fighters flicked on the

switch of some new piece of communications or radar technology,

radio and electronics experts on the other side took off on a research

and development sprint to come up with measures to counter the

new technology. Each additional day a new Nazi or Japanese radar

system could detect Allied bombers without being countered in some

way translated into additional deaths of comrades and uncompleted

missions. What’s more, once one side introduced some new counter-
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 117

measure, scientists and engineers on the other side went into another

reactionary research and development frenzy to come up with countercountermeasures. From the beginning, NRL was in the heat of this

deadly game of electronic cloak-and-dagger.

Hints of this kind of electronic warfare showed up early in the

history of radio. Indeed, radio was still called wireless telegraphy when

its vulnerable underbelly showed itself. Soon after the turn of the century, Naval radio operators discovered that radio communication was

susceptible to both accidental and deliberate disruption. The former

might be called interference; the latter became known as jamming.

A receiver tuned to a particular frequency will pick up any radio

signals from any sufficiently strong source so long as the signals match

the frequency to which the receiver is tuned. To jam radio communication at 50 kHz, therefore, all you have to do is build a transmitter

that emits static at 50 kHz. To counter the jamming at 50 kHz, you

need a radio system that can switch frequencies. To counter a radio

system that can use multiple frequencies, you need a jammer that can

switch to those same frequencies. This is just one reason why so much

of the NRL’s radio developers’ effort went into building different kinds

of radios that could operate at different ranges of frequencies.

Soon after NRL opened its doors, members of NRL’s Radio Division set out to modernize another early tactic of radio warfare—direction finding (DF). As its name implies, a direction finder helps to locate a radio transmitter. With DF equipment, an enemy’s radio transmitter becomes a beacon revealing its location. Howard Lorenzen, a

radio engineer newly hired at NRL in 1940 and later head of the newly

formed Countermeasures Branch and then the more comprehensive

Electronic Warfare Division, later explained why DF already had become an important part of antisubmarine warfare during World War I:

 “In successful submarine operations, the submariner needs to tell

his operational commander where he is located and receive the

benefit of any changes in orders or guidance or intelligence on the

enemy’s disposition. The conventional submarine’s range is lim-
118 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ited by the amount of fuel it can carry, and periodically it must

be refueled and replenished. To effect a rendezvous with a tanker

or support ship he must be able to tell them where and when to

meet him.”10

Even during World War I, the United States put DF equipment to

good use on ships and shore stations to help locate enemy submarines operating in the Atlantic.

By the time the United States entered World War II, NRL radio

engineers and technicians had developed more accurate DF equipment. Rupert Huskins supervised installation of this equipment in a

network of shore stations covering Atlantic Ocean areas. His colleague,

Sterling Thrift, worked with industry in the vast effort to fit ships with

DF equipment. Several French refugee researchers who escaped from

France after it fell to the Nazis contributed greatly to NRL’s DF work

from their new research venue at the Federal Telecommunications

Laboratory at Amagansett, Long Island.11

The resulting network of shore-based and shipborne direction finders enabled the Navy to steer convoys away from enemy submarines

lurking either by themselves in shipping lanes or in “wolf packs.”

The DF equipment also helped U.S., British, and Canadian carriers

and destroyers locate and then sink the submarines. What’s more,

when Japanese airmen began using ultrahigh frequency (UHF) and

very high frequency (VHF) radars to search for American submarines

in the Pacific, an engineering team at NRL quickly developed and

installed equipment, including direction finders, that alerted the submariners whenever enemy radar pulses were reaching them.

The advent of radar equipment in World War II catalyzed a neverending round of countermeasures work. No sooner did radar make

its way into military operations than did radar engineers begin coming up with means to detect and locate, jam, deceive, and otherwise

counter enemy radar systems.12 Thus began the behind-the-scenes,

high drama of electronic countermeasures and electronic warfare that

continues under great secrecy to this day in NRL’s Building 210 and

other places around the world.
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 119

Just four days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Julius Furer, a

major player in coordinating research and development, convened a

high level meeting with representatives of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Rad Lab, and the Navy. The goal of the

meeting was to figure out how the United States was going to create

an adequate infrastructure for the sophisticated countermeasures R&D

that war planners sensed the United States was going to need. Less

than two weeks later, official machinery had been set in motion to

create an obscurely named Radiation Research Laboratory (RRL) at

Harvard. Essentially adjacent to the Rad Lab at MIT, it would become

a national center of a massive countermeasures R&D effort in the

middle of the relentless and deadly cat-and-mouse game with the

enemy’s radio and electronics researchers. Once again, NRL became a

participant in something too big for any one facility to handle.13

Early warning airborne receivers, for example, could tell pilots

when their planes were being illuminated by an enemy radar. Once

the frequency of an interrogating radar was known, frequency-matched

transmissions from radar jammers could be high-beamed at the enemy radar system to blind it to specific targets. That, of course, only

prodded clever radar engineers and electronics experts to develop

equipment for switching frequencies whenever jamming became a

problem. That only provoked similarly clever development of jammers that could continuously sweep frequencies and then lock onto

any found. Depending on the relative strengths and speed of the equipment and their operators, such a jammer could essentially blind an

enemy radar or at least keep it on the run, making it tougher to get a

good fix on targets.

Howard Lorenzen got a taste for what his world was going to be

like immediately after being assigned to the coyly named Special Developments Section of the Radio Division. He later recalled what happened:

“One of my first projects was to build a 400 MHz receiver for a

new radar system that was being developed for the Navy within

the Laboratory. I was working on the second floor of the building
120 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

where the Radar Division had [its] radar systems installed in the

penthouse. Shortly after I finished wiring up the receiver and had

it on the bench for alignment, one of the radar engineers came in

and asked if we had any oscillators running at 400 MHz. I answered that I was working on a 400 MHz receiver. He asked me

to turn it off. He came back in a few minutes and said, ‘Leave

that darned thing off, you are jamming our radar in the penthouse and we can’t see anything on the scope.’ That was my first

experience with jamming, though it was purely unintentional.”14

Soon after the United States entered the war, Lorenzen and his

colleagues were beguiled by a group of visiting British researchers who

told of their harrowing jousts with the German electronics warriors.

Among the most alarming developments was the German introduction of guided weaponry into warfare. Using radio signals as invisible

guides, the Germans could steer manned bombers, and later unmanned flying bombs, into strategic British target areas. The Special

Developments Section at NRL learned how their cohorts in England

had developed the means to essentially bend the German’s guidance

beams so as to steer the death-dealing bombs into unoccupied countryside.

In 1943, United States forces first came under attack with this

new form of warfare when the Germans launched several crude, guided

bombs against U.S. ships operating in the Mediterranean. After one

of these bombs, a Henschel 293, missed and sank in shallow water,

the Navy retrieved it with the hope that its scientists could develop a

means to counter it. Among those drawn into this top priority project,

which mandated round-the-clock work until the job got done, was

Lorenzen’s group. Lorenzen recalled the experience:

“This bomb, the HS-293, was really a small guided aircraft controlled by radio signals. The U.S. Navy felt this was a prime

threat to operations in the Mediterranean. To provide the Navy

with a counter for this bomb, a special project was set up at NRL

and equipment was produced on a ‘crash basis’ for two destroyer

escort ships, the USS DAVIES and JONES.”15
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 121

Lorenzen and his closest coworkers at NRL developed receivers

for intercepting the enemy’s radio guidance signals as well as equipment to record and analyze those signals. With this information, another group in the Special Projects Section, including Carl Miller, built

jammers that could confuse the glide bombs. Miller later told a chronicler of wartime countermeasures work what that job was like:

“Building a transmitter to cover the required band was a bear.

That is one of the most difficult frequency spreads to cover. In the

end, we managed it by dividing the coverage into a couple of

bands. We built a series of experimental jammers that solved the

problems in different ways. We never had any time to test the

jammers, however, because as each hand-built set was completed,

somebody from the Fleet would come and grab it from the laboratory. It would be hastily installed into one of the warships, and off

it would go to sea. We made about five of the jammers during the

summer and early fall of 1943.”16

In a particularly harrowing part of this effort to counter the guided

bombs, Navy engineers went aboard ships that were newly equipped

with NRL-made signal analyzers. The ships then sailed into waters

known to be vulnerable to the new weapons. Taylor recounted what

came of this:

“Acting as bait for a large number of German bombs was a nerveracking experience but the operation paid off by the acquisition

of the necessary technical intelligence for the development of a

practical counter-device.”17

This mid-war work continued to yield dividends in the war against

Germany. “During the Allied invasion [of Normandy in June 1944],

NRL-constructed equipment successfully protected ships by giving

repeated false commands to the bombs from the deception transmitters,” Lorenzen recalled.18

The retrieved Henschel 293 was not the only piece of enemy electronic warfare ingenuity that was captured and returned to NRL so

that the Special Projects Division could analyze it and devise counter-
122 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

measures. This always made Lorenzen one of the first at NRL to get a

look at any new captured enemy equipment. Toward the end of the

war, he and the NRL team received a load of equipment that had come

off of a German submarine that the Navy had captured off the coast

of New England as its cargo of spies was disembarking. Among the

innovations in this equipment that surprised Lorenzen was the use of

tape recorders for storing data.

Throughout the war, the captured equipment kept NRL and the

entire U.S. countermeasures effort respectful of the enemy’s ingenuity. “We continued to be amazed at the German ingenuity and clever,

rugged packaging techniques,” Lorenzen recalled. “What we also saw

was the need for broader-coverage equipment that would be capable

of handling not just one threat but a whole spectrum of threats operating in any given portion of the frequency spectrum.”19 It didn’t take

long for his group to have visions of “universal systems” for countering any and all threats, but efforts toward that sort of technological

The remains of Japanese radar installations like this one were sent back

to NRL for analysis and the development of countermeasures.
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 123

utopia would have to take a back seat to the need for “quick and

dirty” solutions to the stream of immediate threats assigned to NRL

and other countermeasures researchers at other U.S. labs.

Lorenzen remembers one such urgent request from the Marine

Corps as they fought Japanese forces in the Pacific region. They needed

a rapidly deployable radar jammer. “We built a simple ‘Chick’ jammer in an aircraft flare tube,” Lorenzen recounted. “This was a simple

jammer with a parachute to carry it down, which would float in the

water near the transmitter site and continue to jam the radar”.20 In a

sense, the NRL team was returning a favor to the Marines. Earlier, in

August of 1942, the Marines had unexpectely recovered a Japanese

early warning radar system when they captured Henderson Field on

Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. A. Hoyt Taylor, the boss of

Lorenzen’s boss, later recalled what happened:

“The frequency of the transmitter was determined from the name

plate and the information cabled to NRL. Within three weeks,

our engineers, working in around-the-clock shifts, had devised a

suitable jamming device and a frequency analyzer which could

detect signals from similar Japanese transmitters. These countermeasures were shipped by air for immediate use in the Pacific.”21

All of these electronic countermeasures were among the leadingedge technologies of the day. They came in the form of various shaped

antennae, wires, cables and racks of electronic boxes loaded with glowing vacuum tubes, resistors, and other electronic components. The

boxes were covered with a variety of dials, scopes, knobs, switches,

and sockets on the outside.

 One of the more remarkable and most feared countermeasures

of the war, however, was a decidedly low technology type first developed in England. The British called it Window. Americans called theirs

chaff. The Germans, from whom the simple principle of this countermeasure could not be hidden, called it Dueppel.22

 Early chaff consisted of multitudes of metal foil strips or metallized paper that were cut or bent to specific dimensions corresponding to the frequency (or wavelength) of the radar systems they were
124 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

made to fool. Thousands of these were then bound together into packets, which were then ejected from planes by hand, or later from automatic dispensers. To radar operators, the clouds of slowly descending

chaff appeared as additional blips. So a cheap packet of metal strips

you could hold in your hand could appear to radar operators like a

bomber or sometimes even like a full-fledged destroyer. The deceptive power of these metal pieces resided in the physical fact that radar

reflected from them with disproportionate vigor because their carefully chosen physical dimensions essentially tuned them to be optimal reflectors.

Ejected from an airplane, a package of 50 of these aluminum foil strips, called chaff

or Window, would produce a radar echo equal to that of several bombers.

When British researchers first developed Window, they were so

amazed at its deceptive power that neither they nor the other Allies

dared use it in battle for fear of giving away the store to the enemy.

Once those little metal strips did their job, they would fall to the

ground. One look at them by an enemy radio or electronics scientist

of even mediocre talent and the secret would be out. Unbeknownst to

the Allies, however, the Germans had already happened onto their

own version of Window. They, too, feared that using the countermeasures almost certainly entailed losing the monopoly they thought they

had. So they too dared not use it.

The hold on chaff ended in December 1943 when the 8th Air Force

first put it to use. By the spring of 1944, airmen would measure their
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 125

monthly consumption in several hundreds of tons.23 Window and

chaff and Dueppel would fall from the sky with great effect during

the all-out invasion at Normandy. This low-tech, high-concept countermeasure has never disappeared. Since World War II, it has spawned

rather sophisticated variations on the original themes and researchers in NRL’s Tactical Electronic Warfare Division have made an international name for themselves by consistently pushing the envelope

of chaff technology.

NRL wartime work in electronic countermeasures became the

equivalent of a new chromosome that thereafter would influence the

Laboratory’s character and evolution. Howard Lorenzen later assessed

the aftermath of the Laboratory’s wartime countermeasures research

for a military historian:

“After the war, the group grew quickly, especially once the Cold

War started. We became the technical arm of the Navy for electronic

warfare. Once the organization attained departmental status [at NRL],

I was made head of the department. But, it can all be traced back to

the work we did in the war.”24

Today, NRL’s Tactical Electronic Warfare Division works on a mindboggling portfolio of research that has evolved from its WWII roots

along with a half-century of progress in sensors, electronics, computers, and information and communications technologies.

Antisubmarine Warfare—The U-Boat Menace

As the silent war of the electromagnetic beams was going on above

the land and sea, another set of military technology battles was being

waged under water. At NRL, this was the domain of the Sound Division, the lesser known fraternal twin of the Radio Division.

When U.S. Navy ships in Pearl Harbor began shattering and sinking under the onslaught of Japanese bombs and torpedoes, the Fleet

was just beginning to exploit underwater acoustic detection techniques,

that is, sonar. In addition, during the days, weeks, and months that

followed the attack, German submarines were regularly spotted from
126 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

U.S. coastlines. Tens of U.S. merchant ships were sunk each month;

sometimes coastlines were stained with oils slicks from destroyed tankers.25

On both sides of the Atlantic, Nazi U-boats were overwhelmingly

winning the “sink or be sunk” contest; in 1941, U-boats sank 1,118

ships while the Allies sunk only 30 German U-boats as well as five

Italian submarines. After the United States entered the war, merchant

ship losses averaged 75 per month while U-boats were sinking at the

rate of only 3 per month.26

At this early stage of American involvement in the war, the Battle

of the Atlantic was being lost. And of every 100 U-boats that Allied

ships detected, 95 got away.27 The Pacific was no safe haven either.

Japanese subs lurking in the waters of Far East were sinking an average of 10 American merchant ships per month.

The submarine was so menacing that the United States quickly

assembled an enormous infrastructure of research with a specific mission to stop the carnage wrought by the submarines. More than a year

before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the National Defense Research Committee had begun work to counter this threat by recruiting scientists and engineers, mostly from academia, to the arena of

underwater acoustic warfare. When the Nazis took France in June 1941,

Dr. Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution, used the

NDRC as a model to create a more encompassing coordinating body

known as the Office of Scientific Research and Development. By 1945,

the OSRD, with NDRC as a suborganization, had recruited over 32,000

scientists and engineers; 2,500 of them were employed in NDRC’s

Division 6, “Undersea Warfare.”

Like their NRL brethren in the Radio Division, the paltry batch of

15 researchers28 in the Sound Division found themselves part of a

rapidly expanding research and development mission. At least 42

companies and 25 colleges and universities would ultimately join the

sonar program. Well-known centers of ocean research, including the

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod and the Scripps
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 127

Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, joined the fray. The NDRC

established entirely new laboratories at various institutions with missions ranging from studying the theoretical aspects of sonar to testing, evaluating, and calibrating newly designed equipment.

NRL’s Sound Division, which until the beginning of WWII practically had constituted the Navy’s entire store of sonar research and

development, become a minuscule component of wartime sonar research. Yet its value was disproportionate to its size. A 1946 booklet

prepared by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations to describe

what was then the declassified part of the sonar development story

assessed NRL’s role in this way: “The equipments [sic] developed at

NRL in conjunction with the Bureau of Ships Sonar Section and progressively installed in Naval vessels during peacetime, constituted the

primary sonar techniques which were employed throughout World

War II.”29

The JK and QB sets were part of this set of techniques. The JKs

were passive listening detectors with piezoelectric Rochelle-salt crystals as the sensing elements (see Chapter 3). Under normal conditions, they could detect submarines up to 5 miles away and with bearing accuracies within a few degrees. The echo-ranging QBs were essentially a combination of the JK listening sonar with a sound transmitter that also was based on the Rochelle-salt crystals.30

The external equipment for the standard sonar systems included

a spherical housing made of rho-c, the rubber material that B.F.

Goodrich scientists developed with Elias Klein as part of his effort

within the Sound Division to design a better protective housing for

the water-soluble Rochelle salt. Inside went the JK or QB equipment

immersed in castor oil, which has pretty much the same acoustic characteristics as sea water without the nasty habit of dissolving the crystals. By 1933, the Submarine Signal Company of Boston was producing much of the Navy’s sonar gear and the Washington Navy Yard,

just a few miles upstream from NRL on the other side of the Anacostia

River, was installing them into Navy vessels.
128 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The U-boats of World War II were faster, quieter, and deeper running than their WWI predecessors. So despite the efforts of NRL’s

Sound Division, British researchers at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, and others, sonar technology and general antisubmarine warfare techniques remained in desperate need of improvement. The miserable score during the Battle of the Atlantic throughout 1942 was

the most tragic and obvious sign that something had to be done.

In an NRL report late in the year, Harvey Hayes, superintendent of

the Sound Division, reflected the dire situation in these words:

“The conclusion is reached that we are losing the present antisubmarine war by such a large margin that measures should be

immediately taken to outline, codify, and put into action a more

effective antisubmarine program.”31

More than merely stating the problem, Hayes recommended specific tactics, including dropping a series of rapidly sinking munitions

such as contact and proximity depth charges instead of the slow sinking pressure-fuzed depth charges.

These and other responses to the submarine problem began having positive effects for the Allies in 1943. By then, radio direction

finders could pick up submarine transmissions and then send radarequipped planes to pinpoint the U-boats. If the U-boats submerged

to shrug off the radar surveillance, then the planes could drop RadioSono buoys that would send out radio alerts to sonar-equipped (or

the British equivalent, Asdic-equipped) ships to zero in for the kill.

Besides the continual improvement of radar and sonar technology,

the undersea warfare researchers were coming up with all manners of

gadgetry. There were visual aids like the “Bearing Deviation Indicator” that helped sonar operators aim the equipment more effectively.

A “Maintenance of True Bearing” incorporated a gyro to keep sonar

beams directed on U-boats even as the fleeing or pursuing ship underwent complicated maneuvers and turns.

Other developments also helped put U-boats on the run: better

convoying methods, a growing understanding of how ocean temperature affects the ability of U-boats to hide, and more capable sonar
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 129

equipment. In 1943, the Allies lost 598 ships, but they sank 219 Uboats, 22 Italian subs, and 22 Japanese subs.32

Just as in the world of electronic countermeasures, the submarine

warfaring community was developing countermeasures. For submarines, the equivalent of chaff was to release packets of chemicals that

generated regions of bubbles, which appeared as phantom echoes on

sonar equipment. To divert sound-seeking torpedos, ships towed

sound-generating decoys behind them. NRL had its hands in all of

these efforts.

In the summer of 1944, the Germans developed an alarming countermeasure—called the Schnorchel—that made them far less vulnerable to detection via eye or radar. As its name might imply today, the

Schnorchel was a stack that could extend to the surface while the submarine as a whole remained at periscope depth. It meant that the Uboat could expel diesel exhaust and draw in fresh air to replenish its

batteries under much more stealthy conditions. “Effectively, the

Schnorchel had neutralized our antisubmarine air offensive and defeated our surface detection. But, whether schnorchelling, submerged,

or bottomed—the Asdic-Sonar teams detected and located the Uboats,” stated a 1946 Navy Department account of the sonar story.33

Help came also from the development of microwave-based radar,

which could detect smaller objects more readily than the longer-wavelength radar systems.

The 1944 sea warfare box score tells a lot: 134 Allied ships were

sunk but Allied forces killed 202 U-boats and 51 Japanese submarines. The Allies had turned the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic. In a

secret but intercepted communique, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the

man in charge of all Nazi naval operations during the war, could not

have more gloriously congratulated the efforts of his enemy’s undersea warfare researchers if he were their mother. Said Doenitz:

“For some months past, the enemy has rendered the U-boat ineffective. He has achieved this object, not through superior tactics

or strategy, but through his superiority in the field of science; this

finds its expression in the modern battle weapon: detection. By
130 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

this means he has torn our sole offensive weapons in the war

against the Anglo-Saxons from our hands. It is essential to victory that we make good our scientific disparity and thereby restore to the U-boat its fighting qualities.”34

With innovations like the Schnorchel, German engineers tried to

make good on the Grand Admiral’s entreaty, but not before the momentum of warfare had swung inexorably in favor of the Allies.

Building 44: The Unspeakable Specter of Gas

Though not nearly as big as the Radio Division, which was an

elephant among mice and cats, the Chemistry Division grew during

wartime at a faster rate than any other division at the Laboratory. By

1945, it had grown from a prewar staff of about two dozen to a strength

of about 200 researchers distributed amongst 10 sections occupying

four fully equipped buildings.

There was a lot of troublesome chemistry going on in the Navy.

Metal was corroding. Fuel was spoiling. Torpedo batteries were not

powerful enough. There were not enough solid sources of oxygen to

meet the demands of submarines. Optical surfaces on gunsights were

fogging up. When word of such problems came in, chemists in the

Corrosion Section or Fuel Section (later called branches) were tasked

to come up with solutions, which they did in the form of such innovations as corrosion-inhibiting paint pigments or defogging agents.

Those in the Physical Organic Section developed several “chemical

noise makers, ” which were the submariners’ equivalent to the airmens’

chaff. When ejected from submarines, these substances simulated

propeller and engine sounds, thereby luring German acoustic homing torpedoes harmlessly away from their intended targets.

Chemists in the Special Research Section completed a grab bag of

projects leading to a number of lifesaving innovations. Among them

were “Sea Marker” and “Shark Chaser,” which became part of survival

kits for thousands and thousands of U.S. airmen and sailors. The

chemical heart of “Sea Marker” was the fluorescent dye sodium fluorescein, which would spread out and glow around a shipwrecked sea-
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 131

man thereby marking his location for rescue vessels. “Shark Chaser”

was a cocktail of olfactory and ocular irritants designed to repel

sharks.35

The Chemical Protection Section was born of terror. Although violent death by any means is awful to contemplate, the deadly chemical

attacks of World War I held a special power to instill fear. It was the

German military that introduced large scale chemical warfare during

World War I during which 5,000 soldiers lost their lives in a yellowgreen, ground-hugging cloud of chlorine gas. In 1917, in the trenches

of Ypres, Belgium, the Germans unleashed a blistering agent, sulfur

mustard. It worked by absorption through the skin so not even a

good gas mask would serve as protection.

Sulfur mustard caused four hundred thousand casualties during

the Great War.36 What was to stop the Nazis from using chemical weapons on the new fronts of World War II? Indeed, there were reports

early during World War II that the Germans and Poles had used mustard gas against each other.

When the war broke out, Homer Carhart was a 27-year-old chemist in a new teaching job at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf

in Washington, DC. He got a call from Bill Williams of NRL’s Protective Chemistry Branch. Williams had been an instructor at the University of Maryland when Carhart was a graduate student there.

Carhart, now unmistakable for his waxed handlebar mustache and

straight-to-the-core clarity, quickly joined the effort on a crash program to develop defensive measures against chemical weapons should

the enemy add them to its roster of weapons.

“These preparations included the establishment of secret research

programs to develop better protective clothing for the troops and to

investigate ointments and salves that might be effective at reducing

the blistering effects of sulfur and nitrogen mustard (collectively

termed mustard agents) and lewisite, an organic arsenic-containing

compound that shared some properties with mustard agents,” according to a 1993 book-length report by the Institute of Medicine, which

had established a committee to investigate the wartime research into
132 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

chemical agents and protection and the effect of this work on some

60,000 human subjects, nearly 2,500 of whom were tested at NRL.37

After World War I, the U.S. military consolidated virtually all research or production work involving chemical warfare agents within

the Chemical Warfare Service at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in

Maryland. When war broke out in Europe in 1939 and U.S. neutrality appeared less stable in the next two years, the National Defense

Research Committee and the Committee on Medical Research, another high-level wartime panel for coordinating crucial research, organized a much larger and expanded chemical warfare research program. The entire Allied research effort in this area was conducted in

more than a dozen sites, at least nine of which included the construction of gas chambers in which human subjects in experimental protective clothing could be exposed to chemical warfare agents.

NRL became a key part of this crash effort. Homer Carhart, who

remains closely connected to the Laboratory as a senior scientist emeritus, began his NRL career in the heart of this controversial research.

Although crucial, the research was troublesome from the start.

Carhart recalls his own personal run-ins with the agents he was making or using: “We were working with live agents, mostly mustard, and

occasionally we hurt ourselves, got burned. I was doing some work

on phosgene one time and got an overdose of it and couldn’t talk for

several days because of the problem it created in the bronchial area

and the lungs.”38

Not all of his exposure was accidental. Carhart explains:

“In working with these things and working with protective agents,

one of the things that I did was I started to use myself as a guinea pig

to see if I could develop neutralizing agents . . . There were a lot of

things we tried, so it was not unusual for me to be walking around

with a bunch of blisters on my arms.”39

Even after Dr. Borgstrom, the Chemistry Division’s Superintendent, saw these wounds and threatened to fire Carhart if he continued the practice, Carhart persisted. “I finally used myself as a guinea
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 133

pig a little too much and became sensitized, so that I was no longer a

good guinea pig,” he recalled.40 He wore long-sleeved shirts to hide

this practice from Borgstrom.

Young Carhart would raise Borgstrom’s ire on another occasion,

though he would blame the weather for this one. As Carhart recalls it,

Borgstrom arrived at the Laboratory early one morning and caught a

strong whiff of what he knew from prior research experience was sulfur mustard. He promptly closed down the building. When Carhart

showed up for work, he was the usual suspect. “They didn’t know if I

had spilled the damn stuff or what the hell was going on,” Carhart

recalls.41 It turns out that there was an atmospheric pressure inversion

the prior night. As Carhart sees it, this condition overwhelmed the

less-than-good hood under which he had been making his own sulfur mustard to substitute for the intolerably impure supply that had

been available from other sources.

“That got the ball rolling to give the chemical group its own building,” said Carhart. Within a few months, Building 44 had been designed and built specifically for chemical warfare research. It was one

story tall with “damn good hoods in it,” and facilities for making and

supplying the active ingredient (a chloramide) in all Navy-issue ointments as well as the impregnated charcoals used in all Navy gas masks.

Two other significant facts about Building 44 characterized its research:

it was not built on the grounds of NRL, but rather just south on the

grounds of the Blue Plains Sewage Plant; and Building 44 included

one of the country’s first chambers designed for human testing.42

In the wartime context, knowing with confidence what your protective clothing can and cannot do for you during chemical attacks is

imperative for crucial decisions on levels all the way down to individuals making immediate life-and-death decisions and all the way

up to the highest levels of military planning where the entire war

could be won or lost. In the judgment of those coordinating and doing the chemical warfare research, human testing was a necessity, not

a luxury. There seemed to be no time for weighing the impossibly
134 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

murky and troublesome ethics unavoidably linked to any potentially,

even probably dangerous regimen of human testing even though the

intention is to save lives in the long run. Indeed, NRL and the other

research centers then doing human testing would undergo full investigations a half-century after the fact when they became the focus of a

class-action suit and a high level investigation by the Institute of Medicine.43

But faced with an imminent WWII chemical threat, NRL’s chemical warfare group felt they had a job to do. Under the auspices of the

NRDC and the OSRD’s Committee on Medical Research, NRL made

arrangements for trainees at the Navy boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, to come to the Laboratory to serve as subjects. Between 1943

and 1945, sailors who had volunteered for the research detail arrived

at the Laboratory at regular intervals. In time, their total numbers

would approach 2,500.44 Most of these sailors were slated for imminent duty in the Pacific where they knew many among them would

never return alive. Carhart recalls one of the motivations of these men

for coming to NRL: “They were sitting in the outgoing unit, waiting to

be sent to the South Pacific, question mark about coming back. Now,

they had a chance to stay in the United States for some time longer,

several weeks certainly, and to have some more liberty, some more

time free. It had its appeal.”45

Many of these subjects underwent patch tests. This usually entailed exposure of one or several spots on their arms to warfare agents

that had been dissolved in solvents before or after applications of

some hopefully protective ointment formulation of unknown effectiveness. At NRL, medical doctors assigned to the project monitored

the men and made photographic records of the results.

Many of the subjects underwent the more extensive chamber tests.

Simple military logic might justify the tests. As Carhart stated it, “If

we could put people into a chamber with war gas and protect them,

they would be protected in the field.”46

According to an investigation by the Institute of Medicine in the

1990s, a major goal of these nationwide studies was to determine
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 135

“how long, under what conditions of temperature, and under what

concentrations of gas, would chloramide- or activated carbon-impregnated clothing afford protection of personnel against chemical attack

with vesicants [blistering agents].”47

The typical test, often known as a “man-break” test, was as follows. Men, garbed in various preparations of protective clothing, entered a chamber where they were exposed to measured quantities of

gas of usually one hour duration. At NRL, chemist Bill Taylor and his

coworkers regularly monitored the concentrations of the agents by

continuous sampling the chamber air during the tests. Twenty-four

hours after the exposure, medical professionals in the Navy’s Bureau

of Medicine and Surgery, who had legal responsibility for the tests,

examined the men for any physiological evidence, such as redness or

blisters, that war gas had penetrated the protection. If not, the subjects would undergo additional exposures every day or every other

day until they did show such signs.48

The first tests were alarming, Carhart recalls. They showed how

poor the standard Navy issue protective clothing was. For one thing,

the clothing had poor shelf life. The protective compound in this clothing, from a chemical class known as chloramide, had slowly been

decomposing, yielding acidic compounds that were eating up the

cotton of the clothing. Carhart recalls picking up some of these suits

and getting handfuls of shreds. Moreover, chloramide afforded protection against sulfur mustard and lewisite, but little or none against

nitrogen mustard.49

The preparation of the standard suits had additional problems.

Not only did it involve organic solvents that carried their own toxicities, but it involved a binding agent that became gooey and was itself

a skin irritant. This yielded very uncomfortable gear. These were just

some of the problems that sent the NRL team into the laboratory to

find ways to stabilize the existing chloramides, to develop alternative

chloramides and other protective materials that could disarm the nitrogen mustards, and to find better ways of actually making and preparing the clothing.
136 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Along the way to this goal, the NRL chemists and collaborators

came up with several protection techniques that never had to be used.

Carhart recalls some of them. “We developed a little package device

over here so a sailor could actually take his ordinary clothing, and

take his helmet, put water in the darn thing, and put this little package in like dry soup, and make a mix of the darn stuff, and put it on

his clothing. It’s surprising what good protection the stuff gave. We

developed systems so you could use field laundries, or the ship’s laundry, and use the laundry as a method of impregnating the clothing

and protecting the people.”50

 One of the most important contributions that Carhart remembers NRL making to the chemical warfare research effort was to incorporate the protective principle of gas masks into the quest for better

protective clothing. The way the gas masks worked was to force air to

pass through a mass of extremely porous carbon before getting inhaled. Along the way, most organic molecules, which is a large class

of compounds including the then known chemical warfare agents,

stick to the adsorbent carbon rather than continuing on the air flow

into a masked person’s lungs. “We worked with the industry to develop different kinds of carbon clothing,” Carhart recalls.51

The result of collaborations with fiber-manufacturing companies

was the development of a new material that was a carbon-impregnated rayon, which could be woven into protective garments. The task

involved many engineering problems, not the least of which was to

check the damage to the spinnerets wrought by the tiny abrasive carbon particles, which pocked the fibers’ surfaces like stones on a rope

of clay. This work was so cutting edge and of such high priority that it

came to involve one of the world’s newest, most promising, and vastly

undersupplied materials—nylon. It turns out that the additional carbon weakened the rayon fibers, but by weaving the modified rayon

with nylon, fabrics of sufficient strength could be made. DuPont had

introduced nylon commercially in 1939 but when the war broke out,

the War Department labeled it as a strategic material. It was strong

enough to substitute for silk in parachutes and for making tire cords.
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 137

Nylon for nonmilitary uses was rare and coveted. “A pair of nylon

stockings could buy anything,” Carhart recalls.52

The carbon-impregnated textile the NRL chemists helped develop

might have saved many lives had WWII’s battlefields been foggy with

war gas. Recalls Carhart: “We were able to weave the stuff with the

nylon, so that it would now give you the strength and it would give

you the protection. We had fabric made of that, and we had suits

made of that. That stuff gave more protection against sulfur mustard

[and several other chemical warfare agents] . . . than any chemical

clothing.”53

Though still awkward in design (the men had to cut flies in the

suits so they could urinate), these suits underwent rigorous and punishing tests at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina where Marines were

training for some of the most decisive Pacific battles, including Iwo

Jima. The specter of chemical weapons remained threatening. The NRL

group knew they had come up with something worthwhile when the

suits that had been worn by trainees wading through swamps or hitting beaches in landing craft fared well enough to return to NRL for

retesting on subjects in Building 44.

Hitler had no qualms about using lethal gas as a major means of

mass murdering Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians. But, as it turns

out, the Nazis did not use chemical warfare agents in battle. One anecdotally offered reason for this reserve was that Hitler had survived a

chlorine gas attack during World War I and developed such a personal fear of such weapons (which could creep under the doors of

any concrete bunker) that he forbade their use.

Ironically, the only battlefield casualties due to chemical warfare

agents occurred after German bombers raided the harbor of Bari, Italy

on December 2, 1943. One of the ships that sunk that day was the

merchant marine ship SS John Harvey. Secretly in its hold were 2,000

sulfur mustard bombs. As the damaged ship went down, sulfur mustard leaked out and mingled with the oil and other debris in the raided

harbor. Shipwrecked sailors, medical personnel who cared for them

later, as well as civilians from Bari who had been exposed to clouds of
138 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the agent, all became unwitting casualties to an unexpected hazard.

The numbers are staggering. Of the 600 victims of sulfur mustard in

the harbor area, 83 died. Civilian deaths in the town approached 1,000.54

Chemical warfare research at NRL and elsewhere came to a quick

stop after World War II ended. Carhart laments that the consequences

of such rapid dispersal and disengagement of those involved was that

the work and technology were never properly documented. Fear of

chemical warfare never disappeared, however. The shift from chemically impregnated protective clothing to the use of textile fibers studded with tiny absorbent carbon particles, which NRL scientists espoused

during the war years, was a sound principle to which military researchers would return in later years.

For four decades, hardly a word about the human costs of the chemical warfare research reached public attention. In the 1980s, however,

some of the approximately 60,000 U.S. servicemen who were human

subjects in the wartime experiments began seeking compensation from

the Department of Veterans Affairs for maladies they and their doctors

believed derived from that experience. In 1991, the Veterans Administration (VA) sought guidance in the handling of these cases by asking

the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to conduct a study into the association

of chemical warfare agents used during the wartime research with specific diseases.

The 427-page IOM study that came out of this was published in

1993. The task was immense because records of the research and the

human subjects involved generally were either woefully scant or absent. Moreover, no followup studies were ever conducted by any of the

research teams involved to see if there were long-term effects on those

exposed to chemical warfare agents. It turns out that the most valuable

data regarding the wartime experiments came from NRL due largely to

Homer Carhart. “I save shoelaces,” he says.55 He also saved a crucial

box of records from the chemical warfare research, including the names

of many of the test subjects as well as medical photographs of the subjects. To develop recommendations for the VA, the IOM panel subse-
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 139

quently was able to use this, other lines of evidence including longterm epidemiological data from workers exposed to toxic agents, as

well as information from the aftermath of chemical attacks during

the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

The IOM recommended that the VA do everything it could, including public announcements and advertisements, to identify and

locate the test subjects (and chemical warfare agent production workers), medically evaluate them, and provide treatment when necessary. Carhart’s habit of “saving shoelaces” paid off. The documents he

saved from the wartime chemical warfare research enabled the IOM

to locate many of those test subjects who were exposed at NRL.

After WWII, Carhart devoted most of his time to such critical Naval issues as making the interiors of nuclear submarines habitable

during long submersions and reducing risks and effects of fire throughout the Fleet.

The Navy’s Secret Little Manhattan Project

On July 2, 1943, at about 2:30 p.m., Mr. Trafton Robertson, a

radio announcer for the Mutual Broadcasting Company, piqued the

interest of anyone who happened to be listening to a special live

broadcast of NRL’s anniversary celebration. “Today is the Naval Research Laboratory’s twentieth birthday, so we have brought our Mutual microphones inside these closely guarded walls which shield from

prying enemies some of the most astounding secrets that this war has

thus far developed,” he told his listeners.56

Some of the secrets Robertson was referring to already were partially out. In a congratulatory letter to Admiral A.H. Van Keuren, NRL’s

director at the time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt singled out one

of these. He cited “detection of the enemy” as a particularly tough

and militarily critical nut that NRL helped to crack. “Our success is

proven since we are now able to meet the enemy in the air and on the

sea with unsurpassed battle intelligence,” the President wrote.57 He

was referring here primarily to radar.
140 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Later during the anniversary proceedings, James V. Forrestal, Under Secretary of the Navy, filled in some details. He praised NRL’s pioneering contribution to radar, a technology Forrestal credited with helping to win the Battle of Britain by enabling British fighters to get off the

ground minutes before their enemy cohorts had arrived above them.

So rather than becoming sitting ducks, the British airmen were able to

engage the German fighters in the air where the attackers suffered

enough losses to lose the long battle. Forrestal also credited radar with

helping the Allies win the battle at Guadalcanal. He put it this way: “a

taskforce of our battleships had steamed out of the midnight blackness and at a distance of over nine miles, shooting by radar control,

had broken the back of the Japanese striking forces.”58

While all of this well-deserved self-congratulation about NRL’s was

taking place, the m.c. of the ceremony and some of the attendees, including Ross Gunn of the Mechanics Division and Rear Admiral Harold

Bowen (who recently had left as NRL’s director to work in the Office of

the Under Secretary of the Navy), undoubtedly were thinking of another top secret project at NRL.

The project began as an insight in the mind of Ross Gunn. As technical advisor to the director of NRL, Gunn participated in high-level

Defense Department meetings. On March 17, 1939, he and NRL colleague W.H. Sanders attended a particularly interesting one during

which physicist Enrico Fermi, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize

who had arrived from Italy to join the faculty of Columbia University,

briefed Navy commanders about a momentous success in the fall of

1938 by German scientists working in Berlin at the Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute for Chemistry. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman deliberately

split uranium atoms by bombarding them with neutrons. Evidence for

the process came in the form of barium atoms, which Hahn’s former

research partner, Lise Meitner had reasoned would emerge from splitting uranium atoms as atomic fragments. Anybody who knew how to

plug numbers into Einstein’s famous equation describing the equivalency of energy and mass—and Fermi knew how to plug in numbers—
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 141

could see that the splitting atoms could yield vastly more energy compared to any means of

energy release so far harnessed

by humanity.

Fermi told the gathering in

Washington, DC that no one

knew if the process could lead

to new kinds of weapons. But he

and everyone else knew that if

an atomic bomb could be made,

it would become the most terrible weapon the world yet had

seen. The topic of harnessing

atomic energy for power production also came up during the

meeting. Fermi would subsequently head a research team that achieved the world’s first sustained

nuclear reaction in a pile of uranium-235 (U235) underneath a gymnasium at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942. It was a major

step toward development of both the atomic bomb and nuclear power.

The March 17 meeting had a profound effect on Gunn, who quickly

saw the potential of atomic power for revolutionizing submarine propulsion. He realized that a submarine powered by atomic energy rather

than the energy harbored in chemical fuels could remain submerged

almost indefinitely. In that case, human psychology rather than the need

to refuel or recharge batteries, would become the limiting factor to how

long a submarine could remain continuously submerged. The submarine would become an even more awesome and powerful instrument of

war.

Three days later, on March 20, Ross Gunn, eight NRL associates, and

the NRL director, Captain Hollis Cooley, visited Rear Admiral Harold

Bowen, then the Chief of the Bureau of Engineering. (Bowen would

Among other notable achievements at NRL,

Dr. Ross Gunn initiated the first nuclear research sponsored by an agency of the U.S.

Government.
142 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

replace Cooley as director of NRL several months later.) They asked

Bowen to assign $2,000 to NRL, in the words of a memorandum written after the war was over to, “initiate the first steps in the solution of

the uranium power problem.”59 They got the money. In his autobiography published in 1954, Bowen, by then a retired Admiral, claimed

that this money was “the first government money spent on the study

of atomic fission.”60

The first problem for nuclear bombs or nuclear propulsion derived from a common reality in the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. Like many elements, uranium atoms come naturally in several

isotopic forms that differ from one another in the number of neutrons they have in their respective nuclei. As it turns out, nuclear fission occurs far more efficiently in the presence of unnaturally high

populations of the isotope U235. In uranium ore, this desired isotope

is present in the ratio of about 1 to every 143 U238 atoms, which has

three more neutrons in its nucleus. Gunn knew, therefore, that any

practical system of nuclear propulsion entailed having a plentiful

source of uranium fuel enriched in the U235 isotope. The requirement

for U235 enriched material is even more critical when it comes to making bombs, which had to be compact enough and light enough to be

carried by aircraft.

The task fell first to Roman Miller of NRL’s Chemistry Division

and T.D. O’Brien, an isotope separation specialist hired from the

nearby University of Maryland specifically to work on the uranium

isotope problem. The strategy from the start was to synthesize a uranium-containing chemical compound that would exist in the gaseous

state under conditions that were not too extreme. Once in the gaseous state, the slightly different masses of molecules containing the

different uranium isotopes would provide the physical basis for separating them. Uranium hexafluoride fit the bill. By about January 10,

1940, Miller and O’Brien had gram-sized samples of uranium

hexafluoride in hand.

Just three months earlier, President Roosevelt had received a letter

signed by Albert Einstein in which the world famous physicist warned
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 143

of the imminent potential for physicists anywhere in the world to tap

uranium fission for unprecedented amounts of energy. “This new

phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is

conceivable—though much less probable—that extremely powerful

bombs of a new type may thus be constructed,” Einsten warned in his

letter which was written on August 2 but did not reach the President

until October 11.61

Within weeks, the President had set up the Advisory Committee

on Uranium to keep track of the development in uranium and nuclear

research and to recommend actions. Ross Gunn would become a

member of the committee. The official start of the Manhattan Project,

which would produce the world’s first nuclear weapons, was still two

years away.

 Meanwhile, as soon as the NRL chemists synthesized the uranium hexafluoride, it went to several university laboratories whose

secret charge was to develop means of enriching the samples’ U235. By

the end of February 1940, a scientist at the University of Virginia, on

a $13,000 contract with NRL, already had a partially enriched subgram sample of uranium hexafluoride that he obtained with a highspeed centrifuge. At the same time, researchers at Columbia University under a $30,000 contract also had begun centrifugal separation

studies as well.

The work that would prove more fateful started more humbly.

First for free and then with a $3,500 allotment, Philip Abelson of the

Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) began pursuing a different

separation process—liquid thermal diffusion method. Abelson was a

new hire from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California where he

had been working on new electron accelerators. That made him one

of the few nuclear scientists in the country. His boss was Merle Tuve,

the same man who 15 years earlier had used NRL radio transmitters

to measure the variable height of the ionosphere.

The basic idea of the liquid thermal diffusion method was to put

dissolved uranium hexafluoride into a column whose ends were kept

at very different temperatures. Since those uranium hexafluoride
144 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

molecules harboring the lighter U235 atoms diffuse slightly faster to

the warmer side of the column than do those molecules with heavier

uranium isotopes (mainly U238), the lighter molecules end up enriching on the warm side of the column. This U235 enriched solution then

becomes the starting fluid for a next iteration in a diffusion tube and

so on. In each cycle, the proportion of U235 (still forming the center of

uranium-hexafluoride molecules) by the warm side of the column

increases. In time, technicians would withdraw the uranium hexafluoride and then covert it into metallic uranium enriched in U235.

Abelson recalls that soon after he began working on the process

at CIW, which meant first building all manners of columns, he found

himself running out of space, Tuve got nervous about the space-consuming trend. To relieve his angst, Tuve arranged for Abelson to move

his uranium project to a more spacious setting at the National Bureau

of Standards, which was then just a few miles away down Connecticut Avenue. The director of NBS, Lyman Briggs, was a member of the

Uranium Committee and was more than happy to accommodate

Abelson and Tuve. Through Briggs and Tuve, Ross Gunn was kept well

informed of Abelson’s doings.

Abelson had hardly got up and running in his new NBS setting

when he realized he needed to increase the size of the diffusion tubes

yet more. That design change had the troubling consequence of entailing higher pressure steam than he could get at NBS. That started

the machinery in motion that would result in Abelson’s second major venue shift within half a year of arriving in Washington.

Gunn had been attracted to the process Abelson was set on because it looked practical, the kind of process you could scale up to

massive scales. So when he heard that Abelson needed a more capable source of steam, he invited the CIW scientist to NRL to take a

look around. Abelson liked what he saw and on July 1, 1941, he

became an NRL employee. Adjacent to the boiler house near the waterfront where NRL butts against the Blue Plains Sewage plant, Abelson

and his new NRL collaborator, John (known as Jack) Hoover, set up
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 145

column after column, each time changing the spacing between the

hot and cold walls of the tube. Everything about the tubes seemed to

matter—their lengths, diameters, and the difference in temperature

between their hot and cold walls. Money for this and the other isotope separation studies came from the Navy Bureaus of Ordnance

and Engineering, which each kicked in $26,000, and from the Army

Ordnance Department, which provided $50,000.

By late 1942, Abelson’s NRL staff had increased by four and he

had several contractors working on specific problems in theory and

analysis. They had arrived at a working set of column conditions and

built a pilot plant of 12 columns, each 48 feet tall. The enriched material they were harvesting from these columns represents some of

the first substantial amounts of slightly enriched uranium ever obtained. On December 10, the little riverside curiosity, which few people

at the Laboratory had clearance to know about, received a visit as

unexpected as it was fateful.

On that day, a colonel of the Army Engineers by the name of Leslie

R. Groves arrived without warning at the office of NRL director Admiral Bowen. At the time, Bowen was unaware that Groves was running

the super-secret Manhattan Project that officially had begun on December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Groves asked to see the small pilot plant that Abelson and his associates had built. Approximately six and ten weeks after his visit, Groves’

technical advisory body paid two visits to NRL to assess the plant and

the liquid thermal diffusion process for its potential in helping the

bomb project.

According to a memorandum on the history of the uranium separation work at NRL issued in 1946 and signed by its participants, “It is

reported that the technical advisory committee was favorable to our

method, but the building of a liquid thermal diffusion plant was vetoed by someone higher up.”62 Whatever the committee’s actual recommendations, liquid thermal diffusion did not then become a component of the bomb project.
146 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Although it appeared that neither NRL nor the Navy would be

playing any part in the Manhattan Project, liquid thermal diffusion

remained the number one candidate for acquiring the material needed

for nuclear propulsion (which required less enrichment than did

bombs) and the Navy was going full steam ahead. In June 1944, NRL

proposed the construction of a 300-column production plant to Vice

Admiral Edward L. Cochrane, chief of the Bureau of Ships.

In post-war memoranda about this move, the Laboratory stated

an additional rationale for the plant. “The purpose of this plant was

to supply insurance against failure of part of the Army’s separation

program and to provide the Naval Research Laboratory with materials for study of atomic energy,” stated the August 9, 1945 memorandum to the Chief of Research and Invention, who was none other

than former NRL director, Rear Admiral Harold Bowen.63

As it was when Abelson made his move from NBS to NRL, steam

remained a key commodity in the diffusion process. With a 300-column plant on the horizon, however, there would be a need for massive amounts of high-pressure steam. As home to the Naval Boiler

and Turbine Laboratory, the Philadelphia Navy Yard was the place to

go for lots and lots of steam. This site would become the location for

the secret, two-million-dollar isotope separation facility. Abelson remembers living on the road between Washington and Philadelphia

after construction of the plant began in November 1943.64

Just as the plant neared completion the following June, NRL was

shocked to learn that the War Production Board was going to turn

down their request for the uranium hexafluoride, the starting material without which the new plant would be idle. Not only was this

chemical the feedstock for the separation process, but Abelson and

his NRL colleagues were the ones who came up with the very process

for producing large amounts of the material in the first place. When

the NRL team attempted to circumvent this obstacle by shifting to an

alternative method of making the feedstock based on abundantly available uranium oxide ores, these alternative starting materials also were
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 147

denied them. With aggressive pressure by high level Navy officers,

this de facto embargo against the Navy’s uranium isotope program

was finally lifted. By the end of June 1944, the Philadelphia pilot

plant began production.

Meanwhile, Abelson had become aware that the isotope separation plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which relied on a gaseous diffusion process, was badly behind schedule. He began to worry that the

entire bomb project might be in jeopardy. A logical consequence of

this, he thought, was that the liquid thermal diffusion process just

might be an ace in the hole for the Manhattan Project. He wanted

Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project at

Los Alamos, New Mexico, to know what NRL had to offer at the PhilaA liquid thermal diffusion plant for separating uranium isotopes, like the one shown

in this model, was built at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1943. In 1944, a larger

plant went into operation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it speeded up the

production of uranium for the country’s first atomic weapons.
148 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

delphia plant. Already frustrated by the veritable locking out of the

Navy vis-à-vis participation in the bomb project, Abelson chose to

circumvent the conventional means of communications within the

Manhattan Project. This is what Abelson told historian Richard

Rhodes:

“I wanted to let Oppenheimer know what we were doing. Someone in the Bureau of Ships knew one of the people in the [Navy]

Bureau of Ordnance who was going out to Los Alamos. I remember that I met the man at the old Warner Theater here in Washington, up in the balcony—real cloak and dagger stuff.”65

Rhodes fleshed out what happened next: “Abelson briefed the

Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) officer about the plant he was building.

He said that he expected to be producing 5 grams a day of materials

enriched to 5 percent U235 by July. This vital information the BuOrd

man carried to Los Alamos and passed along to Edward Teller. Teller

in turn briefed Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer apparently conspired

then with Deke Parsons, the Hill’s ranking Navy man, to concoct a

cover story: that Parsons had learned of the Abelson work on a visit to

the Philadelphia Navy Yard. With the Navy thus protected,

Oppenheimer on April 28 alerted Groves.”66

All of this transpired in the weeks following completion of the

Philadelphia plant. Admiral Bowen later recounted what followed:

“On 26 June, 1944 the blueprints of the Naval Research Laboratory

were turned over to Colonel Fox of the Manhattan [Project] to facilitate the construction at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, of a new plant using

the Abelson-Gunn process with 2,200 elements or seven times the

capacity of the Navy plant at Philadelphia.”67 That summer, Leslie

Groves himself paid a visit to the Philadelphia plant as well, his second personal enounter with the liquid thermal diffusion process.

By the last week of August, Harvard University President James

Conant, a chief science advisor to Colonel Groves, had recruited 10

enlisted soldiers with technical skills. Arnold Kramish, who was on

detail at the Philadelphia plant from Los Alamos where he had been
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 149

working on the detonators for the first atomic bombs, recalls Conant’s

pitch:

“[He] told us very little about what he was asking them to do,

and he cautioned them that the job would be very dangerous,

testing a new and untried process. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you will be

winning the war.’”68

Their mission was to work at the newly operational liquid thermal diffusion plant in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, construction of the

2,200-column Oak Ridge plant had begun. Since most of the engineering problems, including ones with lethal potential, already had

been discovered and solved, the Oak Ridge plant went up in record

time. By the fall, usable material was coming out of the columns.

On September 2, a week after the Oak Ridge contingent arrived

(and the same day that the future president George Bush was shot

down over the island of Chici Jima in the Pacific), something went

terribly wrong at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. At 1:20 p.m., a swift

and tragic series of events began when a cylinder of uranium hexafluoride feed stock exploded in the transfer room and fractured nearby

pipes coursing with searing steam. When uranium hexafluoride mixed

with the water of the steam, an instantaneous reaction produced hellish mists of hydrogen flouride, one of the most aggressive of acids.

Arnold Kramish vividly recalled what happened:

“There were three of us in the transfer room at the time—myself

and two civilians, Peter N. Bragg, Jr. of Fayetteville Arkansas, and Douglas P. Meigs of Owings Mill, Maryland. We inhaled large quantities

of uranium compounds and suffered whole body acid burns. Peter

and Douglas, both of them civilian engineers, died soon thereafter”.69

Four other civilians and four other soliders were injured in the blast.

Abelson even took in several caustic lungfuls of the stuff but did not

need hospitalization.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the accident was that the project

was so secret that, in Kramish’s words, “for decades the families of

Peter Bragg and Douglas Meigs never knew how they died.”70 Bragg’s
150 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

parents died without ever learning what happened. Not until Kramish

called Peter’s brother, Braxton Bragg, in 1987 did a representative of

the family finally find out. After unyielding pressure from Kramish

and Braxton Bragg, the Navy, for whom Bragg was hired as a chemical

engineer at the time of the accident, finally acknowledged Bragg’s ultimate sacrifice. On June 12, 1993, Captain Paul Gaffney II, then the

Commanding Officer of NRL (now Chief of Naval Research), presented Bragg posthumously with the Commanding Officer’s highest

civilian medal—the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. The ultimate

sacrifice by Douglas Meigs, who was a contractor of the H.J. Ferguson

Co. in Cleveland (and as such not a direct employee of the Navy when

he died in Philadelphia), has yet to be officially acknowledged.

After the accident, engineers repaired the damage and the plant

continued to produce moderately enriched uranium. By the time the

Philadelphia Facility closed in early 1946, it had produced just over

21⁄2 tons of enriched uranium. This modestly U235 enriched material

became feedstock for yet another separation process at Oak Ridge,

whose more thoroughly enriched U235 became part of the radioactive

heart of the first atomic bombs.

“A large fraction of the uranium isotopes embodied in the

Hiroshima and Nagasaki [the Nagasaki bomb actually was plutoniumbased] bombs were processed by the Abelson-Gunn method,” Ross

Gunn told the Special Committee on Atomic Energy of the U.S. Senate soon after the war. “We were credited with shortening the war by a

week or more, in spite of the delaying tactics and fumbling politics

imposed on us by some members of the Manhattan Project.”71

A week may not sound like much, but a week of world war is

different from a week of a world at peace. Just consider the human

costs. Estimates of deaths during the roughly six years of World War II

range up to 54 million for a weekly average of 180,000. The number

of injuries was far greater. It is a strange calculus. After all, the number

of Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties due to the atomic bombs also

reached into the hundreds of thousands. For the United States, at least,
chapter 6 – nrl goes to war ♦ 151

an earlier ending to World War II meant more lives saved and fewer

families shattered by premature death and endless grief.

NRL and the New World

From outer space, the third planet from the Sun undoubtedly

looked quite the same after the war as it had throughout human history. But nothing, anywhere truly was the same. National boundaries

had been redrawn. Entire familial lineages had ended abruptly, depriving the world of the future saints and murderers those lineages

may have harbored. The seeds of the Cold War almost instantaneously

were sown. The simultaneous angst and promise of the new nuclear

age had begun to infiltrate both individual and collective psyches.

The Naval Research Laboratory had grown from adolescence to

adulthood in a growth spurt that only wartime emergency could have

demanded. It was more than the number of buildings and people

that were different at the Laboratory, however. As the war began, NRL

was one of the country’s only existing military laboratories with a

stated, albeit little-practiced, mission of scientific research. In that

sense, it was like a scout amongst Government laboratories with the

unstated purpose of seeing what tax-funded scientific research can do

for the nation.

During the war, the nation’s reliance on and commitment to science expanded dramatically. Through the National Defense Research

Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, it

seemed as if the entire national nexus of technical talent in the governmental, academic, and industrial sector had been organized to

wring as much out of the intelligent application of science and engineering as it was naturally possible. The wonder weapons of World

War II—radar, proximity fuzes, atomic bombs—all were born of science and science-guided engineering. The war had proven beyond a

doubt that a country’s scientific resources were every bit as strategically valuable as the number of bombers in the Army Air Corp or the

number of destroyers it could put to sea.
152 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

When the war ended, the brilliant organizational machinery of

wartime—NDRC and OSRD—began dismantling. And there, still on

the banks of the Potomac River, was NRL, its contingent of more than

2,000 researchers—a pair of future Nobelists soon to join them—

unsure of what they and their Laboratory had become or where it was

heading.
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 153

C h a p t e r 7

Harold Bowen

and a Born Again NRL

153

NRL during wartime seemed on its way to becoming the kind of

place where a submarine could be built in 15 days, which was the

fanciful and unrealistic goal Edison had touted before Congress in

support of the Laboratory’s creation 30 years earlier. It still was bogged

down with the time-consuming responsibility of testing industry-made

equipment against specifications. But the relentless flow of radio, radar, countermeasures, and other equipment from NRL during wartime proved that it had the makings of a bona fide invention factory

relying as much on the manufacturing skills of its machinists as on

the engineering abilities of the research and development staff. However, the Edisonian vision for NRL would prove shortsighted in the

end. It would become more than a mere invention factory. Along the

way, of course, there would be some striking moments.

Consider the “unsatisfactory fitness report” that the Secretary of

the Navy, Frank Knox, placed into the personnel file of NRL director

Admiral Harold Bowen in 1941. The report rated the Admiral as a

very “capable engineer and possessed of great courage in pressing experimental projects.” It also rated Bowen’s dealings with the nation’s

most powerful civilian scientists as exceptional. “Rather belligerent

and temperamental in his contacts outside of the Navy” is how the

report stated it.1 That character trait would have repercussions for

Bowen, for NRL, and for American science in general.
154 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

 Bowen, then 57 years old, had been a Navy man all of his life. He

graduated from the Naval Academy in 1905 and then served variously

on ships and shore stations. A 1914 master’s degree in mechanical

engineering from Columbia University set him into a lifelong Naval

career with a mission to improve the Navy’s machinery. From 1917

until 1931, he served as a technical administrator in the lower echelon of the Naval hierarchy. After that, he entered a higher profile

arena where one’s acquired friends and enemies tend to be more powerful and where their actions tend to be more consequential.

Throughout the 1930s, Bowen served first as Assistant Chief of

the Bureau of Engineering and then as Chief. At the bureau, he was

the aggressive champion of an R&D program for a new Naval propulsion system based on high-pressure, high-temperature steam. Out of

this effort came the vast amounts of steam at the Philadelphia Navy

Yard that was the heart of Philip Abelson’s pilot plant for uranium

isotope separation during the war.

During his tenure at NRL, Bowen set some lasting trends into

motion. He successfully argued NRL’s case on Capitol Hill, leading to

Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen,

commanding officer of NRL, at

a time when the Laboratory

was becoming a home to basic

as well as applied science and

engineering
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 155

increases in Congressional appropriations for the Laboratory from

$370,000 in 1939 to $1,479,500 in 1941. Congressman James

Scrugham, whom Bowen had befriended, was instrumental in this

outcome. The increased money from Congress as well as from the

Navy bureaus showed up in the form of a doubling in the NRL’s physical plant to 58 acres, a near septupling of personnel to over 2100, a

more than doubling of the number of buildings from 17 to 42, and

the purchase of land on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay for

the construction of an annex that became a critical site for testing offthe-bench radio, radar, and countermeasures equipment.

Bowen greatly valued NRL’s role and its potential for increasing

the technical quality of the Navy. But his assignment in 1939 as NRL’s

director by Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison was in large

measure an attempt to decontaminate some bad air that had accrued

between Bowen and other top Navy officers and officials.2

In a bid for a long-term solution, Edison also shifted NRL from its

place under the former Bureau of Engineering to the haven of the

Secretary’s own office. Though not ideal to Bowen, the situation was

tolerable and Bowen did an admirable job bringing about and overseeing NRL’s most intense growth spurt.3

Edison also gave Bowen a second hat as Technical Aide to the

Secretary of the Navy, a job that had no specified responsibilities. “The

Technical Aide designation was made to save face for me,” Bowen

later assessed in his autobiography.4

 In this obscure capacity, however, Bowen managed to make headway in a long-term goal of centralizing control of Naval research. That action would pit him against

formidable opponents.

Admiral Bowen’s bulldog approach to human relations in and

out of the Navy would have different consequences for himself, the

Naval Research Laboratory of which he was director between 1939

and 1941, and the Navy as a whole.

At about the same time that Secretary Knox, who replaced Secretary Charles Edison, filed the unsatisfactory fitness report, Admiral

Bowen and NRL were transferred from the Office of the Secretary of
156 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the Navy back to the cognizance of a bureau, namely, the Bureau of

Ships. For Admiral Bowen, the shift was a resounding slap in the face

since it rendered him subordinate to the very office that he thought

he ought to have been chosen to run two years earlier.

For the Laboratory as a whole, the effects of the administrative

shift were relatively innocuous. In his own accounting of the NRL’s

first 25 years, A. Hoyt Taylor remarked that the administrative shift

was largely unfelt at the Laboratory since the vast majority of work

was for the Bureau of Ships anyway.5

Bowen rode out his personally demeaning placement until his

NRL assignment came to an end in mid-1942, after which he handed

over the directorship to Admiral Alexander H. van Keuren, who served

in that slot until the war ended.

That was not the end of Bowen’s troubles. “His humiliation was

not yet complete, for his enemies within the Navy barred him from a

major command and nearly caused his retirement by a medical review panel,” explains MIT public policy analyst Harvey Sapolsky in

his book Science and the Navy. “Only a growing friendship with the

Under Secretary of the Navy [James Forrestal] saved him from being

forced to collect an early pension in the midst of the greatest war in

the Navy’s history.”6

It is wise to make friends in high places because you never know

who is going to die. When Knox died in the spring of 1944, Under

Secretary Forrestal became Secretary Forrestal. After the war, Bowen’s

close connection with Forrestal would help the Admiral become the

last thing that his enemies might have wanted—the man in the Navy

with the most power ever over the direction of Naval research and

development. Throughout the mid- and late-1940s, that power would

even end up spilling beyond the borders of the Navy at a time when

the nation’s scientific intelligentsia were wrenching through a highstakes soul search whose outcome would define American science,

and the way it is sponsored, to this day.

The happy turn of fortune for Bowen in 1944 and 1945 came

only at immense initial cost to NRL and the Navy. Most notably was
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 157

the Navy’s conspicuously minor role in the wartime Manhattan Project,

the ultimate showcase of the world-changing creations of which collective human intellect and ingenuity are capable. The Navy’s diminutive presence in this historical project was due, at least in part, to Admiral Bowen’s brusque way with the civilian scientists who had organized it.7

One of those scientists was Vannevar Bush, not a man to be on

the wrong side of if you harbored high ambitions in the world of

American science.8

Bush had been Dean of Engineering and Vice President of the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming President of

the Carnegie Institution of Washington. When war broke out in Europe in 1938, he also was Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which Sapolsky describes as “a civilian agency which had been established in 1915 to promote the scientific development of aviation and which had been given authority (in

June 1939) to assist the military in the development of combat aircraft.”9

 The prewar basic research by NACA on airfoils was widely exploited during WWII by both sides. NACA served as a model from

which Bush, by Presidential authority, created and organized the National Defense Research Committee beginning in mid-1940. The

NDRC would be to militarily-relevant research what NACA had been

to aviation research.

Among the NDRC’s founding members were such titans of science as Harvard University President James Bryant Conant, MIT President Karl Compton, and Frank Jewett, president of Bell Laboratories.

The NDRC’s liaison in the Navy was none other than Admiral Bowen,

the director of NRL and the Technical Aide to the Secretary of the

Navy. From the start, Bowen was uncomfortable with the growing

civilian presence in military technical planning and research.

When France fell to Germany in 1940, the NDRC concept expanded into the more encompassing and powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development of which NDRC became a major component. Bush glided into chairmanship of the parent OSRD. In so
158 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

doing, he became as close to being a czar of American science as anyone ever had been before or since.

The time for a blowout between NRL Director Bowen and Bush’s

suddenly powerful research organizations was rapidly approaching.

Soon after the NDRC formed, it absorbed the Uranium Committee,

which had provided the conceptual starting point in early 1939 for

NRL to become the first government agency out of the blocks in the

quest to apply nuclear fission. As a consequence of this shift of control over the Uranium Committee, military planning regarding nuclear

phenomena fell under the jurisdiction of NDRC regardless of NRL’s

pioneering foray into the area. Moreover, the NDRC, whose members

deathly feared that German scientists would build an atomic bomb,

quickly focused attention and resources onto atomic weapons and

away from Bowen’s and Ross Gunn’s interest in nuclear propulsion.

As liaison to NRDC for the Navy, Bowen was one of the few in the

Navy privy to the potential applications of nuclear fission and to the

administrative structure that would emerge to manage nuclear research. That was only one reason why a clash between Bowen and the

NDRC was inevitable. In a memorandum to Secretary Knox dated

December 14, 1940, Bowen proposed that the Naval Research Laboratory be officially renamed as the Naval Research Center, which would

supervise all Naval research “on any subject of interest to the Navy.”10

This tactic would, in effect, create an in-house NDRC function within

the Navy. If such a center were to actually be established, Bush’s OSRD

and NDRC, and its majority of academic types, might be denied control of Naval research.

The conflict came to a head just months before the United States

entered the war. Harvey Sapolsky described the situation: “Admiral

Bowen’s brusque assertion of the Navy prerogatives in weapons research . . . antagonized Vannevar Bush and the other prominent scientists who were attempting to organize a civilian-directed weapon

development program, and in 1941, he was forced out of his senior

post in Naval research.” The effect was far more than merely personal.
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 159

“Bowen’s clash with civilian scientists was in large measure the cause

of the Navy being excluded from participation in the Manhattan

Project,” Sapolsky surmises.11

As it happened, NRL’s uranium isotope separation, ostensibly for

nuclear propulsion studies, did become an integral and grudgingly

acknowledged part of the bomb project. What’s more, that work developed into the equivalent of a new chromosome in the laboratory’s

genome that henceforth would influence the mission and character

of the Laboratory. In 1946, for example, many members of the Laboratory—particularly in the Optics Division—would become part of

Project Crossroads, the first set of postwar nuclear weapons tests in

the Pacific. After that, NRL would remain an important component

of the Nuclear Age and the awful Doomsday Machine that would

emerge out of the fledgling Cold War.

As it happened also, Bowen came back from the professional exile to which his opponents had hoped to relegate him. And in so

doing, he would catalyze the creation of the Office of Naval Research,

which would change the course of NRL, research in the Navy, and

even the entire context of American science.

The concept of ONR was first envisioned in late 1944 when Secretary Forrestal received a proposal from Admiral Furer, who then was

the head of the Office of the Coordinator of Research and Development (CRD), which was the technical link between civilian-run scientific organizations like the OSRD and the Navy’s materiel bureaus.

Furer’s proposal, which first was formulated the previous year by a

small group of CRD officers known as the Bird Dogs, was to create a

central organization to plan and guide the Navy Department’s research.12

On May 19, 1945, Forrestal established the Office of Research

and Inventions (ORI). It subsumed the functions of the CRD and the

six-month-old Office of Patents and Inventions that had been created

to preempt expensive patent infringement claims that were likely to

emerge after the war. ORI also was assigned the responsibility of plan-
160 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ning postwar research. Moreover, it took over the Naval Research Laboratory. The Office of Research and Inventions was in some respects

the Naval Research Center that Bowen had proposed earlier to Secretary Knox.

As ORI’s chief, Forrestal appointed Admiral Bowen. In principle,

Bowen had emerged from nearly being barred from the technical planning of the Navy to become, in theory at least, the most influential of

all Navy technical men ever.

In what was at least a pragmatic change of heart, Bowen immediately took measures to reverse his reputation as “belligerent and temperamental in his contacts outside of the Navy.” He and his staff

began wooing academic scientists, partly because Bowen hoped many

of those who had been involved in the Army-run Manhattan Project

might end up helping Ross Gunn realize his 1939 vision of a Navy

propelled by nuclear energy.

Bowen was keenly aware of the postwar reality that large-scale

science had become a vital means for the development of new and

improved military technologies. In the post-WWII era, the Navy would

need an organization akin to an OSRD or NDRC. The Office of Research and Inventions, which less than a year after its creation was

renamed as the still extant Office of Naval Research (ONR), was the

answer. Created by an act of legislation, ONR, which was directly under

the auspices of the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, would rapidly

become a model for a growing roster of institutions administering

funds to researchers. Among those institutions are the Office of Army

Research (ARO), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and

the National Science Foundation (NSF), all of which were established

in the 1950s.

Bowen did make one last gambit to subsume nuclear propulsion

R&D under ORI with NRL as the main research center. Even in late

January 1946, two months after the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)

had set up a special office—The Deputy Chief of Naval Operations

for Special Weapons, or OP-06—to oversee the development of nuclear
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 161

weapons and guided missiles to carry them, Bowen still shipped off

dissenting memoranda to his bosses.

On January 26th, Bowen sent a six-point policy proposal on the

subject of “Nuclear Energy for the Navy” to the Secretary of the Navy

and the Chief of Naval Operations. “Legislation now pending for federal control or supervision of work in nuclear physics is of vital importance to the Navy,” Bowen wrote. “Piecemeal comment by the Navy,

obtained by the usual process of shopping around for the views of

bureau and office chiefs, will endanger the strong position which the

Navy must take or else face relegation to a minor role. We must agree

upon and announce a firm policy.”13

His proposal was comprehensive. It included research and development in nuclear propulsion, nuclear munitions, nuclear medicine,

countermeasures to nuclear munitions, and basic nuclear science as

well as a program to train Naval personnel “in the field of nuclear

energy and its applications.”14

But it was too late. Officers at the Bureau of Ships, who wanted a

major role in nuclear propulsion for their own bureau had already

established an alliance with OP-06. During internal Navy discussions

about where Navy nuclear work (in collaboration with the soon to be

formed Atomic Energy Commission) would be centered, the Bureau

of Ships won out. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, one of the few officers

who could beat Bowen in a contest of will and aggression, ultimately

would garner the credit for ushering the Navy into the Nuclear Age.15

Although ORI would not become the Naval planning center of

nuclear R&D that Bowen had envisioned, he and ORI colleagues

helped prepare a legislative bill that would give the new organization

longevity beyond his own ambitions. On August 3, 1946, President

Harry S. Truman signed the bill establishing the Office of Naval Research. Bowen, a man in a high place who nonetheless had been

muscled out of the quest to create a nuclearly propelled Navy, relinquished his post as the head of ORI in 1947 and retired with the rank

of Vice Admiral.16
162 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

While all of this shuffling and reorganization was going on in the

upper echelon of the Navy, research leaders at NRL were engaged in a

parallel internal effort to redefine their Laboratory. There was a continuum of work going on with a small amount of basic research comprising one extreme, the testing of equipment on the other, and a

whole lot of applied science and engineering in between. The unanimous call among NRL researchers was to drop most of the testing

functions (except during war emergencies) and to shift its overall research agenda toward the more basic research side of the continuum.

The scientists had more than sympathetic backing from the NRL’s new

military commander, H.A. Schade, who took over the helm of NRL

from Admiral van Keuren (Bowen’s successor at NRL) at the end of

1945.

Members of a steering committee that Schade had set up to guide

the postwar remaking of NRL articulated the deep and perhaps most

important reason why NRL had to become a haven of basic research:

“It is one of the peculiarities of higher technical talent that individuals possessing it have a greater interest in the problems of science

than they do in specific engineering applications. Accordingly, if the

requisite technical talent is to be maintained at the Naval Research

Laboratory, and if development work is to take full advantage of advances in pure science, this institution will have to engage in scientific

work that is not immediately related to engineering development of

applied research [emphasis in original]. This character of work is generally called ‘Research.’”17

The end of War World II and the creation of ONR ensured that

NRL, ONR’s primary in-house research outlet, finally would have fertile ground for the growth of basic research alongside, and in complement to, the Laboratory’s more established history of applied research.

Rather than relying on funds from the mission-oriented Navy bureaus,

large portions of NRL’s research budget began to come from ONR,

which was independent of any bureau. In that sense, NRL found itself

in its best position ever to emulate the nation’s great corporate laboratories just as NRL’s founders envisioned it should back in the era of
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 163

World War I. Research that was in the near- or long-term interest of

the corporation—in this case, the Navy—was fair game. Finally, basic

research had become an officially sanctioned and financially supported

component of NRL’s research portfolio.

To lure top-notch talent in the postwar years when demobilized

scientists would have many career options, some prominent members of the NRL community even proposed that the Laboratory combine the best of corporate lab-life with the perks of the academic

lifestyle. Ross Gunn was one of them:

“The great attraction of university life is the three month summer

vacation accompanied by a two week break at the Christmas holidays. I think we could better our employment position if we could

establish the work of this Laboratory on a nine-month a year

basis . . . It seems to me that 9 months duty with the 26 day leave prorated and a salary of 75% of the base salary might provide flexibility

enough so that we could compete, probably quite successfully, with

the universities.”18

Even without the promise of summers off, the new postwar NRL

began attracting scientists of the highest caliber. Perhaps most emblematic was the arrival in 1946 of Jerome Karle, who had done plutonium metallurgy for the bomb project at the Metallurgical Laboratory located at the University of Chicago. He actually began working

for NRL in 1944 as part of a research contract with his graduate supervisor at the University of Michigan. Thirty-nine years after arriving at

NRL, he and NRL colleague Herbert Hauptman (who arrived at the

Laboratory in 1947) would become co-recipients of a Nobel Prize for

work that helped make X-ray crystallography a household tool for

chemists and physicists seeking to reveal the anatomy of molecules

and materials (see Chapter 11). It would be quite a victory for the

Laboratory because the Prize was awarded to Karle and Hauptman

for their unabashedly basic research—not applied science, engineering, or equipment testing. It was a dramatic endorsement for the vision of Gunn and his colleagues to build an academic model of research into NRL’s culture.
164 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

With Jerome Karle arrived his wife, Isabella Karle, who also was

destined for greatness. Some say her mathematical insights into problems of crystallography should have earned her part of the Nobel Prize

that her husband and Hauptman would share. Isabella Karle’s early

work at NRL provided key mathematical tools that opened up to definitive crystallographic analyses enormous classes of chemical compounds previously considered too complicated for such procedures.

Like her husband, she would go on to win a raft of science’s most

coveted awards and honors, including the National Medal of Science

in 1995.

The Karles were just two of the new breed of researchers that would

help usher NRL out of its relative isolation behind a fence of military

security into the larger and more open fraternity of the civilian scientific community. Another was Herbert Friedman, the man who actually hired the Karles. Friedman himself was hired into the Physical

Optics Division by Hulburt in 1941 to develop new kinds of light and

radiation detectors. This was fitting since Hulburt was hired in 1924

with the then dreamy vision that basic research would soon take hold

at the Laboratory. It actually took nearly 25 years for that to happen.

Although Friedman’s initial work during WWII centered on developing radiation measurement tools, he would become smitten with

a remarkable spoil of war—the opportunity to put measurement tools

atop the world’s most powerful rockets that the Nazis used as terror

weapons toward the end of the war. Friedman would become a visible, top-tier, pioneer in rocket-borne research. He would help launch

NRL, the country, and humanity into the Space Age. A profile of Friedman that appeared in the September 22, 1960 edition of The New

Scientist assessed his career with these words: “the contributions which

he has made to the exploration of space stand in comparison with

those of any other single person.”19 Even today, Friedman continues

making contributions in his role as chief scientist emeritus of the E.O

Hulburt Center for Space Research, an entity created at NRL to attract

talented graduate students and future NRL luminaries.
chapter 7 – harold bowen and a born again nrl ♦ 165

Richard Tousey, who died in 1997 at the age of 89, was hired at

about the same time as Friedman. After the war, he, too, would fall

head over heels into rocket-borne research. Whereas Friedman would

help the world see the way the cosmos color the sky and bathe the

Earth in invisible X-rays, Tousey would do the same for ultraviolet

radiation. Like a tag team, the two would help make NRL one of the

most important centers of space science prior to the Congressional

creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958.

Like bookends, the work

of the Karles and of Friedman

and Tousey would come to

bracket the vastly diverse scales

of the universe, from the diminutive inner space of crystals to the vast reaches of outer

space. Almost every level and

type of phenomenon became

legitimate foci for research at

NRL, so long as there was

some defensible connection to

Naval interests and needs.

In keeping with the postwar trend toward a more academic model of research, the Laboratory

created a new top office—director of research—designated for civilian occupation. In 1949, Hulburt became the Laboratory’s first director of research. With this new office in place, more effective planning

was possible between the Laboratories support services and its research

program.

A new, more academic research culture was taking root at NRL

alongside the older engineering culture that had characterized NRL

since it opened. Although this new research culture was new, it started

Richard Tousey in 1961
166 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

off with robust support. Not only did the likes of Ross Gunn, Herbert

Friedman, Richard Tousey, the Karles, and many others within NRL’s

gates embrace it, so too did the Office of Naval Research from which

much of NRL’s research budget would come in these transitional years.

Admiral Bowen may have lost NRL the chance to become a center of

nuclear research, but he ended up securing for the Laboratory the

right, even the mandate, to do the kind of basic research that would

earn it respect in the scientific community at large.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 167

C h a p t e r 8

Turning Vengeance

Weapons into a Space Age

167

Nothing influenced the fate of NRL’s postwar research program

and image more than an instrument of warfare designed by Nazi scientists and engineers—the Vergeltungswaffe, the Vengeance Weapon.

Built in the world’s largest underground factory by slave laborers who

were systematically worked to death,1

 the rocket-powered missile became known more familiarly as the V-2 bomb, the weapon that rained

terror down on English territory toward the end of the war.

At launch, each V-2 stood 46 feet high, weighed 14 tons (including a one ton warhead), and typically could travel nearly 200 miles in

an arc that would take it to an altitude of over 60 miles.2

 Of the 3,000

V-2s produced by the Nazis by the end of the war, about 1,000 reached

England.3

 Although the rain of V-2s on Londoners was terrifying and

deadly, the V-2 had no bearing on the outcome of the second great

world war. It was after the war that the V-2 rocket, sans warheads,

would change the world. The Naval Research Laboratory would have

everything to do with it.

The man most responsible for steering the V-2 into NRL’s fate was

physicist Ernst Krause. Krause grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and

earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering during the Depression years when jobs were scarce. In lieu of a job, he continued

his education, earning a PhD in physics. In 1938, the year Germany

invaded Poland, he joined Claud Cleeton’s Communications Sec-
168 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

urity Section in NRL’s Radio Division. The section’s proposed mission was to develop a microwave-based system for sending secure messages. From there, Krause ascended quickly during wartime to become

coordinator of guided missile research—an offshoot of pioneering

NRL work in the 1920s in radio-controlled aircraft. He later succeeded

Cleeton as section head. During the war, Krause had known as much

as anyone about guided missiles since his section worked on many

key aspects of such weaponry including telemetry, guidance, and countermeasures. He had also learned the important managerial skill of

coordinating the activities of many differently trained researchers to

achieve very complicated ends.4

At the end of the war, the U.S. Army had captured the subterranean V-2 factory near Niedersachswerfen just before the treaty-sanctioned Russian occupation of this part of Germany had actually begun. At first, no one at NRL knew of this acquisition. As preparations

for the transition to the Russians were underway, the Army packed up

360 metric tons of V-2 parts and equipment and shipped the rocketry

booty back to White Sands, New Mexico where the Army was establishing a missile testing ground. The Army wanted to use the V-2s as a

tool for learning how to handle and launch big rockets.5

Meanwhile, Krause had been learning about the German missile

and rocketry work. He was among a cadre of American scientists who

went to Europe on postwar technical missions to interrogate German

scientists and engineers. One of the frightening discoveries of these

missions was a plan by German scientists to build a 118-foot long

submerged cylinder that Nazi submarines could tow to the coasts of

the United States, raise to a vertical position by flooding one end, and

then use the skyward pointing tube to launch V-2 strikes.6

Krause returned from Germany with a rocket-filled vision of NRL’s

near future. New weapons were one thing, but in the spirit of NRL’s

postwar campaign to replant basic science on its grounds, Krause began pushing the idea of rockets as an exciting new tool that would

bring a new era of upper atmosphere research. With rockets, NRL’s
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 169

scientists finally would have a means of lofting measuring instruments

beyond the often obscuring, even blinding, effects of the atmosphere.

Krause was not alone in his enthusiasm. NRL’s military director,

Commodore Schade, had been a major participant and designer of

the Navy technical mission to Europe and was well aware of the German work in guided missiles and rocketry.7

 Moreover, even before

anyone at NRL knew about the V-2s captured by the Army, Milton

Rosen, one of Krause’s colleagues, had proposed building a research

rocket. NRL now had the means and the will to bring rockets into its

research portfolio.

Krause’s lobbying paid off. On December 17, 1945, what previously had been known as the Guided Missiles Subdivision of the Special Electronics Research and Development Division became known

as the Rocket Sonde Research Subdivision (or Section). Unlike later

rockets that would send satellites into orbit, a rocket sonde merely

shoots as high as its fuel will take it before falling back to Earth, a trip

that lasts only a few minutes at best.

Krause was assigned head of the new section. Its functions were

defined in Laboratory Order No. 46-45 as follows: “to investigate the

physical phenomena in and the properties of the upper atmosphere

with a view to supplying knowledge which will influence the course

of future military operations.” To carry out these functions, the section was charged with doing the basic research to develop the “techniques, instrumentation, and devices required.”8

 Its members would

become some of this country’s first rocket scientists by reading the

intelligence reports of the technical missions to Europe.9

The Rocket Sonde Research Section would drop like an intense

dye smack into the swirling center of NRL. It would color much of

the basic research that over the next few decades would put NRL more

visibly on the scientific map then it had ever been before. John Hagen,

a radio researcher at NRL during the war, played a lead role in bringing the world into the Space Age. This role would place him squarely

in the media spotlight in the late 1950s. He later looked back and
170 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

summarized NRL’s history up to then as a three-stage structure. In the

1973 Report of NRL Progress, an annual accounting of research at the

Laboratory, Hagen wrote: “The Naval Research Laboratory was born

out of World War I. It grew to maturity in preparing for World War II,

excelling in its achievement during the War. It blossomed into a fullfledged scientific institution in applying the talents of its people after

the war.”10 The biggest petal on this blossom was rocket-based science.

When the Rocket Sonde Research Section formed, the Army already had contracted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which budded

from the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) during World

War II and is now operated by Cal Tech for NASA) to develop a rocket

that could carry 25 pounds of meteorological equipment to altitudes

of about 20 miles. But the rocket that would come out of this program, the Wac Corporal, would be too small to carry enough of a

scientific payload high enough to meet the Rocket Sonde researchers’

needs. So Krause and his team were poised at the end of 1945 for the

long haul of developing a rocket that could meet their specific needs.

Then on January 7, 1946, a cadre of members of the section learned

from Lt. Col. J.G. Bain of the Army Ordnance Department about the

captured cache of V-2 parts, enough perhaps to reconstruct 100 rockets.11 The Army’s interests in firing the rockets largely were military in

nature—to learn how to handle, use, and track rockets of V-2 dimensions. But Bain also indicated that the Army was interested in gathering data about the upper atmosphere. If anyone was going to be shooting rockets around the upper atmosphere, they needed to know what

that place was like—its temperature ranges, compositions, and pressures. This was a research endeavor the Army was ill-equipped to pursue on its own.

So there was the U.S. Army about to fire the world’s biggest and

most powerful rockets, but they had no atmospheric measurement

tools to loft on them. And there was NRL with a new research section

aiming to do rocket-borne research of the upper atmosphere, yet expecting to wait 2 years before having a suitable rocket in hand made
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 171

by a not-yet specified contractor. When Bain invited the Rocket Sonde

Research Section to take part in the effort to measure properties of the

upper atmosphere, the idea “was enthusiastically received and accepted,” Krause wrote in the section’s first report on their V-2 work.12

NRL was not alone in its interest in rocket-borne research. The

Army Signal Corps Laboratory, which had developed radar alongside

NRL in the 1930s and during wartime, was getting in on the wave. So

was the Applied Physics Laboratory, a legacy of the wartime NRDC

link to Johns Hopkins University (whose initial mission was the development of proximity fuzes). These were among the dozen organizations with scientists interested in the captured V-2 as new research

tools. General Electric (which the Army contracted to run White

Sands),13 Watson Laboratories, the National Bureau of Standards, as

well as several universities were all in on the rockets.

In mid-January, the “V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel,”

which was composed of representatives from these interested parties,

convened for the first time to coordinate research. Its first act was to

elect Krause as chairman,14 a move that immediately put NRL at the

titular forefront of rocket-borne research in the United States. Just

three months later, on April 16, 1946, the first American-launched V2 roared skyward from White Sands. Some 60 more V-2s would follow suit over the next 41⁄2 years. NRL’s Herbert Friedman, who witnessed many of these launches, wrote:

“No matter how many times you witnessed it, the launch of these

rockets was always inspiring. After the short-lived bursts and rapid

acceleration that characterized the firings of small rockets, the

slow, majestic rise of the V-2 and the sudden vanishing of the

roar of the rocket in the eerie quiet of burnout was a breathtaking

experience. Silent, snaking vapor trails marked the passage of the

rocket through the stratosphere, and sound returned only near

landing when shock waves reverberated from the mountains.”15

The program had a healthy portion of difficulty, however. Though

far more powerful than the Wac Corporal, V-2s in fact were designed

to transport explosives into enemy territory, not to carry scientific in-
172 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

strumentation to great atmospheric heights. “Eleven hundred pounds

of lead have been poured into the nose of a V-2 when the instrument

load was insufficient to provide static stability,” recalled Milton Rosen

and Richard Snodgrass, members of Krause’s Rocket Sonde Research

Section.16 The V-2’s technology also was replete with bugs, not made

any easier by the fact that these were German-designed vehicles being

assembled in the United States with American crews, albeit with the

help of some of the German scientists and engineers that had developed the missile in the first place. According to Friedman,

“The first five of the huge rockets all returned nose down in streamlined flight and buried their pulverized remains in craters about

30 feet deep and 80 feet in diameter. One reversed direction

from north to south and headed for El Paso, Texas. It crossed the

Mexican border and struck next to Tepeyac Cemetery, about a

mile and a half from Juarez. The impact barely missed a warehouse full of commercial blasting powder and dynamite. This

even may be recorded as the first U.S. ballistic missile strike on

foreign soil.”17

Krause and others in the rocket science arena always had considered the V-2s as stopgap vehicles for a new field of rocket-borne research that would outlast the supply of the German missiles. Even as

preparations for the first White Sands V-2 launch was underway, Krause

and Rosen of NRL agreed with the Applied Physics Laboratory to jointly

oversee an APL-developed scientific rocket—called the Aerobee—based

on an engine designed by the Aerojet Engineering Company.18 And

for the longer term supply of more capable rockets, NRL began designing its own rocket. It would become known as the Viking.

Despite the harrowing crapshoot that each V-2 launch amounted

to, NRL researchers quickly began reaping the kinds of scientific riches

they had envisioned would come with rockets. The first to bring home

gold was Richard Tousey and his colleagues in the Optics Division

who had become infected with the enthusiasm of Krause’s Rocket

Sonde Research Section.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 173

Tousey was hired into the Optics Division in 1941 to do research

on the upper atmosphere. It is no surprise that E. O. Hulburt, the first

scientist hired at NRL with the expressed freedom to choose his topic

as an academic might, would be the one to hire scientists like Richard

Tousey and Herbert Friedman who would realize the ideal of NRL as

a bastion of basic research unfolding side-by-side with applied research and engineering.

When word of NRL’s access to V-2s started percolating beyond the

founders of the Rocket Sonde Research Section, Hulburt immediately saw immense potential. After all, he had devoted much of his

research to revealing and measuring the physical features of the upper atmosphere that affect long-distance communication. This led to

important results including empirically derived protocols enabling

Navy radio operators to determine what wavelengths to use at different times and locations. Useful as that may have been, Hulburt and

his colleagues still wanted to understand the atmospheric phenomena that coerced them into developing such protocols in the first place.

Everyone knew that radiation from the Sun was what set these

upper atmosphere mechanisms—including the fluctuating character

of the ionosphere—into motion. A theoretical understanding of what

was going on had been elusive, however. A big part of the problem

was that so much of that solar radiation could never make it beyond

the absorptive upper reaches of the atmosphere to measuring instruments below. Hulburt could see that rockets could break through the

blindness imposed by the very atmosphere he wanted to understand.

To get his division in on the new game, Hulburt challenged Tousey

to put a spectrograph on a V-2. That way, as he and Tousey both knew,

an instrument capable of detecting the spectrum of ultraviolet radiation would for the first time soar above the stratospheric ozone layer

which absorbs all UV wavelengths shorter than 3000 angstroms. (The

ultraviolet spectrographs the NRL researchers contained special gratings of ultrafine lines that reflect different wavelengths of UV radiation to different degrees, thereby spatially separating the many com-
174 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ponent wavelengths of a UV source into its individual components.

The separated light can be projected onto and recorded by a photographic plate. The resulting exposure represents the source’s rainbow

of UV light, otherwise known as a UV spectrum).

Tousey’s interest in measuring the extreme ultraviolet radiation

began in his graduate days when he worked under Harvard University

Professor Theodore Lyman. Lyman had developed techniques to measure UV spectra emitted by excited chemical species such as hydrogen

atoms that are trapped inside of a vacuum where air would be unable

to absorb the more extreme UV wavelengths. One of those hydrogenderived wavelengths, measured at 1215.7 angstroms, became known

as Lyman-alpha.

Atmospheric researchers began to suspect in the 1920s that Lymanalpha emission might play a large role in the electron-energizing

A V-2 rocket is raised into launching position at the White Sands Proving Grounds

in Nevada on December 5, 1946.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 175

mechanisms behind the ionosphere. This was not merely an academic

issue since radio fadeout appeared linked to changes in the ionosphere

wrought by solar activity. Knowledge of this Sun-ionosphere-communications dynamic, therefore, became important to the Navy.

One possible mechanism behind the fadeouts, which could interfere with Naval communication for days, involved the injection of

solar energy (in ultraviolet and X-ray ranges) into atoms in the Earth’s

upper atmosphere. This process would generate populations of free

electrons in certain regions of the upper atmosphere, thereby affecting the ionosphere. And that could help explain such phenomena as

fadeouts that coincide with high sunspot activity. Without direct measurement above most or all of the stratospheric ozone levels where

most of the extreme ultraviolet radiation (including Lyman-alpha) is

absorbed, however, no one could tell if this mechanism was anything

more than an intellectually satisfying story. Hulburt, Tousey, and their

colleagues hoped a UV spectrograph in the nose cone of a V-2 would

help them to separate fact from fiction in this scenario.

Their first try took place on June 28, 1946. It was the sixth V-2

shot. The rocket lifted off from its launch site at White Sands and then

careened back to Earth. With nothing to slow its descent, its impact

created a crater from which virtually nothing from the rocket, including the spectrograph, was recovered intact or even in recognizable form.

The ending would be different for the twelfth V-2 flight, which

took place on October 10. Tousey had equipped it with a new spectrograph, this time locating it on one of the rocket’s four stabilizing

fins rather than in the more vulnerable nose cone. Also, upon its descent, operators remotely blasted the V-2 into less streamlined parts

that would descend more slowly. This time, Tousey was able to retrieve the spectrograph. It harbored data no one had seen before—the

solar UV spectrum down to 2200 angstroms. This heretofore unmeasured part of the Sun’s UV emission was called the “new UV.” A subsequent V-2 flight on March 7, 1947 yielded 300 new UV lines between

3000 and 2200 angstroms, with which the NRL scientists were able to
176 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

(a) On March 7, 1947, NRL scientists, using a V-2 rocket as a platform for measurement equipment, obtained this solar ultraviolet spectrum showing more detail and

extending to shorter wavelengths than was possible with earthbound instruments.

(b) Schematic depiction of the instrumented V-2. Note the fin location of the spectrograph that produced the above UV spectrum.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 177

identify the presence of 17 chemical elements in the Sun.19 These were

the shortest UV wavelengths ever measured from the Sun, but the

spectrum did not reach low enough to include the Lyman-alpha line,

an extreme UV wavelength a full 1000 angstroms shorter than any in

the “new UV.”

These first flights only whetted the scientists’ appetites. After all,

the atmosphere not only relentlessly screened UV radiation below

3000 angstroms from earth-bound and balloon-borne instruments,

but it also had blocked transmission of many, not all, of the even

higher energy cosmic emanations, including X-rays and gamma rays.

The same was true for much of the infrared radiation and low-frequency radio waves below 20 kilohertz. In effect, before 1946 and the

first V-2 flights, the atmosphere had blinded scientists to a plethora

of astronomical “colors” that harbored endless discoveries about the

atmosphere, the Sun, and the universe.

 Spectrographic measurement of those shorter and fainter wavelengths was hampered by the V-2’s tendency to spin and precess as it

rode out its parabolic path from launch to peak to crash site. The

lithium fluoride crystal windows of Tousey’s spectrographs would

only directly point at the Sun when the windows happened to have

the correct orientation as the rocket spun rather unpredictably.

To gather better and more revealing data, the NRL team decided

to develop a “sun-follower,” a gadget that would rely on a photoelectric tube to monitor the location of the Sun with respect to the

rocket orientation and then send signals to a mechanical servo system that would reorient the spectrograph in the nose cone so that it

would spend more precious seconds of the few minutes each V-2 was

aloft actually pointing toward its solar target.

“Most of the sun-follower’s electronic and mechanical systems were

adopted directly from a radar tracking unit developed at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory during the war, with the substitution of a light-sensitive receiver for the radio-frequency radar system,” according to historian of technology Bruce Hevley who carefully investigated NRL’s
178 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

role in early rocket-based astronomy.20 The NRL team was quickly

able to adapt the wartime radar tracker into a peacetime star-tracker.

Unfortunately, Tousey and his colleagues were frustrated in their

attempts to be the first to measure the coveted Lyman-alpha emission

by a string of five consecutive launch failures involving V-2 rockets

and one newly available Aerobee rocket that NRL had received. Better

fortune befell a group at the University of Colorado who had developed a less weighty sun-follower under an Air Force contract. Their

stabilized spectrograph finally did bag the world’s first Lyman-alpha

measurements of the Sun from the upper atmosphere in 1953. Tousey

followed with a definitive observation just months later in 1954.

Amidst all of the bad luck in the late 1940s, however, Tousey’s

team developed an alternative means of measuring not only UV radiation but also a portion of the X-ray spectrum (with shorter wavelengths than UV) that abuts the extreme edge of the UV spectrum.

The principle of this alternative measurement was thermoluminescence. UV or X-ray radiation would hit carefully chosen phosphors,

chemicals that emit light when exposed to radiation (they’re in your

TV). This light, in turn, would expose film. The intensity of exposure

qualitatively indicates the intensity of the radiation. Moreover, by using

different filters that would allow only preselected ranges of radiation

through to the phosphors, the approximate wavelengths of the incoming radiation could be determined.

Of the six V-2s that Tousey equipped with thermoluminescence

systems, he was able to retrieve data from four. The first success was

on February 17, 1949. It revealed the unusual presence of X-rays below an altitude of 79 miles. None of the other experiments duplicated that result, probably because none of the others flew at a time

when solar activity was high. During that first success, ground stations simultaneously monitored ionospheric disturbance. This happy

concurrence would help the NRL scientists to discern the different

atmospheric roles played by extreme UV radiation and X-rays from

the Sun.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 179

Five weeks after the flight, the Navy touted the meaning of the

result in a press release. [The] “intense . . . ultraviolet rays apparently

produce the ionospheric layers necessary for long distance radio transmission,” the release suggested, “while sudden bursts of X-rays apparently cause radio fadeouts and disrupt radio communication . . . On

flights when intense X-rays were detected, solar flares were observed

by astronomers and radio fadeouts occurred all over the world during

the time the rocket was in flight.”21

All four successful thermoluminescence experiments detected radiation in a swath of ultraviolet wavelengths including the Lymanalpha emission. During the fourth flight, the data even included much

more detailed information about the rocket’s behavior, a bonus that

enabled Tousey’s group to eke out more science from their thermoluThe spectacular look

of failure in the then

nascent business of

scientific rocketry
180 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

minescence data. For one thing, they were able to deduce the intensity of solar-derived extreme-UV radiation, and thereby the amount

of energy the Sun injects into the atmosphere. Their findings confirmed previous suspicions by others that a disproportionate amount

of solar UV radiation is in the sub-3000 angstrom regime. They also

were able to calculate ozone concentrations at different atmospheric

heights up to about 70 km.22

The thermoluminescence data were intriguing. However, they were

the result of a largely indirect, qualitative measurement since the mere

presence of exposure was not enough to determine exactly which

wavelengths were reaching the film. There was plenty of incentive for

other researchers, including Herbert Friedman, to develop more direct and quantitative techniques for measuring solar radiation at various levels of the atmosphere.

Just as A. Hoyt Taylor’s technological interest in high-frequency

radio communication had steered the Radio Division into scientific

issues such as the way the ionosphere affects the propagation of highfrequency radio waves, the interest of Krause and his colleagues in the

Rocket Sonde Research Section in rockets for upper atmosphere work

was opening new scientific doors, this time in astronomy. By 1950,

rocket science and upper atmosphere research accounted for over 8%

of NRL’s research and development budget, amounting to almost

$1,500,000.23

Krause, the man who got NRL into the rocket business, left the

Rocket Sonde Research Section in 1947 when his responsibilities in

the arena of nuclear weapons testing became a higher priority. He

handed the baton to Homer Newell under whom Milton Rosen would

oversee development of the Viking rocket, which NRL would begin to

use after the V-2 supply had dwindled. Another group within the section focused on measurements of those atmospheric properties such

as temperature, pressure, and composition that were critical unknowns

needed for developing next-generation rockets such as the Viking.

Meanwhile, the Optics Division had tasted the scientific fruits attainable with rockets. Richard Tousey, who came to NRL as an expert
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 181

in laboratory spectroscopy was transforming himself and his colleagues

into some of the country’s first rocket-based astronomers. At about

the same time, in 1949, Hulburt shed his role as head of the Optics

Division to become the first civilian director of research at NRL, an

administrative novelty thoroughly in line with the Laboratory’s concerted effort to emulate the academic model of research. His ascent

also ensured that rockets would continue rising in importance and

profile at NRL.

The same year Hulburt became director, one of his hires in the

Optics Division, Herbert Friedman, took the same opportunity as

Tousey did to steer his own career into the nascent field of rocket

astronomy. Friedman studied solid state physics in the late 1930s at

Johns Hopkins University before joining NRL’s Metallurgy Division

in the summer of 1940.24 At Hopkins, Friedman had learned to handle

X-rays for analyzing materials, a skill that seemed to fit nicely with

the very origins of the Metallurgy Division in the late 1920s when

division patriarch, Robert Mehl, developed techniques for analyzing

the quality of welds, casts, and forged metal parts by passing radiation through the metal and onto recording film.

When Friedman joined the division, however, he found that it

had moved away from Mehl’s scientific approach of relating a metal’s

internal microstructures to its good and bad properties. Instead, the

focus had shifted toward a more empirical approach of improving

metals and alloys by tweaking this or that practice at the foundry. It

was a strategy more apt to produce results quickly, that is, better metal

for the Navy, but it did not satisfy Friedman’s craving to push the

boundaries of fundamental knowledge about the material world. Since

Friedman was more attracted to the more fundamental studies, he

convinced himself that he would have to leave NRL.

Hulburt snatched up the disillusioned Friedman before he and

his talent could follow through with his intention to leave NRL. After

all, X-rays are a form of light and that means Friedman’s skills were in

sync with the Optics Division. One of the first successes Friedman

scored in the pre-V-2 days under Hulburt was to use X-rays to help
182 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

precisely orient and cut crude quartz crystals so they could have preselected radio oscillation frequencies. This turned out to be of critical

importance during the war when the supply of more easily oriented,

higher quality crystals was cut off. The accomplishment later was credited with saving millions of man hours.25

Friedman’s ticket to rocket-based science began when he became

the Laboratory guru for photon counters. On one side of these usually cylindrical devices there often is a window made of materials chosen to allow particles or photons of only certain energy ranges into

the tube’s gas-filled interior. The light entering the tube ionizes a

molecule of the gas, triggering an avalanche of electrons. So, very tiny

amounts of light can produce a large amount of ionization, which

then is readily detectable by electrodes in the tube. The most widely

recognized photon counter is the Geiger counter, which detects emissions from decaying radioactive atoms.

Since photon counters measure radiation more quantitatively than

photographic techniques, Friedman was able to use them to make

such measurements as the thickness of paint on a ship and the level

of fuel in a tank. The principle was much the same as Mehl had used

in the late 1920s with his gamma-ray radiography, only instead of

relying on film to record the data, electrical signals feeding to an oscilloscope or a chart recorder did the job.

It took Friedman several years longer than Tousey to get into the

rocket astronomy business, partly because new photon detectors were

in high demand during the nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific just

after the war. Since radiation is one of the primary products of nuclear

explosives, Friedman and his photon counters became critical components of these efforts. Indeed, the collective talent at NRL for measuring physical phenomena in general meant that many at the Laboratory, including Hulburt, Tousey and Krause, would participate in

the tests.

It was soon after the A-bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll that Friedman inadvertently became hooked on solar flare research. He, Peter
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 183

King of the Chemistry Division, and several others were assigned a

secret, high-priority project to develop a means of detecting atmospheric nuclear explosions. One part of the detection system involved

the placement at air weather stations of automatic photon counters

sensitive to the gamma radiation from nuclear fission products.

Beginning in late 1949, Friedman, then head of the division’s Electron Optics Branch, began to send some of the radiation detectors he

and his colleagues were making to the highest altitudes ever achieved.

“When the great solar flare of November 1949 occurred, possibly the

greatest on record, we obtained excellent measurements of the penetration of solar cosmic rays up to 20 GeV [billions of electron volts],

from Arctic to Antarctic latitudes,” Friedman recalls with

bittersweetness. The data was secret, however, so he and his colleagues

could not share their unique data with the open scientific world. It

was the kind of data that would have made the career of a young

scientist. “I resolved then to pursue studies of the flare phenomenon

in the unclassified rocket program.”26

This approach was far different from Tousey’s. For one thing, the

electronic detection of radiation in Friedman’s photon tubes was more

readily and precisely quantifiable than photographic detection. Moreover, there was no need to recover the tubes since their electronic signals were radioed to receivers on the ground. The real-time

telemetering of data had the additional advantage of allowing Friedman to mesh his own data with rocket performance and position

data from ground tracking records.

The first battery of Friedman’s detectors flew on September 29,

1949 to a height of about 94 miles (151 kilometers). It was the 49th V2 flight from White Sands. “As the radio signals came in, we first read

Lyman-alpha extreme ultraviolet at about 75 kilometers followed by

soft X-rays at 85 kilometers,” Friedman recalls.27 When all of their

data came in, Friedman and his colleagues were able to identify Xrays as the form of radiation most responsible for the ionization that

underlies the ionosphere. In addition, they found that the UV radia-
184 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

tion passes through this layer without causing ionization, and is absorbed at a lower atmospheric level.

Friedman’s group had beginner’s luck with their first V-2 flight.

The next V-2 they had an opportunity to fit with photon counters

exploded on the launching pad, burned furiously, and surrounded

the blockhouse with billowing smoke. With that loss, Friedman

learned firsthand about the devastating mood swings of the big V-2s.

When the smaller and more reliable Aerobee rockets started becoming available, Friedman became an instant fan. He hoped to use

them to study solar flares. Although, the first generation of Aerobees

could not reach V-2 altitudes, stretched versions of Aerobees with

longer fuel tanks outreached the V-2s. In an arena where higher is

better, the Aerobee became the workhorse research rocket.28

 Friedman and others interested in using rockets for studying solar flares still had a big problem. Solar flares occur with a suddenness

and unpredictability that did not match well with the long preparation time of an Aerobee, which had to be used within an hour or two

once its fuel was pressurized. Success depended entirely on the extreme luck of a solar flare occurring just in those few hours out of

each average month when one happens to have an Aerobee fueled,

pressurized, and ready to go.

An answer came in by way of Jim Van Allen, then at the Applied

Physics Laboratory and destined for immortality as the discoverer of

the magnetic belts that circle the Earth and that bear his name. Van

Allen’s idea was the Rockoon: a small, relatively simple rocket (like

the 9-foot long Deacon) is tied to a 150,000 cubic foot polyethylene

balloon. The balloon carries the rocket to a height of 25 km. It hovers

there all day, if need be, until it could be fired by radio command at

the first sign of a solar flare.

In July 1956, Friedman, James Kupperian, Jr., Leo Davis, Robert

Kreplin, and other NRL colleagues sailed with ten Rockoons from

San Diego aboard the USS Colonial, an LSD (a ship designed for dispatching materiel onto a beach-head), to a site about 400 nautical

miles off of the California coast. “Each morning we launched a bal-
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 185

loon trailing a string of corner reflectors [for radar tracking] below

which dangled the rocket,” Friedman recalls. “Then began the chase.

We could not permit the Rockoon to get out of range of our radio cutdown command, but the upper-air winds were faster than the lumbering LSD. It helped that the winds reversed in the course of the day,

so that we could let the Rockoon travel away from us toward the California coast in the morning, then catch it coming back in the afternoon.”29

On the first days, there were no solar flares. “Sunday was a day of

rest, and with no Rockoon aloft to observe the Sun, it produced two

very good flares,” Friedman wryly recalls. “On the fourth day we were

all at lunch except for Bill Nichols and Bob Kreplin when a flare

erupted. Bob reacted quickly and fired the rocket. It caught a weak

Class I flare, but the observation of a strong X-ray flux at 70 kilometers was clear-cut. We had proven that solar-flare X-rays are the key to

the production of radio fadeout.”30

While Tousey and Friedman were leading teams along parallel

and complementary lines of rocket-borne research in the first half of

the 1950s, NRL as an organization was about to take just about the

With the October 5, 1954 flight of a camera-bearing V-2, NRL scientists assembled this

photo-composite showing approximately 1.25 million square miles of the world’s surface. The caption of this press photo included the following claim: “The Navy believes

that this is the largest Earth area ever photographed from one spot at one time.”
186 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

deepest plunge any organization in the world had taken into the nascent field of rocket-based research. As the V-2 supply dwindled and

the Aerobees and Rockoons began to fill in the gap, those in the Rocket

Sonde Research Branch were realizing its original ambition to develop

its own rocket—the Viking. Unlike the V-2, which was not steerable,

the Viking had a gimbaled engine that could guide the vehicle by

directing thrust at different angles. Moreover, it was larger and so could

carry heavier payloads than the Aerobees and take those payloads

much higher.

Under contract by NRL, the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore built the Viking using an engine designed by Reaction Motors,

Inc. under a separate Bureau of Aeronautics contract.31 Krause assigned

Homer Newell, Jr. and Milton Rosen to oversee the project. The Viking project would lead to the construction of 14 variously configured rockets. The last two Viking rockets became part of the optimistic national goal of putting an artificial satellite into orbit around the

Earth as part of an international scientific mission, called International Geophysical Year (IGY), to study the Earth as a whole.

The first seven Viking firings occurred between May 3, 1949 and

August 7, 1951.32 Viking 4 stood out because it was fired from the

deck of a ship, the USS Norton Sound. Launching from an at-sea platform made scientific sense since the structure of the atmosphere varies at different geographic locations. But the shot also demonstrated

the military potential of ship-launched missiles reminiscent of the

Nazi plan to tow launching tubes to the U.S. coasts. There was no

shortage of failures. For example, the lightweight aluminum fins on

Viking 6 buckled and collapsed mid-flight, sending the rocket into an

unscheduled landing 7 miles from the launch site.

Viking 7 was the last of the first-generation Vikings, which were

49 feet tall and weighed nearly 5 tons. It went up at 0:59 a.m. on

August 7, 1951, and when its engine burned one second longer than

was needed to break the altitude record, Milton Rosen and his Viking

colleagues had wide eyes as the rocket continued to coast higher and

higher. Its ascent ended at 136 miles, shattering the previous record
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 187

of 114 miles set by a V-2 launched nearby almost five years earlier.

Only this time, the rocket that held the record was conceived of, designed, and built in the United States under the direction of NRL.

The next three Vikings under the original contract with the Glenn

L. Martin Company would be fatter and heavier, a slight sacrifice in

aesthetics for the hope of attaining higher altitude. They would demonstrate, however, that rockets still rose on a cloud of thrust and a

prayer. This new Viking series started out ominously on June 6, 1952,

when the Viking 8 rocket ripped from its tie-down blocks during a

test firing of its motor and then crashed in the desert about four miles

southeast of the launch site. The next Viking’s engine stopped earlier

than expected, reaching a height of 135 miles, about 50 miles shy of

its intended peak.

The June 30 firing of Viking 10 turned harrowing when the rocket’s

tail section exploded, setting off a fire. Despite the unintended pyrotechnics, no one was hurt. Workers were even able to quash the fire

soon enough to salvage much of the rocket. The rocket was rebuilt

and, like Lazarus coming back from death, the reconstructed Viking

10 soared upward from White Sands on May 7, 1954 to a recordequaling height of 135.9 miles.

In between the death and resurrection of Viking 10, NRL awarded

the Glenn L. Martin Company another contract for four more Vikings.

Viking 11 surpassed the performance of its predecessors, taking the

record to 158 miles. The NRL scientists were able to retrieve the armored steel film cassette from an aerial camera that survived the

rocket’s crash landing. In it was a cache of spectacular high-altitude

portraits of the Earth, revealing magnificent cloud formations and

global weather patterns. The then novel pictures ran in many newspapers and magazines. Viking 12’s January, 1955 launch did not live up

to the building expectations that came with Viking 11. But its camera

produced some of the best high-altitude pictures of Earth yet.

As exciting as all of the Viking firings were, they were expensive,

on the order of $400,000 per shot. And the scientists who had spent

many months designing experiments or equipment to fly on the rock-
188 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ets never quite knew what to expect. There never were guarantees.

Smaller, more reliable rockets like the Aerobees and Wac Corporal

would become the workhorses for sounding rocket studies in which

the flights lasted only a few minutes. Big rockets retained unambiguous military potential as delivery vehicles for guided missiles, but their

future role in scientific research was uncertain because of their expense.

In the summer of 1954, during early planning for the International Geophysical Year (slated to run from July 1, 1957 to December

31, 1958), the fate of big rocket science would be sealed. Members of

the International Scientific Radio Union, the organization that originally proposed the IGY, recommended that the IGY community consider the audacious idea of artificial satellites as platforms for research.

There were no such things at the time, only on-again, off-again sounding rockets like the Vikings that were unable to achieve conditions for

reaching orbit.

This launched the collective imagination of the IGY community

into orbit. Later in 1954, the U.S. National Committee (USNC) for

the 67-nation IGY set up advisory groups to study the feasibility of

launching a satellite sometime during the 18 month International

Geophysical Year and secondly to determine whether a satellite would

genuinely boost research. To no one’s surprise, the answers were yes

and yes. With the nods of advisory bodies, the USNC proceeded in

1955 to draw up plans for a satellite program.

On July 29, 1955, the White House publicly announced jointly

with the Belgium-based Special Committee for the International Geophysical Year (IGY’s international headquarters) that the United States

intended to launch “small unmanned earth-circling satellites” as part

of the IGY. “This program will for the first time in history enable scientists throughout the world to make sustained observations in the

regions beyond the atmosphere,” President Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, told reporters at the White House.33

The timing of the announcement was in part due to fears that the

Soviet Union would snatch the glorious moment.34 Four days later,
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 189

Moscow announced that the Soviet Union also would have its own

satellite in orbit during the IGY.

No one knew exactly how anyone was going to put an artificial

satellite into orbit. No rocket on Earth could do it. At the time of

Hagerty’s announcement, a high level committee known as the Stewart

Committee (convened at the behest of the Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles) was charged with deciding who, in fact, would

get a shot for the once-in-history shot at being the first to put a satellite into Earth orbit since the Moon showed up there billions of years

ago.

The Air Force might have been a contender but its development

work on the Atlas rocket, which was slated to become the launch vehicle for an intercontinental ballistic missile, by law had to take precedence over a scientific rocket project. That left two tight-knit and

proud groups of rocket designers—one at NRL under men like Homer

Newell and Milton Rosen, and one at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal

under the auspices of Wernher von Braun, the German rocketeer most

behind the V-2s whom the Army had snatched for their own after the

war.

The Army proposed the Orbiter, some of whose components already had been under development with funds from the Office of

Naval Research.35 It called for a multistage rocket that could put a 5-

pound satellite into orbit. The NRL proposal was for a three-stage

rocket using a Viking-based design for the lower one or two stages

and newly designed upper stages. Rather than a 5-pound payload,

however, the NRL proposal called for 40 pounds of scientific instrumentation. NRL also could boast of a virtually ready-to-go radar tracking system, called Minitrack, that NRL researchers John Mengel and

Roger Easton already had developed to track Viking projects. This was

no small concern since the challenge of finding and tracking a 5- or

40-pound satellite in the vast expanse of outer space mocked the

trouble of finding a needle in a haystack.

The Stewart Committee assessed the pros and cons of each proposal and sent their report to the Secretary of Defense on August 4.
190 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The committee vote was close but the majority favored NRL’s proposal over the Army’s. It took another head-to-head round involving

detailed reports and testimonials by generals, scientists, engineers, and

company executives before the Stewart Committee made their final

decision.

On September 9, it became official. NRL had won stewardship of

the satellite program, which became known as Project Vanguard, and

NRL would never be the same.

The basic objectives were to build a satellite launching vehicle, get

one satellite into orbit, track it in orbit, verify its orbital path, and

accomplish one scientific experiment all before the end of the IGY.36

Recent analyses by historians of declassified documents from the

National Security Council reveal that the science-centered Project Vanguard was part of a hidden agenda for President Eisenhower and the

national security community. By launching a scientific satellite during the IGY, the U.S. would be able to establish a legal precedent by

which the jurisdiction of sovereign states over their own air space

would not extend to outer space. With a “freedom of space” definition established, it then would be quite legal to fly surveillance satellites directly over Soviet territory. For the topmost level of the U.S.

government, therefore, the Project Vanguard story was a cover.37

Even if the Project Vanguard scientists were being unwittingly used

in this way, the scientific opportunities they saw in satellites remained

as exciting as they possibly could get. “Recognizing that the project

was of a magnitude greater than that for which a division was geared

to handle and that the successful development of the project would

call for talents from many divisions in the Laboratory, the Director,

Capt. Tucker, and the Director of Research, Dr. Hulburt, decided to

form a group outside the division structure to carry out the project,”

recalled John Hagen, superintendent of the Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division (1950-1958) and Director of Project Vanguard.38 Life

magazine would later describe Hagen’s experience in Project Vanguard

as “one of the most trying ordeals ever imposed on an American scientist in the course of his work.”39
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 191

Hagen had three years to pull off the task, which required as much

administrative orchestration as technical innovation. The Vanguard

team organized into groups devoted to designing the rocket, designing the grapefruit-sized satellite, miniaturizing instruments and

telemetering equipment so they could fit into the satellite, and developing a global rocket and satellite tracking system. Scheduling, budgeting, and liaison with other parts of the Defense Department also

fell under the aegis of Hagen and the Vanguard team. Moreover, the

team had to work closely with the Glenn L. Martin Company, the

prime contractor on the Vanguard project, to build the launch vehicles. What’s more, the team had to secure and modify a part of the

Army’s missile launching site at Cape Canaveral so that it would be

suitable for Vanguard rockets.

“In the end, because the Air Force and Army claimed full occupation of launch facilities and since Vanguard had no military priority,

we were forced to build our own hangar, blockhouse, and launch

stand,” Hagen recounted.40 “All the while, the Scientific Program group

worked with the committee for the IGY of the National Academy of

Sciences to select a series of experiments from scientists around the

country and then to work with those scientists in preparing the experiments so that they would stand the rigors of launching and flight”.41

It was a non-stop orchestration of thousands of people distributed

across the country working on scores of projects at a cost of millions

of dollars.

The first blow came early after NRL had signed a letter of intent

with the Glenn L. Martin Company. Unknown to NRL, the company

previously had also been selected as the prime contractor for a toppriority Air Force project to develop the Titan, a second-generation

intercontinental ballistic missile. Many of the Martin engineers who

had worked on NRL’s Viking rockets were now assigned to the Titan

project. That left Vanguard with a less experienced Martin crew.

Although, the Martin company was responsible for the overall

rocket system, many other companies supplied components. The firststage engines and pumps came from General Electric. The Aerojet-
192 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

General Company was contracted to supply the second-stage rockets

incorporating a guidance packet supplied by the Minneapolis

Honeywell Company. The third stage had its own set of contractors.

The plan was to build up to a satellite launch with a set of six test

vehicles, designated TV-0 through TV-5. The first two would use up

the two leftover Viking rockets and test out new telemetry as well as

the new third stage. TV-2 would be the first test of the newly designed

first stage, which essentially was a Viking with a more powerful engine. TV-3 would be the first full test of the three-stage design. Assuming enough information about rocket performance had been gleaned

from the prior tests, TV-4 would shed some of the testing instrumentation and telemetry, making way for TV-5, which would embody the

final launch vehicle including a dummy of the satellite. Following the

test vehicles would come seven satellite-launching vehicles or SLVs.

Roger Easton and John T. Mengel were responsible for getting the

tracking system ready. Easton and colleagues already had developed a

radio guidance system, the Minitrack System at White Sands, and this

became the basis for the Vanguard tracking system (and later for the

Global Positioning System by which anyone anywhere could establish their latitude, longitude, and altitude with astounding accuracy).

With a series of stations separated every 500 or 600 miles in a northsouth line from Blossom Point, Maryland, through the southern states,

and Central and South America all the way south to Chile, the researchers designed a “radio fence” that could track the satellite. Additional Minitrack stations went up in Australia and South Africa. The

prototype station at the Naval Electronics Laboratory (NEL) in San

Diego, which was not positioned to track Vanguard satellites, would

be among the first stations to verify that the Space Age had begun.

With launches going from the Florida coast and tracking stations

set up all over the world, the Vanguard team established a control

center at NRL with teletype connections to all relevant locations, which

included a link to the Vanguard Computing Center in Washington

equipped with an IBM 709 computer for orbital computations.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 193

Things were moving nicely along by the spring of 1957. By then,

the first two test launches, TV-O and TV-1, had demonstrated that a

third stage indeed could be ignited in the near vacuum of the upper

atmosphere. Nothing could be taken for granted in this fetal stage of

the Space Age.

Then, with TV-2 installed on launch pad on October 4, 1957, the

Vanguard team and the rest of the world heard a revelation that could

not have been more shocking. According to a Life magazine article

about Hagen’s rough ride as director of Project Vanguard, the morning started out for Hagen at an IGY meeting in Washington on missiles and rockets. At the meeting, Hagen had sought out Sergei

Poloskov, a Russian rocket expert. “Hagen asked if the U.S. would be

given time to change its radio tracking equipment should the Russians soon launch a satellite,” the article reported. “Poloskov smiled

and said plenty of notice would be given.”42

That evening, Hagen skipped an evening cocktail party at the Russian embassy and returned to his home in Arlington, Virginia. There

his 16-year-old son Peter relayed news that had just been called in on

the phone: the Russians had launched a satellite—Sputnik I. Hagen

was stunned.

Herbert Friedman recalls the immediate aftermath:

“Public reaction was initially mild, reflecting President

Eisenhower’s comment that ‘it does not raise my apprehension

one iota about national security.’ The numbness wore off quickly,

and public figures began to decry the shameful situation with the

usual accusations of administration penny-pinching, shortsightedness, lack of vision, and general stupidity. Truman blamed the

McCarthy era for having deprived America of its best brains. By

implication the Vanguard team was a bunch of second-raters.

The Senate Preparedness Committee chaired by Lyndon Johnson

immediately began an inquiry into the status of U.S. rocket and

satellite programs.”43

Scooped, Hagen and the Vanguard team had to push on. They

successfully launched TV-2 on October 23, 1957. It carried a two-ton
194 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

payload to an altitude of 109 miles before coming back to Earth 335

miles downrange. Two weeks later, the Soviets launched Sputnik II

and its canine passenger Laika.

The launch of the Sputniks may have raised blood pressures at

NRL to record levels, but an unfortunate miscommunication following a White House briefing by Hagen and several colleagues on Project

Vanguard would raise pressure to the bursting point. Hagen recalled

what happened: “ . . . we briefed President Eisenhower, giving him a

very factual report of our standing and telling him that we had planned

in December to launch the first full-fledged test vehicle in the Vanguard program, emphasizing it was only a test vehicle which had a

very remote bonus—a satellite. This was the TV-3, the first attempted

launching of a complete Vanguard vehicle with all three live stages, as

well as the first flight of the second stage.”44

Although TV-3 always had been planned as an engineering test

whose outcome would build into the real thing, perceptions that it

actually was the real thing were about to get way out of hand. On

November 11, 1957, shortly after the briefing, James Hagerty,

Eisenhower’s press secretary, released a statement saying that Project

Vanguard would launch a satellite in the near future. “In other words,”

Hagen said, “our first live three-stage launching was billed as a satellite launching success in advance and committed us to a public deadline with an untried vehicle.”45 Once released, there was no stopping

the media frenzy. No matter what the rocket scientists might think,

the U.S. citizenry was convinced that NRL would launch the U.S. answer to Sputnik at the very next Cape Canaveral firing on December 6.

With the world watching, and after several tension-amplifying

weather delays, the countdown went to zero. Again, Friedman recalls

the moment:

“When the rocket flame ignited on December 6, the vehicle rose

only a little over a meter and faltered. As it fell back, the fuel

tanks ruptured and the rocket rumpled to the ground enveloped in

hellish flames and billowing smoke. From the top of the three-
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 195

stage rocket the silvery 6-inch satellite plummeted 25 meters

through the flames and bounced on the concrete deck. There our

wounded bird, its antenna badly bent, radiated a futile signal at

108 megahertz.”46 [Roger Easton later retrieved the satellite and

brought it home, where he kept it in a closet.]47

Amidst all of the subsequent report writing and public humiliation, Hagen and his team still had a test schedule to complete. But

there would be no mercy. On January 22, a series of delays scrubbed

the scheduled flight of America’s second attempt to answer the Sputniks. The ridicule was brutal. “The Soviet delegation to the United

Nations jokingly offered to include us in the USSR program of technical assistance to developing nations,” Friedman recalls.48 The joke

at the Pentagon was a new Navy salute—a hand clasped to the forehead.49

Stuck plugs and a leaky fuel system on subsequent days prolonged

the delay. That’s when Wernher von Braun and his rocket crew with

The world watched on

December 6, 1957 when

this, the first firing of the

complete three-stage

Vanguard Program rocket

burst into flames just two

months after the Soviet

Union had successfully

launched its first Sputnik

satellite.
196 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, whose top priority mission had been

the development of intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic

missiles, received authorization to launch their satellite-tipped Jupiter C. On the night of January 31, the Army’s Explorer I satellite indeed had begun circling the Earth, a fact all too clear to the Navy men

tracking its orbit with the Minitrack system they had built specifically

for tracking Vanguard satellites. In the end, it was the Army, not the

Navy, that Americans would remember as meeting the Soviets in the

space race.

Hagen’s ordeal was not yet complete. After several more delays in

early February, another satellite-tipped Vanguard rocket finally lifted

off but it broke up after reaching a little more than four miles. On

March 8, the next launch attempt, a plug involved in the fuel pressurization process failed to come free. The luck of the Irish finally came

Hagen’s way at 7:15 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. This Vanguard rocket soared upward to deliver its 31⁄2 pound satellite, which

Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev had dubbed “the grapefruit,” into orbit.

Although Project Vanguard suffered every PR calamity in the book,

it was an astounding achievement in rocketry from an engineering

point of view. In just 21⁄2 years, a new rocket system and satellite had

gone from an all-paper design stage to a successfully launched satellite. The legacy of the project’s rocket designs would trace through

several NASA and Air Force vehicles including the Delta booster, which

would bring the United States into the era of manned space flight.

Moreover, the Minitrack system would become the basis of all satellite tracking, including the advanced and comprehensive space surveillance system code named SPASUR.50 With SPASUR, the U.S. could

detect unannounced launchings of satellites by foreign nations.

In addition to these engineering and surveillance developments,

the Vanguard I satellite yielded a modicum of new scientific information. Among them were more data about the subtly nonspherical shape

of the Earth and the periodic variations in the density of the upper

atmosphere.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 197

To Hagen, none of these were the most important outcome. “The

greatest achievement of Project Vanguard,” he opined, “ . . . was the

development of a group of dedicated and talented scientists and engineers who came to understand thoroughly, perhaps the hard way,

the overall complexities of the space programs.”51 Indeed this legacy

of human talent, expertise, and ambition would have lasting effects

both within and without NRL.

The first major ripple began swelling into a major new wave of

the Space Age just weeks after Vanguard I went into orbit when President Eisenhower set into motion a series of actions that led to the

creation of the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. By then, there were pockets of rocket

expertise at NRL, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency that had put Explorer 1 into orbit, the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories,

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and several other places. Among

these, however, NRL supplied the largest portion of NASA’s initial

technical staff.

“It was a foregone conclusion that NRL’s Vanguard group—150

strong—were to become part of NASA, as they did on November 16,

Model of the satellite,

known as “the grapefruit,”

that NRL successfully

launched into orbit on

March 17, 1958
198 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

1958,” according to one of NASA’s own accounts of its early history.52

“As it turned out, NRL also provided the great bulk of NASA’s sounding rocket know-how when, on December 28, 1958, John Townsend,

Jr., transferred to NASA, as did 46 NRL scientists and engineers in the

Rocket Sonde Research Branch that began with Ernst Krause’s vision

in 1946. So about 200 NRLers became part of NASA’s initial staff.

This large contingent of NRL researchers became the professional

nucleus of NASA’s Beltsville Space Center, the NASA facility in suburban Maryland just north of Washington that would become the center of NASA’s unmanned space programs. When the Beltsville Space

Center was renamed the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1959, former

NRL staff held many top management positions as well as comprising the bulk of the Center’s talent in sounding rocket science and

technology. Moreover, a cadre of the pioneers and leaders of NRL’s

rocket research and design effort—including Homer Newell, Milton

Rosen, and John Hagen—also took over high level positions at NASA’s

headquarters in downtown Washington, DC. It is no exaggeration to

say that these men and their many NRL colleagues who worked on

the rockets from the V-2 days onward through the Viking and Vanguard programs are among that group of people responsible for the

advent of the Space Age.53

Even after the great exodus of rocket expertise from NRL to NASA,

some very powerful roots were left behind. A small remaining contingent of these rocket scientists immediately began regrowing. One of

them was Marty Votaw. “He thought that the Navy should stay in

space,” recounts Peter Wilhelm, who began working for Votaw in late

1959 in the newly formed Satellite Techniques Branch.54 Wilhelm grew

up in Yonkers, New York, earned a degree in Electrical Engineering

from Purdue University, and worked on classified submarine electronic development at a Chicago engineering firm before joining NRL.

“Votaw convinced people that staying in space was important and

that the Navy shouldn’t get out of the business,” Wilhelm recalls.55

After Votaw first convinced the NRL Director of Research Robert Page

and other decision makers to reestablish a small satellite group, Votaw
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 199

scrounged up $100,000 to get the new branch off the ground. “There

was still some residual hardware around that NASA had not scoffed

up,” recalls Wilhelm.56 A junior member of the branch, Wilhelm’s

first task was to build radio frequency transmitters for Solrad I, NRL’s

first post-Vanguard satellite, whose mission was to measure solar radiation, a research goal snugly linked to Taylor’s and Hulburt’s ionospheric studies in the 1920s. Besides Votaw and Wilhelm, who now

directs NRL’s Naval Center for Space Technology, there were a handful of others in the new branch that comprised NRL’s own post-Vanguard seed in the field of satellite engineering.

The first project of NRL’s regenerating space science group—Solrad

I—proved to be a good omen. The satellite’s name is a contraction of

the phrase “solar radiation.” Solrad I was larger than the grapefruitsized Vanguard satellite, but not by much. Like fraternal twins in a

womb, the NRL satellite and a navigation satellite called Transit (built

by the Applied Physics Laboratory affiliated with Johns Hopkins University) sat together in the tip of a Thor Abel rocket. On June 22, 1960,

the rocket shuttled Solrad I into orbit where for the next 10 months it

telemetered data about the Sun to NRL scientists. This achievement

was simultaneously a birth of satellite navigation, which NRL would

get into in the biggest way, and an optimistic rebirth for NRL’s solar

scientists.

This time, luck was abundantly on NRL’s side. Not only was the

launch a success, but the cosmos cooperated with Herbert Friedman

and his colleagues, who had built X-ray and ultraviolet detectors on

the hypothesis that solar X-rays were indeed responsible for radio

fadeouts. A rival idea was that Lyman-alpha emission from the Sun,

which is ultraviolet radiation, was to blame. With the two kinds of

detectors aboard Solrad I, the NRL scientists had the means of performing a critical test and hopefully settling the issue.

“Shortly after we went into orbit, only a few days later, there was a

major explosion on the Sun, a major event,” along with radio disturbances, Wilhelm recalls. “And what we saw from the satellite was a

huge increase in X-rays, but the Lyman-alpha emission was pretty much
200 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

constant. So that nailed it more precisely than before.”57 Friedman

was right. Solar X-rays delivered the energy driving ionospheric disturbances. An important question of solar physics had been answered.

Solrad I marked the beginning of an unending stream of satellite engineering advances and space science discoveries made by NRL researchers.

Solrad I was the first of 14 Solrad satellites whose collective mission was to characterize the Sun’s radiation reaching the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The failed launch of Solrad II was a sobering reminder that space science would be no cakewalk. The next launch

three months later had mixed results. Aboard a Thor-Able-Star rocket

was the first Low Frequency Trans-Ionospheric satellite (LOFTI I),

whose mission was to determine whether low-frequency radio waves

could penetrate the ionosphere well enough to be used to communicate with submerged submarines. Unfortunately, the satellite failed

to separate from another satellite on which it was riding piggyback.

Despite that snafu, LOFTI I collected data for 36 days before falling

into the upper atmosphere and disintegrating. Moreover, the mission

answered the question it was designed to answer: the ionosphere was

too disruptive to allow for reliable submarine communications with

circuits that go through the ionosphere. Data like that would move

Navy decision makers to build enormous, land-based, low-frequency

antennae.

The next launch suffered a similar fate: the satellite failed to separate. The next two launches failed completely. Though the fact offered

little solace, no one else in the young rocket business was doing much

better. There is no shortage of film clips from these early years showing rockets blowing up on launch pads or going astray soon after

launch. In the rocket business, one must crash before one flies, a truism that was later transformed at NRL into the adage: “You can make

mistakes, just don’t launch them.”58

Finally, with NRL’s seventh post-Vanguard satellite launch, on

December 13, 1962, the road began to smooth out. This time, a ThorAgena rocket successfully carried a pair of classified satellites, a cali-
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 201

bration satellite for the ground-based Space Surveillance system

(SPASUR) and the tiny, 3 kilogram, Calsphere I satellite, whose role

was to help satellite trackers on the ground get better at identifying

specific objects in space. Since 1960, NRL has been involved in more

than 30 launches, collectively bearing more than 80 NRL-built satellites (see launch manifest on the next page).

Besides measuring solar radiation and calibrating satellite tracking

systems, NRL-made satellites have harvested massive amounts of basic

data that became crucial for subsequent satellite design and for overall

thinking about how the space environment can further the Navy’s mission and capabilities. Some satellites measured gravitational gradients

over the Earth, which is important for such things as the general design

of orbital trajectories for satellites. Some have monitored the thermal

effects on satellites and components of cyclic heating and cooling as

the spacecraft circle into and out of the Sun’s light. Still others have

investigated the propagation of various low- and high- frequency radio wavelengths through the ionosphere for space-based communication, the measurement of drag on satellites as a function of altitude,

and the placement of orbiting atomic clocks for submarine navigation

and position determination. In addition, many launches have carried

classified payloads.

So routine did NRL’s presence in space become, that it is now just

another bullet on the Laboratory’s curriculum vitae. Yet some accomplishments do stand out. One of them is commemorated in the main

hallway of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum in

Washington, DC. There, millions of visitors stop by a mock-up of Apollo

16’s landing module on a simulated Moon site. In front of this scene is

a duplicate of the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, which was

designed at NRL by engineer George Carruthers.

The real Far Ultraviolet Camera, whose golden surfaces still reflect

sunlight from the Moon, constituted the first and only lunar observatory. Once it was set up on the surface of the Moon by the Apollo 16

crew—a perch where there was no UV-absorbing atmosphere as on

Earth—the camera snapped 178 pictures of the ultraviolet light from
202 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Manifest of NRL space launches spanning from 1960 to the late 1990s
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 203

the Earth, cosmic gas clouds, and star clusters. What magnifies

Carruthers’ accomplishment, which stands high merely by technical

criteria, is that he was a veritable Jackie Robinson in the world of astronomy when he worked on the project in the late 1960s. “Back in my

day, there really and truly was no African American role model in astronomy that I could look to,” Carruthers recalls.59 Now he has become one.

Another highlight was entered in NRL’s space science resume during the following decade when John-David Bartoe60 and Diane Prinz

were chosen as payload specialists in NASA’s Space Shuttle Program.

The two NRL scientists underwent extensive astronaut training, including rides on specialized 707 aircraft whose roller-coaster-like flight paths

provided nauseating, 20-second snippets of weightlessness.61 On July

29, 1985, Bartoe and the rest of the crew of the Challenger soared into

space.

Aboard were two NRL-made instruments—the High Resolution

Telescope and Spectrograph (HRTS) and the Solar Ultraviolet Spectral

Irradiance Monitor (SUSIM). The HRTS was designed to observe the

high energy physics going on just above the disk of the Sun within the

solar corona. The SUSIM instrument’s charge was to observe that range

of solar UV radiation that is the main source of energy driving the dynamics of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Bartoe ended his once-in-a-lifetime orbital adventure on

August 6th when he returned to Earth with the HRTS and SUSIM instruments and a rich cache of new data that have become important in the

ongoing quest to understand the complex physics occurring within,

on, and above the Sun, as well as the solar-driven phenomena in the

Earth’s upper atmosphere. Upon Bartoe’s glorious return, Diane Prinz,

who served as science program manager on the ground during the mission, was looking forward to her own turn on a subsequent shuttle

mission. But those plans evaporated in the aftermath of the disaster in

1986 in which the same shuttle Bartoe flew on—the Challenger—exploded soon after launch, killing the seven astronauts aboard.
204 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Even before the tragedy, however, the pace of space science and

satellite building at NRL had slowed. After an earlier rocket failure in

late 1980, the pace of satellite launches for NRL diminished to one

every three to four years, except in 1990 when NRL launched two

satellites. Part of the slowdown was due to the shift in national emphasis from expendable rocket launches to the Space Shuttle concept

involving reusable rocket components. The explosion of the Challenger only exacerbated the trend of increasing the intervals between

launches.

A good part of the slowdown, however, was a natural consequence

of the spiraling cost and complexity of each space mission. For most

of the satellite-building community, each new project involved more

people, more organizations, more parts, more sophistication, and

An Apollo 16 astronaut faces the Far-Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph

that NRL scientist George Carruthers designed.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 205

more management to integrate it all. With so much material, financial, human, and emotional resources sitting atop tons and tons of

rocket fuel—a situation in which the risk of failure would never become negligible—each project took far more time to become ready

for launch.

Because NRL’s satellite engineering budget had always been in the

minor league compared to NASA’s, NRL’s satellite engineers never had

the option of adopting the bigger, more expensive trend in spacecraft

design, according to Wilhelm. So when Daniel Goldin, director of

NASA, publicly announced that his civilian space agency was taking

on a new philosophy of “smaller, better, cheaper,” there was a familiar ring to it at NRL.

Most emblematic of this design philosophy was the successful

1994 launch of the Deep Space Program Science Experiment, more

familiarly known as Clementine.

62 The purpose of the mission, which

was funded under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its subsequent incarnation as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

(BMDO), was to test new lightweight sensors, imaging technologies,

and other components and to see if a spacecraft could home in on a

distant target, in this case an asteroid. As an experienced satellite engineering facility within the military establishment with a track record

for successful, on-budget launches, NRL’s Naval Center for Space Technology became a natural darling of SDI.

A mere 22 months after Lt. Col. P. Rustan of the Strategic Defense

Initiative Organization asked NRL to come up with the details for a

mission, Clementine was on its way on a mission with both military

and scientific goals. The military goal, now under the auspices of

BMDO, was to see how well an inexpensive, quickly engineered spacecraft might use new generations of sensors, communications technologies, and other equipment to zero in on and observe space-based

objects, in this case, the Moon, the Earth, and an asteroid. The scientific payoff would be the most detailed study of the Moon ever, including a comprehensive mapping of the Moon using nearly a dozen
206 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

electromagnetic bands. The planners knew that the resulting data

would comprise an enormous database about the Moon’s topography, geology, mineralogy, and geophysics.

Besides BMDO and NRL, the Clementine team also included NASA

(for its Deep Space Network for satellite tracking), the Lawrence

Livermore National Laboratory (for the cameras), the Air Force (largely

for carrying out the launch), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (for the

asteroid encounter), and nearly 50 private companies.

NRL began receiving funding for Clementine in March 1992. On

December 30, 1993, the satellite was shipped to the Vandenberg Air

Force Base in California. There a team of engineers placed Clementine

aboard a Titan II rocket. On January 25, 1994, the rocket soared into

space. Within three months, Clementine already had completed an

unprecedented mapping of the moon, including its dark side. That

The Clementine Mission not only imaged the Moon

in unprecedented detail, but it also found signs of water

(as ice) in the Moon’s south polar region (shown above).
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 207

done, mission control engineers fired thrusters on Clementine so that

it would leave lunar orbit and head off to a near-Earth asteroid. Unfortunately, a software glitch caused the spacecraft to fire virtually all

of its thruster fuel. In addition to setting the spacecraft into a dizzying

spin, the loss of the thruster wiped away any chance of achieving the

second goal of the mission—intercepting and mapping an asteroid.

Although hopes spiked in February 1995 when engineers were able

to recontact the spacecraft and communicate with onboard computers, they still were unable to salvage the asteroid mission.

Disappointing as that was, the Clementine mission became an instant classic. It was widely acclaimed in the media as a breakthrough

demonstration of how space projects would be done in the future.

Even President Bill Clinton went on record about the mission’s success. A year after the Moon data started pouring into NRL’s makeshift

mission control in an unassuming rented brick building in Arlington, Virginia, Clinton stated that “The relatively inexpensive, rapidlybuilt spacecraft constituted a major revolution in spacecraft management and design; it also contributed significantly to lunar studies by

photographing 1.8 million images of the surface of the moon.”63

According to Paul Regeon and NRL colleagues who worked on

Clementine, the multispectral imaging of the moon stands out as the

mission’s most important result. Moreover, data indicated that the

massive Aitken Basin at the Moon’s South Pole is the deepest basin in

the solar system, reaching some eight times deeper than the Grand

Canyon.

One of the most tantalizing results from observations of this sunshielded basin was the then unconfirmed hint of the presence of ice

based on reflections of radio frequency energy emerging from the

basin. That is an exciting finding because the presence of water of any

kind on the Moon opens the possibility that the Moon may have

harbored life at one time. Moreover, if water is available on the Moon,

the futuristic vision of building manned bases on the Moon becomes

that much more realistic.
208 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Soon before this book went to press, the planetary science community received additional evidence of the presence of water on the

Moon. Measurements of the Moon’s surface by instruments on the

Lunar Prospector, which NASA launched on January 6, 1998, confirmed the presence of ice not only in the Aitken Basin where

Clementine first had found signs of water, but also in craters on the

Moon’s north pole.

One of NRL’s proudest and most celebrated roles in the space science and technology arena already is having far ranging consequences

in both the military and civilian realms. It began in the mid-1950s

with a seemingly ancillary part of Project Vanguard. Yet this ancillary

project proved to be the seed of today’s most sophisticated navigational system—the Global Positioning System (GPS).64

The rocket and its satellite payload were the most obvious components of Project Vanguard. But to confirm that a launched satellite

actually had begun orbiting the Earth, it was critical to be able to track

the satellite and plot its trajectory. For that, Roger Easton and colleagues at NRL proposed, designed, and built the Minitrack system.

Centered on several ground stations along the satellite’s expected flightpath, the system detected and precisely timed signals emanating from

the satellite’s radio transmitter. The slight differences in the time that

signals would be received at the different ground stations provided

the key for calculating the satellite’s position, altitude, and velocity.

The Minitrack system also could detect and track quiet satellites

that emitted no signals so long as radar signals could be bounced off

the satellites to receivers on the ground. The ability to detect satellites

passively became the technical basis of the Naval Space Surveillance

System (NAVSPASUR), which became operational in 1961 and remains

an active part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command

(NORAD).

Easton says he realized soon after conceiving of the Minitrack system that satellites carrying ultraprecise clocks, which could transmit

navigational signals synchronized to a master clock, would enable

anyone receiving those signals on the ground to calculate their own
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 209

locations at sea, on the ground, or in the air. The concept of using

satellites for location-finding and navigation on Earth was the logical

flip side of the concept of using Earth-based radar to track satellites.

There were additional calls in the 1950s for better navigational

tools. When nuclear submarines carrying nuclear-tipped Polaris missiles became a central pillar of U.S. military strategy, the problem of

accurate, rapid navigation at sea took on new and awesome proportions. Since a submarine’s on-board inertial navigation system could

not avoid drifting during long deployments, the submarine needed

to surface from time to time to reestablish bearings, say, by tracking

stars from a deck-mounted instrument. Only with such recalibrations

of its on-board navigational system could a submarine commander

establish where in the world he was with enough accuracy to confidently program the trajectory of his missiles in the woeful event that

World War III broke out. To tell a missile where to go, you have to tell

the missile where it is starting from.

With so much strategic value concentrated into the new classes of

submarines beginning in the late 1950s, the need for ever better and

A series of surveillance transmitting antennae like this one at Lake Kickapoo,

Texas, comprised a surveillance system developed by NRL to detect unannounced radio-silent satellites passing over the United States.
210 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

faster navigational technologies became paramount. Since this was a

time when satellites were getting launched with increasing regularity,

it is no surprise that Navy researchers began to think about satellites

as an answer to the new navigational demands. In 1968, the Joint

Chiefs of Staff made the push for new location-finding systems official by stipulating requirements for a system capable of precisely locating military forces wherever in the world they might be. Satellites

eventually would provide the solution.

The Navy’s first foray into using navigation began in the late 1950s

at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, just

as Soviet rocket scientists and their counterparts in the Navy and Army

were putting the world’s first artificial moons into orbit. The project

was known as Transit, or more verbosely as the Navy Navigation Satellite System.

The Transit satellites did in fact provide submarines with the capability of determining their locations in about twenty minutes rather

than the hours it would take by more conventional means such as

star-tracking or radiolocation techniques relying on several transmitters. A submarine made a positional fix by surfacing and receiving a

sequence of precisely timed transmissions from a Transit satellite passing overhead. This procedure enabled navigators to accurately calculate the satellite’s location, thereby transforming the satellite into the

equivalent of a fixed star by which navigators have plotted their locations for centuries. With appropriate corrections for the motion of

the Navy vessel during the series of receptions from the satellites, navigators on the vessel could get a fix on their own position faster than

ever before. The Transit system became operational in 1963.

The Timation (derived from the words time and navigation) program, the next generation of navigation satellites, began the following year at NRL. The technical backbone of the Timation satellites

was ultraprecise spaceborne clocks, which could govern the emission

of ranging signals that receivers on the ground could time with clocks

synchronized with the satellite’s clocks. Ranging signals from several
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 211

satellites then could be picked up by a navigational receiver in which

the necessary calculations and corrections could be made to pinpoint

the receivers’ location on Earth. NRL scientists quickly began to adapt

a quartz-based oscillator (the heart of the clock) for service in space

as well as determining the most efficient constellation of satellites for

providing worldwide coverage.

According to Easton, one of the early experiments to test the technique of determining locations passively took place in October 1964

along the brand new route 295 that runs along the bottom of the

District of Columbia and links into the Capitol Beltway at the East

end of the Wilson Bridge. “That was where we ran a car down 295

with a pseudo Timation transmitter in it, and we received signals back

in Building 58,” Easton later recalled.65

Almost three years later, on May 31, 1967, the first Timation satellite went into orbit. It demonstrated that a surface vessel could determine its position within two-tenths of a nautical mile using the timesynchronized signals from a satellite. Easton could not have predicted

what future the first Timation satellite would harbor. Indeed, it would

evolve into the powerful and much applauded navigational tool now

known as the Global Positioning System (GPS).

Timation I entered a polar orbit at an altitude of 500 miles.

Throughout the rest of the year and into the next, the satellite underwent various tests, including navigational experiments using boats,

aircraft, and trucks. Timation II went up in September 1969 with what

was hoped to be an improved quartz oscillator. It actually performed

less well than the clock on Timation I because it was more sensitive to

radiation effects in orbit.

Timation III, which at launch was renamed as Navigation Technology Satellite One, went up in 1974. It was a testbed for the first

space-based atomic clocks. These were supplied by a Munich-based

company, Efratom, and then modified for rocket flight and orbital

service. The satellite also included an experimental transmitter, known

as the 621B project, built by the Air Force as part of a military-wide
212 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

coordination of navigation projects. NRL’s Timation Project and the

Air Force’s Project 621B became the germs for the NAVSTAR Global

Positioning System, which is known in short as GPS.

First conceived of behind closed doors at the Pentagon in 1973,

the 24-satellite Global Positioning System was completed in 1993.

Interestingly, one of its technical roots goes at least as far back to the

mid-1940s when researchers including Alan Berman’s Nobel-Prizewinning graduate advisor at Columbia University, Isidor Isaac Rabi,

floated the idea that an atom’s supremely high-frequency oscillations

could serve as the basis for ultra-accurate clocks. Good clocks have

been at the heart of good navigation for centuries.

The Air Force was chosen to administer the entire project. One of

NRL’s primary responsibilities was to move the development of spacequalified atomic clocks forward. This involved NRL researchers as well

as those at a number of companies working on a contractual basis.

Aboard Timation II , for example, were the first prototypes of cesiumbased atomic clocks, which, in principle, could provide satellites with

clocks of unprecedented accuracy and stability.

Roger Easton was NRL’s primary contributor and visionary associated with the GPS. He not only helped conceive of the overall system of satellites, but oversaw the design, testing, and validation of the

rubidium and cesium-based atomic clocks without which the system’s

accuracy and almost miraculous location-finding abilities would have

been impossible.

With the major decisions about the system made by the mid-1970s,

the last thing to do was to get the system up and running. Satellites,

atomic clocks, rockets, and a thousand and one details all had to be

worked out, integrated and put in their respective places. The system

designed included 24, car-sized Navstar satellites, each weighing nearly

a ton, and to be built by Rockwell International. Engineers worked

out an orbital geometry such that anybody with a GPS receiver anywhere on the planet would be in contact at any time with at least four

satellites. The multiple links are crucial for the speed and accuracy of

the navigational calculations.
chapter 8 – turning vengeance weapons into a space age ♦ 213

The first operational Navstar satellite went up in 1978; by 1993,

the full complement of 24 satellites was in place. The Global Positioning System has become a major navigational technology crucial

for military operations, but now also used in the commercial and

private arenas for things as varied as fishing and wilderness hiking.

 The CNN-reported Gulf War provided the most striking publicly

revealed military application of GPS to date. Who can forget General

Schwarzkopf’s almost gleeful press briefings on the pinpoint accuracy sometimes achieved by America’s newest smart weapons? At the

very beginning of the offensive, the GPS guided cruise missiles from

Navy ships hundreds of miles in the Persian Gulf directly into Iraqi

defense radar antennae. And the great sweep of armored forces across

the trackless desert was possible only because of GPS instruments on

tanks, artillery, and logistics vehicles.

From there, the GPS has been present in the military in many

ways everyday. Perhaps the most dramatic use of GPS took place on

June 6, 1995. At 2:08 in the morning, downed American F-16 pilot

Captain Scott F. O’Grady finally risked radio communication as his

comrades flew over the Serb-controlled territory he had been hiding

out in ever since his own plane had been shot down four days earlier.

Using a GPS receiver hidden inside his life vest, O’Grady was able to

determine his own longitude, latitude, and altitude (although he was

on the ground) to within a few hundred feet. With that intelligence, a

Tactical Recovery of Aircraft Personnel (TRAP) team of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was able to extract O’Grady from behind enemy lines a mere four hours after F-16 flyers first picked up their

comrade’s distress call.66

While GPS’s most sophisticated abilities remain within the military domain, its publicly available features have been put to use in all

kinds of ways. Trucking companies track their fleets and plan routes

using GPS, as do sea-based shipping companies. Now anyone who

wants to buy one can carry an inexpensive GPS receiver. Civilian pilots, airline pilots, cartographers, construction engineers, road builders, telecommunications companies and even high-end automobile
214 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

sellers have put GPS to use. All of that in only three years since the full

system has been up and running.

In 1992, the National Aeronautics Association (NAA) recognized

the principals of the GPS development team—NRL, the U.S. Air Force,

Aerospace Corporation, Rockwell International Corporation, and IBM

Federal Systems Company—by awarding them its 1992 Robert J.

Collier Trophy. This award is presented annually, in NAA’s words, “for

the greatest achievement in aeronautics in America, with respect to

improving the performance, efficiency, or safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year.”67 The NAA cited the GPS team for

“the most significant development for safe and efficient navigation

and surveillance of air and spacecraft since the introduction of radio

navigation 50 years ago.” NRL’s copy of the Collier Trophy has been

strategically located for maximum visibility in the lobby of Building

43.

Clementine and the Global Positioning System happen to be triumphs with unclassified components that can be included in this

book. However, most of NRL’s satellite science and engineering story

cannot yet be told publicly because much of that story involves classified projects. What can be said is that NRL so far has built over 80

communications, navigation, and others kinds of satellites for the

Navy and other customers in the Defense and Intelligence communities. As such, NRL has played a major role in the emergence of space

technology over the past 40 years. The motto of the Naval Center for

Space Technology, the present incarnation of NRL’s satellite engineering crew, remains as gung-ho as ever: “To Fly What Has Never Been

Flown Before.”68
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 215

C h a p t e r 9

NRL, Nuclear Fallout,

and the Cold War

215

Just as NRL found itself after World War II in the spectacular birth

pangs of the Space Age, it also found itself with the kind of expertise

badly needed as the nascent Nuclear Age collided with ominous postwar geopolitical developments. Even before the dust of World War II

had settled so that the world could grasp the tragedy, the global political environment began to cool down to what became known as

the Cold War. Not only would NRL feel the breezes of the nascent

Cold War, but it also would become a central player in the emerging

high-technology era, and the ultimate stakes that came to characterize the Cold War.

Indeed, the Cold War was beginning even as the Army snatched

up the bulk of Germany’s V-2 program at the secret Baltic coast site of

Peenemunde in 1945. When the Army left with the rocket parts and a

cadre of German rocket scientists including Werhner von Braun, Soviet occupational forces were in the process of taking over the region

by international agreement. After the Soviet Union recovered land it

had lost to Germany, Poland, Finland, and Japan, it went further, forcing Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary to hand over territory

that never had been part of the Soviet Union. Moreover, wherever its

forces were in occupation, repressive Communist governments and

closed societies were put into place.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” is how Winston Churchill
216 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

would famously assess the situation in a speech at Fulton, Missouri

in 1946.1

The Testing Begins

Nothing could be more emblematic of NRL’s immediate linkage

to this worrisome new world order than its role in the United States’

nuclear weapons testing program that began with Operation Crossroads at the Bikini Atoll in July 1946. Following the detonation of a

test bomb by the Manhattan Project and the bombs dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs detonated during Operation

Crossroads were the world’s fourth and fifth nuclear detonations—

one above Bikini and the other in shallow water.

The primary goal of the detonations was to see what happens to

military equipment, including naval ships at sea, when confronted

by a nuclear blast and its aftermath. Nuclear weapons were a curious

technology; although their blasts were entirely man-made phenomena, they were poorly understood from a scientific viewpoint. In a

sense, nuclear detonations provided physicists with awesome novel

objects in the universe replete with all manners of interesting thermal, optical, electromagnetic, mechanical, and other effects. From the

perspective of NRL’s academically minded scientists working under a

As part of Operation

Crossroads, this underwater detonation of

a nuclear device on

July 25, 1946 at Bikini

Atoll sent a tower of

water and debris

skyward.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 217

military research laboratory’s roof, nuclear blasts were almost like having suns to study on Earth. Nuclear blasts were scientifically enticing.

The Manhattan Project yielded not only bombs; it also yielded

thousands of scientists and engineers well-versed in the ways of nuclear

reactions and their emanations. So much of the expertise that was

required to scientifically observe and measure the behavior of nuclear

blasts came from this wartime community. Although NRL was largely

excluded from the Manhattan Project, at least partly due to Admiral

Bowen’s antagonistic relationships with Vannevar Bush and his Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Laboratory’s visionaries, like Bowen and Ross Gunn, made sure they and their colleagues

kept their toes in the nuclear waters. Indeed, Gunn and Phil Abelson

drew up a set of engineering plans for a nuclear submarine in 19462

,

years before the quest for nuclear propulsion became Rickover’s own.

With Operation Crossroads, the Laboratory went in deeper, taking

the equivalent of a full-body dive into those nuclear waters. This is

evident from NRL’s supplying 75 of the 450 personnel involved in

the electronics-related measurements at Bikini.3

E.O. Hulburt and John Sanderson of the Optics Division and Ernst

Krause of the Rocket Sonde Research Section had organized and led

the overall NRL weapons testing program. This was an exciting time,

filled with career-changing decisions for many NRL researchers. About

ten percent of the Laboratory’s technical forces would become entangled in the 12-year stint of above-ground nuclear weapons testing.

The primary goal of Operation Crossroads for the NRL team was to

measure the total optical energy emitted by the blasts as well as to

photograph the spectra4

 so as to gather diagnostic data about the

nuclear phenomena occurring during the blasts.

After Crossroads came nuclear testing projects with equally cryptic names: Sandstone, then Greenhouse, Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Ivy, Upshot-Knothole, Castle, Teapot, Redwing, Plumbob, and

finally, in 1958, Hardtack. That was just months after the Soviet Union

put Sputnik into orbit, thereby fanning fears about a new ability to

deliver nuclear warheads from intercontinental ballistic missiles.
218 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Hundreds of NRL scientists at all levels participated in these many

tests, at which they made various and ever more sophisticated measurements. Louis Franklin Drummeter, Jr., a new NRL hire in 1948,

would be among the most thickly involved. Drummeter, then 27 and

a former plumber with a PhD in optics, had heard about NRL from a

Johns Hopkins University classmate, Harold S. Stewart, who was on

study leave from NRL where he was head of the Radiometry Branch.

That connection led to an offer for a $20 per day job by John

Sanderson, then acting associate superintendent of the Optics Division. Viewing the job initially as a stop gap before landing a university position, Drummeter took the job and then spent his entire professional life at NRL, eventually becoming the Associate Superintendent of the Optical Sciences Division before retiring in 1982 as the

Acting Associate Superintendent of Research for Electronic Science

and Technology.5 Even now, 16 years after retiring from NRL,

Drummeter remains connected to the Laboratory as a consultant.

After first applying his know-how in infrared detection to the problem of detecting exhaust trails of a submarine’s snorkel, Drummeter

During Operation Ivy, researchers went to great extremes to make

measurements of the bomb’s radiation outputs. Shown is a plywood

tunnel harboring evacuated tubing that conducted signals from the

bomb to measuring instruments located two miles away.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 219

became the assistant head of the Radiometry Branch in 1949 where

he would begin a long-term and intimate relationship with nuclear

blasts. Beginning in 1951 with Operation Greenhouse, he would witness 20 nuclear blasts through 1955. Along the way, he and NRL colleagues had to develop techniques and equipment for making detailed and often exquisitely rapid measurements of all kinds of radiation. Drummeter points out that Stewart was the key architect of the

optical measurements, which included designing specialized instruments.

These measurements often were unprecedented in the need to

snatch radiometric and optical measurements in the millionths of a

second between the detonation of a bomb and the consumption of

the measuring instrument in the bomb’s obliterating wake. To carry

out some of these measurements, NRL’s shop workers constructed

evacuated tubing that could conduct signals from the bomb to measuring instruments far enough away that they could survive the blast.

“At the time, the design and construction of such vacuum systems

was a large and major engineering undertaking in itself,” Drummeter

recalls.6

 Some of these optical measurements were fundamental to

the design of the first generation of thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs), according to Jack Brown, a retired NRL research manager who has played many roles in the development of nuclear weapons.7

 In Operation Buster-Jangle, Drummeter and coworkers measured

the spectrum of so-called Teller Light, which the famed Manhattan

Project nuclear scientist and champion of the hydrogen bomb had

predicted would exist following a nuclear detonation. Teller Light, an

emission of X-rays from atmospheric molecules stimulated by the

energy from the bomb blast, had been measured previously. But the

NRL work revealed the spectrum—or distribution of wavelengths—

of the Teller Light. The high-speed measurement technique needed to

take a snapshot of the short-lived Teller Light was crucial for determining both the size of the blast and the efficiency of the nuclear
220 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

reactions that occurred in the device’s core. The optics team also was

able to identify the molecules responsible for light emission.

There were plenty of moments of high drama during this era of

above-ground nuclear testing. Drummeter, one of the many NRL scientists who participated in the above-ground bomb testing program

in the 1940s and 1950s, recalls moments of mortal fear. On one occasion, he was so close to ground zero that he had to crane his neck as

far back as possible to watch the evolving mushroom cloud. And

Drummeter recalls one blast that he didn’t think he would return

from. “Something went wrong,” he recalls. “We were 25 miles away,

but it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.” And then, of course,

it stopped well before consuming him. He learned later that the blast

was about twice as big as it was expected to have been.8

By the end of his tenure as head of the Radiometry Branch,

Drummeter and his colleagues had produced scores of classified reports. “The work laid the foundation for all that is known about the

emission of thermal radiation from nuclear explosions in air,”

Drummeter says. “These data underlie all the effects data in handbooks and the prediction of thermal radiation from weapons of all

sizes.”9

 As such, NRL’s researchers contributed mightily to the development of at least some of the data on which was based the United

States’ nuclear warfare strategy.

Losing the Nuclear Monopoly

 The first years of nuclear weapons testing were performed when

the United States retained a monopoly on such weaponry. Yet everyone knew that the physics and engineering behind nuclear weapons

were open books, albeit ones with plots so complex that only the

most ambitious and clever readers would penetrate their meaning.

But sufficient ambition and cleverness were out there, especially in

the expansive Soviet Union. So it was just a matter of time before

other countries would break the American monopoly. When the

United States began its program of above-ground testing of nuclear
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 221

weapons in the Pacific, there was no way to know whether somebody

else was blowing up their own test weapons somewhere halfway

around the world.

In 1947, this hole in intelligence capability led Admiral Lewis

Strauss, a member of the newly formed civilian-based Atomic Energy

Commission, to start a process that by decade’s end would lead President Truman two years later to make the startling announcement that

the United States already had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The process began when Strauss was surprised to learn from Secretary of Defense James E. Forrestal that the United States had no

means for long-range detection of a Soviet detonation of an atomic

bomb. Strauss then pressed the Office of Naval Research, which in

turn looked to NRL to supply the detection means that Strauss so

sensibly wanted.10

After ruling out sound or seismic signals as the basis for detection

technologies (at least in the early years of the nuclear arms race), radiation effects became the

Laboratory’s focus. Herbert

Friedman, an expert in radiation detectors in the

Physical Optics Division,

joined the project. Among

the other key scientists were

Montgomery Johnson in the

newly inaugurated Nucleonics Division and Ernst

Krause of the one-year old

Rocket-Sonde Research

Branch.

Since the call for longrange detection came about

a year before the Project

Dr. Herbert Friedman in 1966 Sandstone nuclear blasts,
222 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

NRL scientists began working on several fronts so they would be ready

to put those blasts to use for the goal of developing long-range detection techniques. One of those fronts centered on special filter paper

from NRL’s chemical warfare protection work. The paper was adapted

to collect airborne particles over a period of days, after which the paper would be placed under a radiation counter. If the detector picked

up radiation, the likely cause would be a nuclear blast upwind. Johnson

favored another possible technique for long-range detection: lofting

Geiger counters with tethered balloons to a height of 20,000 feet where

they would be able to pick up gamma rays from the fission products

of a distant nuclear blast.

Friedman and his colleagues in the Optics and Chemistry Divisions went for the most sensitive technique—an array of seven gamma

ray detectors (Geiger tubes) so arranged to greatly reduce natural

gamma ray signals from natural, cosmic sources. Each detector was a

metal cylinder 2-feet long by 2-inches in diameter, filled with chlorine-neon gas and sealed with glass caps. NRL produced all of the

electronics for powering the detectors and making sense of the signals generated within them. One hundred of these detectors were secretly shipped from NRL to universities, Naval stations, and other

government stations all over North America from the Aleutian Islands

in Alaska to Panama as well as eastward out to Bermuda.

“Several well-known physicists maintained security by operating

the instruments from their own homes,” wrote Friedman, Irving H.

Blifford, and Luther Lockhart of NRL’s Chemistry Division, who also

became involved in the long-range detection project. “For example,

H. Victor Neher of Caltech wrestled a 400-pound unit into his attic

and the editor of the Physical Review, John Tate, had one in his back

yard.”11

The first test of all of this equipment came after the Sandstone

tests. Wrote Friedman, Blifford, and Lockhart: “ . . . filter paper collectors on the NRL dock on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, obtained positive responses at roughly the same time as the balloon-
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 223

borne Geiger counters at NRL’s Chesapeake Bay Annex and the gammaray detectors on the roof of NRL’s optics building responded.”12

An unexpected clue to a more sensitive test literally rained on

Friedman’s and Blifford’s gamma ray detectors in early 1948. After

observing a rise in the ambient gamma-ray activity when it rained,

the scientists put a 2-inch deep collection tray above the counters. As

the tray filled, the natural radioactivity rose sharply. The rain was

washing the radioactivity out of the sky and bringing it down into the

tray.

The question then became whether there was some way of concentrating the rain-carried radioactive fallout so that Friedman and

his detector experts could not only sense radioactivity when it is there

but also determine the chemical identities and half-lives of the radioactive material. This way, the data would provide a signature by which

the fallout could be associated with tests by specific countries. Friedman put the question to Peter King, superintendent of the Chemistry

Division.

King put Luther Lockhart onto the problem and he quickly found

the necessary technology at the Dalecarlia Reservoir in Washington,

DC. Called flocculation, the well-known technique called for the addition of small amounts of chemicals such as aluminum sulfate into

water. The additives then bind suspended silt and organic matter to

an extent that the resulting complexes settle out of solution and can

be collected for chemical analysis. King calculated that the technique,

when adapted for collecting radioactive particles from rainwater, could

concentrate radioactivity in samples by factors of 10,000,000 or so,

making the technique sensitive to even small amounts of fallout.

To test the new possibility, Lockhart set off for the Virgin Islands

shortly after the Sandstone tests with the quest to find fallout-laden

rainwater in the island’s concrete water-collection cisterns. Of the 2,500

gallons of suitably old rainwater that he found and treated with a

flocculation agent, he came back to NRL with 5 gallons of settled floc

for chemical analysis. The floc contained yttrium-91, cerium-141, and
224 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

cerium-144 in ratios that matched what would be expected to have

come from the Sandstone bombs.

Emboldened, Peter King sent a young chemist in his division, Jack

Kane, on a water collection adventure that took him to Shemya, the

last island on the Aleutian archipelago, and from there to Kodiak,

Alaska. These places were as close to Soviet territory as you could be

and still be in the United States. The negative results of these July

1948 collections indicated that the Soviets had not yet exploded any

nuclear devices, at least not above ground.

Additional collections by Kane in the Truk islands of Micronesia

(now known as the Chuuk Islands) and the hills of Moen as well as a

collection from the Chemistry Building’s roof (which King had had

the division’s janitorial crew scrub with brushes to prepare for the

tests) helped the long-range detection group settle onto a protocol by

April of 1949. Thousand-square foot sections of new corrugated aluminum roofing would serve as rainwater collectors. At the first sign of

possible fallout from filter-paper or gamma-ray detectors, the rainwater would be collected, flocculated, and the resulting floc analyzed. At

this point, the top secret bomb detection project became known as

Project Rainbarrel.

Its projected budget of $80,000 was a mere ghost of the $32 million budget for an Air Force proposal in which early detection would

come from a squadron of B-50’s flying filter-paper scoops for collecting airborne radioactive particulates. Cheap maybe, but Project

Rainbarrel was criticized for its reliance on rain falling over a collection station. A plane can take off at a moment’s notice, but rain comes

when God says so.

The critics were silenced sooner than anyone originally thought

would be possible. On September 10, 1949, air monitors at NRL picked

up positive readings. Three days later it rained and samples were collected also containing fallout. At the same time, sensitive gamma-ray

detectors at Kodiak picked up signals, so Alaskan rainwater was collected, flocculated, and air-shipped to NRL for analysis. These samples
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 225

also contained radioactive fallout. Corroborative signals also came

from filter paper scoops aboard an Air Force B-50 flying between Japan and Alaska. (There had been an earlier cue from a signal detected

by an infrasonic microbarograph array on the day of the test but the

chemical analysis of the radioactive materials served as the definitive

detection while also revealing details of the Soviet bomb design.)

On September 22, Herbert Friedman and Peter King reported the

alarming results of their analysis in Top Secret Restricted Data NRL

Report 3536. Entitled, “Collection and Identification of Fission Products of Foreign Origin,” the report deduced from the data that the

fission producing the detected isotopes occurred “probably not earlier than 24 August.”13 The next day, on September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had detonated its first

nuclear bomb, which the United States military dubbed Joe-1.

A subsequent examination of the radioactive floc retrieved from

the Kodiak site by Lockhart and chemist colleague Richard Baus revealed that Joe-1 contained the artificial element plutonium. Confirmation of this came from Maurice Shapiro of NRL’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory, who as was able to capture in a thick stack of photographic

emulsions the emissions of the Kodiak fallout sample as measurable

streaks characteristic of the decay of plutonium atoms. Although

Truman announced to the world that the Soviets indeed had exploded

a nuclear bomb, the evidence that Joe-1’s blast came from plutonium

and not just sufficiently enriched uranium remained top secret more

than 12 years later.

Listening In On the Other Superpower

The 1949 detonation of Joe-1 was the preamble to a U.S.-Soviet

Cold War relationship that would become dominated by a nuclear

warfare deterrence philosophy known as MAD, or Mutually Assured

Destruction. At the same time that Project Rainbarrel’s aluminum bins

were collecting Joe-1’s radioactive fallout, NRL’s new astronomers

under the direction of John Hagen were eagerly anticipating the in-
226 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

stallation of what became known as the “big dish” atop what is now

Building 43 just a few months later. It was a case of astronomical

science and Cold War intelligence-gathering going hand in hand.

A February 13, 1951 article on the front page of the Washington

Post told its readers that the Navy expects to use the dish-like radio

telescope to “find out much about the mysteries of heavenly bodies

through the energy they radiate.” Solar flares, galactic radiation, and

the size, shape, and composition of the Moon and Sun were among

the probable topics of study. “They may also tune in any intelligencedirected signals from outer space—that is, ‘signals’ beamed to this

earth by any ‘beings’ inhabiting other worlds,” the article said. That

same ability to listen to signals coming from out there meant the dish

would be able to hear signals that started here on Earth, went

spaceward, and then somehow got reflected back earthward, say, by

the Moon.14

When workers did complete NRL’s “big dish,” it was the world’s

largest, steerable radio telescope for short radio wavelengths. It reNRL’s landmark, 50-ft

radar telescope in 1956

when researchers were

still using it to probe

planets and other

cosmic objects
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 227

mains an eye-catching technological monument that to this day sits

atop NRL’s administrative building. The 13-1⁄2 ton, 50-ft diameter reflector is set in an 11-ton ring and cross-girder system atop a 12-ton

yoke, all mounted on a steerable 27-ton, twin, 5-inch gun mount

stripped of its guns and breech mechanisms. To increase the dish’s

chances of picking up the faint radio emissions from stars whose light

is too distant to be seen with optical telescopes as well as from other

radio-emitting cosmic phenomena, its paraboloid surface was machined so that actual deviations did not exceed about 1⁄16 inch from

the mathematical equations specifying its shape. The closer a radio

telescope’s shape is to perfection, the less noisy will be its reception

and the better it will be able to take radio portraiture of the invisible

universe.

The first published studies by the Radio Astronomy Branch of the

Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division reported radio emissions from

enormous clouds of gas including the Orion Nebula, as well as emissions from more discrete sources. The big dish’s ability to listen in on

shorter-wavelengths uncovered new regions of ionized hydrogen in

space that had been invisible to longer-wavelength radio telescopes.

When the Big Dish pointed at Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, NRL researchers were able to make thermal measurements of these planetary neighbors. The big dish helped scientists discern variations in the brightness around the solar and lunar disks and to measure the increased

solar radiation during times of high solar activity.15

In 1959, NRL’s C.H. Mayer teamed with Columbia University’s

Charles Townes, the soon-to-be inventor of the laser, and other colleagues in a project that improved the Big Dish’s radio eyesight by a

factor of 13. The heart of the improvement was a newly available maser,

which could amplify the tiny microwave signals coming in from such

cosmic radio sources as planets and stars better than previous amplifiers. The word “maser” is an acronym that stands for microwave

amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation. One year after

his work with Mayer, Townes would invent the laser (light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation) with ONR funding.16
228 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The big dish atop Building 43 was just the beginning of NRL’s

love affair with ever bigger radio telescopes. Just as Mayer and Townes

were finding out how masers could push the envelope of radio astronomy, NRL’s next radio telescope would try to do the same thing

by increasing the size of the dish itself. In 1958, at Maryland Point

on the Potomac River about 45 miles downstream from NRL, the

Laboratory completed construction of an 84-foot parabolic antenna

capable of pointing anywhere in the sky and tracking any celestial

object from horizon to horizon.

Bigger yes, but the Maryland Point radio telescope was small compared to the great 250-foot moveable dish erected by British astronomers at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station of the University of

Manchester.17 NRL’s new radio telescope held a consolation record,

however. It was the world’s largest radio telescope mounted

equatorially, which meant it could be steered with a relatively simple

clock mechanism.18 With these and a host of smaller radio antennae,

NRL had developed a versatile new telescopic window on space,

complementing the rocket-based astronomy and astrophysics program

that had been underway since the Laboratory attained access to V-2s.

All of this antennae-building also was stimulating ideas of the Cold

War variety.

 It was NRL’s communications scientists, those in the lineage of A.

Hoyt Taylor, Leo Young, and Louis Gebhard, who would make a bid

to procure truly gargantuan antennae for the Cold War’s extra-scientific demands. Foremost amongst this group was James H. Trexler.

Trexler, who helped support himself during college as an amateur

radio technician, joined NRL in 1942 as a junior radio engineer. His

first assignment was in the Measurement and Direction Finding Unit

before becoming part of the Radio Countermeasures Branch. He later

would become head of the Space Technology Branch of the Electronic

Warfare Division, one of the Laboratory’s most secretive areas. Indeed, the public reasons Trexler and the Navy put forward for the

construction of several enormous antennae during the 1950s were at

best complementary to the primary classified objectives.19
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 229

In Trexler and NRL came a convergence of history, interest, national defense and technical capability that led to Operation Moon

Bounce, also known as the Communication Moon Relay (CMR). With

its assets distributed around the world, the Navy was troubled by the

long distance radio communication cut-offs and irregularities caused

by Sun-driven ionospheric storms. After all, a serious interruption of

communication from command headquarters to battle formations at

sea could lose a battle. Any techniques that could fill in communication gaps would be welcome.

In 1946, after learning that Army Signal Corps’ researchers had

detected radar signals that had reflected from the Moon, Donald

Menzel of the Harvard College Observatory proposed to the Navy

Department that the Moon could be deliberately used as a reflector

for radio signals. Menzel had served as Naval Reserve commander

during World War II and advised the Joint and Combined Chiefs of

Staff as a member of their radio propagation committee. That proposal would find its way to James Trexler, who back in his college

days at Southern Methodist University had tried reflecting high frequency radio waves from meteor trails as part of a radio propagation

study. That put Trexler into the small club that was apt to have radio,

communication, and cosmic objects in the same thought.

In 1948, a paper in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers

suggesting that the Moon itself might have an ionosphere stimulated

Trexler to calculate the requirements for an antenna that could send

signals to the Moon. By the end of June, he realized that many radar

systems around the world already were close to the specification. And

that meant that signals from these powerful antennae might already

be bouncing from the Moon back to the Earth. Apparently, no one

had yet tried to listen for the reflections.

“The strictest security should be maintained as to the existence of

such intercept devices since the enemy could with little difficulty restrict the operation of there [sic] sets to avoid Moon contact,” he wrote

in his laboratory notebook. “One immediate application of the system would be the detection and anylisis [sic] of the Russian Radar
230 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

signals that have been monitored at 500 Mc [million cycles per second] near Alaska.”20

The first effort to follow up on this insight came in the form of two

long-wire antennae on the grounds of Blue Plains, the immediate southern neighbor of NRL, where the Chemical Protection Branch had built

their gas chamber during the war. By the first half of 1950, the results

were good enough to Trexler and Howard Lorenzen, his immediate

supervisor, that they put in a request to Captain Frederick Furth, NRL’s

military commander, to pursue a next generation of tests with more

powerful antennae. By June 1950, Navy leadership officially included

the Moon as part of its intelligence gathering “equipment.” First referred to under the code name “Joe,” the Navy served up $100,000 for

the project which it renamed project PAMOR (Passive Moon Relay).

In the waning days of 1950, heavy equipment began scooping ton

after ton of earth from a site at Stump Neck, Maryland, which was part

of the Navy’s Indian Head Propellant Plant. When it was finished, the

parabolic antenna measured 220-ft by 263-ft. Its 3-inch by 3-inch iron

grid could collect and then steer radio wavelengths at least one meter

long into a precisely locatable receiver slung above the grid by cables

and booms. The first test on October 21 surprised Trexler. Most of the

energy from the reflections of pulses sent at the Moon from a 750,000

watt transmitter were picked up by the huge parabola in such a tiny

fraction of a second that Trexler knew the Moon was going to be far

more valuable than anyone had expected. Theories had predicted that

the entire Moon surface would reflect the signal and thereby arrive back

at Earth spread out in time as though a normal voice were replayed at

much slower speed. The unexpected coherence of the reflections

bumped Trexler’s work to a higher priority for the Navy’s electronic

intelligence program and into a higher security status.

It also indicated that transmitter-Moon-receiver circuits ought to

work as part of modern communication systems, which included voice

and even video transmission. Over the next several years, Trexler and

his Countermeasures colleagues worked out the engineering issues to
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 231

prove this to be true. Their work resulted in PAMOR’s programmatic

cousin, the CMR (Communication Moon Relay).

In a letter dated June 15, 1954 to Louis Gebhard, Superintendent

of NRL’s Radio Division and a pioneer in transmitter design, Trexler

ticked off a litany of potential uses the project harbored. Navigation,

interception and jamming of enemy radar and radio communication,

upper atmosphere research and communications with ships, subs,

and aircraft. Moreover, he wrote in the letter, “it appears that the fidelity of the Moon circuit is much better than predicted in the possible use of many types of circuits such as high-speed teletype, facsimile, and voice.”21

On July 24, Trexler made good on that statement. Two and a half

seconds after speaking into a microphone, radio waves sent by the

Stump Neck parabola already had carried his voice the 500,000 miles

to the Moon and back to an array of simpler and smaller antennae

that Trexler’s group found would work just fine for communications.

“For the first time ever, the sound of a human voice had been transNRL built and used this 220-ft by 263-ft antenna in Stump Neck,

Maryland, as part of a long-distance communication circuit involving Earth’s natural satellite, the Moon, as the reflector of signals

from the sender to receiver.
232 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

mitted out beyond the ionosphere and then returned to Earth,” writes

NRL historian David van Keuren.22 A consequence of such demonstrations was that the development of Moon-based communication circuits became a project in its own right, independent of the system’s

originally envisioned role for electronic intelligence gathering.

But there was one little obstacle, especially for key military uses

under Project PAMOR, such as intercepting weak Soviet radar signals.

The 220-ft by 263-ft Stump Neck parabola was too small. Trexler calculated that a truly gargantuan antennae was needed—a 600-ft bowl

that was longer than the Washington Monument was tall and whose

area would cover 7.1 acres. It would be a 22,000 ton behemoth yet

capable of being pin-pointable to any spot above the horizon. Anything that big would require lots of money, direct Congressional approval, and a major lobbying effort. The push began in early 1955.

As part of this effort, NRL pulled off some strategic internal PR

stunts that also happened to confirm the communications value of

the Moon. On November 29, 1955, Robert Morris Page, NRL’s Associate Director of Research for Electronics, sent a transcontinental teletype

message via the Moon from the Stump Neck site to Dr. Franz Kurie,

Technical Director of the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego,

CA where appropriate receivers had been set up. Page to Kurie: “ . . .

lift up your eyes and behold a new horizon.”23 After some additional

engineering work to smooth out some wavering that slightly marred

the November tests, Trexler’s group flexed their muscles further on

January 23, 1956 when the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh

Burke, sent a congratulatory message via the Moon to Admiral Felix B.

Stump, Commander-In-Chief of the Pacific Fleet.

Among the witnesses was Donald A. Quarles, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development. Money followed, including enough to cover a $5.5 million development contract with

the Developmental Engineering Corporation to build a demonstration model of a practical long-range naval communication system.

Additional intellectual support came by way of the National Academy
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 233

of Science’s Advisory Committee on Undersea Warfare, which viewed

the technology as well suited for submarine-to-shore communication.

 By 1959, 11 years after Trexler began musing about radio circuits

using the Moon, the Navy had a fully functional Moon-included communication system linking Washington, DC and Hawaii. The next

year, NRL and the Navy went public. On the front pages of newspapers and on TV screens was the picture of thousands of officers and

seamen on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hancock in Honolulu

spelling out “Moon Relay.” The facsimile picture of that scene was

sent to Washington via Trexler’s Moon relay.

(a) This model of the 600-ft,

intelligence-gathering dish

proposed by James Trexler is

shown for size-comparison

next to a scale model of the

Washington Monument.

(b) Construction in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, began even before

all of the engineering and design had been worked out.
234 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The system no longer required components like the Stump Neck

parabola. Instead, it relied on 84-ft diameter transmitters set up at

Opana, Oahu and at Annapolis, Maryland, home of the Naval Academy. Much smaller receivers were set up in Cheltenham, Maryland

and Wahiawa, Oahu. “The system could accommodate up to 16 teleprinter channels at the rate of 60 words per minute and was capable

of processing teletype and photographic facsimiles,” according to

David van Keuren.24 The system continued to become more convenient with smaller and more portable receivers and transmitters.

Throughout the technical development of the Moon circuit, others at NRL saw considerable benefit. For one thing, because the Stump

Neck antenna could only eavesdrop on the Soviet Union for a few

hours each month, the great bowl was largely available to Navy radio

astronomers. Moreover, the project entailed the building of a roomsized, electricity-guzzling, vacuum-tube riddled Naval Research Computer (NAREC), which in the early 1950s represented cutting-edge

computer technology. Many at NRL would use the NAREC to undertake formidable calculations. Among them were Jerome and Isabella

Karle and Herbert Hauptman. For them, the NAREC opened the way

to daunting mathematical calculations needed for their seminal work

on X-ray crystallography. In the hands of other NRL researchers,

NAREC would be applied to calculating trajectories of satellites and

long range ballistic missiles.25

Meanwhile, even before the first public display of the Moon circuit in 1960, the original 1948 motivation by Trexler for getting into

the Moon relay business—listening in on Soviet radio and radar traffic—had become bigger and more secret than anyone had anticipated.

The reason: the National Security Agency (NSA), which had been created by way of a secret memorandum signed by President Truman on

November 4, 1952, wanted in.

To officials at the new NSA and other U.S. intelligence organizations, the enormous radio ear of the kind that Trexler had proposed

building in the backwoods of West Virginia was just the right kind of
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 235

device for listening in on Soviet radio and radar traffic.26 By 1959, the

NSA and the Office of Naval Research (NRL’s parent organization),

had convinced Congress to put $60 million into the project to build

the largest moving structure that human beings had ever made. The

public cover story was that the big dish was to be the most powerful

tool the radio astronomy community had ever seen. In the interest of

one-upmanship, it also would be the United States’ answer to

England’s record radio astronomy dish.

But the Sugar Grove project became far more complicated and

expensive than its champions had expected. After requests for additional multimillion-dollar chunks of public funding in 1960 and

1961, Congress placed a budget limit of $135 million. Navy analysts

calculated that figure to be roughly two-thirds of what would be

needed. By 1962, as satellite communication technology began to

mature, President Kennedy was receiving counsel from his science

advisor as well as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency that the

project would end up at best as a marginal deal for intelligence-gathering.

“Eventually it was decided that Sugar Grove would be the ideal

replacement facility for the Naval Radio Station at Cheltenham, Maryland,” wrote James Bamford in The Puzzle Palace, his 1982 history of

the secretive National Security Agency.27 The switch was implemented

in May 1969. According to Bamford, “NRL continued to operate a

sixty-foot microwave receiving antenna building in 1957 as a prototype” for the 600-footer.28 He wrote that on July 1, 1975, NRL was

relieved of its role at Sugar Grove by the Naval Security Group, which

was part of the Central Security Service established by President Nixon

in 1972 to “provide a more unified cryptologic organization within

the Department of Defense.”29 After that, Bamford’s book maintains

that the NSA built additional surveillance equipment at the Sugar

Grove facility, which it used to keep track of a major portion of satellite-carried international communications. But the giant radio telescope recommended by Trexler was never built.
236 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Cold War in the Abyss

Soon after the looming costs of the Sugar Grove project began to

ensure its demise, the Cold War and NRL were entwining in other

remarkable and sometimes nightmarish ways. An example of the latter kind began in the early spring of 1963.

On the evening of April 10, Captain Bradley F. Bennett, NRL’s military director at the time, was at a dinner party when he learned the

news of a tragic accident at sea. The Thresher, a newly built nuclear

submarine undergoing shakedown tests at sea, had just sunk to a depth

greater than 8,000 feet (more than 11⁄2 miles) in an area of the Atlantic 260 miles east of Boston. There were 129 men aboard.30

There was no hope for the men: everyone knew that beginning at

around 1,000 feet, water pressure would have been sufficiently high

to crush the submarine’s hull. Bennett’s instinct was to immediately

call Chester Buchanan, head of a small team of ocean scientists and

engineers in the Sonar Systems Branch at NRL that had been developing tools for monitoring the deep ocean.

After a sleepless night, Buchanan handed the Captain a handwritten plan to search for the Thresher. The next day, five researchers

(headed by Tony Hollins) in Buchanan’s branch, and others from

elsewhere at NRL and the Hudson Laboratories, boarded the small

acoustics research vessel Rockville and headed with sonar equipment

to the search area to join a growing armada of search vessels. The first

team returned to New London after ten days and a second Sound

Division team, headed by Burton Hurdle, took the Rockville out of

New London, Connecticut, along with new equipment to join the

search. In subsequent days, yet more NRL personnel, including Chester

Buchanan, boarded the J.M. Gillis with additional equipment and

joined the search.

“Every resource of the United States Navy was thrown into the

historic search operation,” wrote James H. Wakelin, Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development, later in a National

Geographic magazine article.31
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 237

The search centered on a 100-square mile area, which is small by

ocean standards. But finding a slivery submarine somewhere at the

very bottom of 100 square miles of deep ocean was akin to finding a

shaving of metal at the bottom of a deep tank of opaque oil. Moreover, trying to steer instruments from a surface ship to a spot 8,000

feet away on the bottom of the ocean was akin, in Wakelin’s words,

“to a man in a balloon, a mile and a half above the earth, unsure of

his own position, trying to drop a fish line through a blizzard into a

swimming pool.”32

The Thresher began to reveal itself in mid-June. Using a magnetometer to detect metal and a camera towed from a surface ship, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Lamont

Geological Observatory photographed portions of the wrecked submarine. Two months later, the manned research vessel Trieste I, which

was being operated by the Navy Electronics Laboratory, located more

wreckage. The bulk of the submarine, however, remained undiscovered by September when bad weather forced Captain Frank. A.

Andrews, head of the search operations at the site, to postpone the

rest of the search.

The loss of the Thresher was a wake up call for the Navy. In a summary of the Thresher search operation in 1965 highlighting the Navy’s

inadequacy in deep-sea search, location, and rescue, Captain Andrews

wrote that the tragedy “demonstrated only too clearly the degree of

ignorance and inability which surrounded the entire business.”33

When search operations resumed in 1964, NRL’s recently procured

research vessel, Mizar (a converted Arctic resupply ship), which would

later be customized with a central well through which instruments or

tow lines could be lowered into the water, became the pivotal element. Under the direction of Buchanan, other members of the team

had fitted a tow-vessel with a battery of cameras, strobe lights, sidelooking sonars, a rechargeable battery, and a scintillation detector for

detecting radiation. Projecting from the prow of the tow vessel like a

nose was a magnetometer, which would trigger the lights and cam-
238 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

eras at the first “sniff” of metal. The Mizar also was in communication

with a bottomed navigational acoustic transponder so that it would

be able to pinpoint the exact location of the Thresher in case it were

found. This was crucial because drift and currents relentlessly shifted

the ships’ and towed vehicles’ positions relative to the ocean bottom.

Success came quickly this time. “In the first eight hours of search,

Mizar’s towed vehicle photographed the tail section of Thresher,” wrote

Captain Andrews with palpable pride.34 That was June 27, 1964; over

the next days and weeks, the Mizar’s crew located and photographed

the main portions of the Thresher’s hull. More than 50,000 photographs were taken.35 Moreover, the navigational data enabled the NRL

to direct the manned Trieste II to land directly atop a portion of the

Thresher hull where it could take close-up photographs. Unable at

first to see signs of the hull, the crew of the Trieste II thought the Mizar

had steered them awry. But when the crew member who was looking

out of the viewing port took a closer look, he realized the Trieste II

had alighted directly on top of the Thresher’s remains.

“Probably the most significant improvement in search effectiveness following the 1963 search effort was the installation of underwater tracking equipment (UTE) on the USNS Mizar,” Andrews wrote.

“The Naval Research Laboratory deserves great credit for this accomNRL’s oceanographic

research ship Mizar
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 239

plishment, for without it the almost complete photography of the

visible portions of Thresher’s hull would have been impossible.”36

In addition to photographing the wreck, radiation measuring instruments on the Mizar’s towed vehicle and on Trieste II answered a

burning question: was radioactive material in the submarine’s reactor

leaking into the ocean? The 1964 instrument readings indicated there

were no radioactivity levels above expected background levels attributed to naturally radioactive atoms in the ocean water and sea bottom. Therefore, either the reactor had remained intact or any radioactivity that was going to leak already had.

On-site analysis of the remains found during the Thresher operation confirmed what everyone already knew—that as the submarine

had sank through its “crush depth,” it was crushed like an aluminum

can by the enormous oceanic pressure. But the search did not provide

answers to the more important question of what went wrong in the

first place to send one of the nation’s cutting-edge submarines and its

highly trained crew to their demise. Recovering the wreckage from an

ocean depth of 8,400 feet with the hope of answering that question

would have amounted to an Apollo-scale operation with no guarantee that the coveted answers would be found. The Thresher remains

on the ocean bottom today.

The search for the lost submarine turned out to be merely the first

of a highly dramatic series of deep-ocean searches for Buchanan and

Photograph by an

NRL team of the

Thresher’s anchor
240 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the men in his branch, which was renamed as the more general Deep

Sea Research Branch.37 The next Cold War sea search drama began on

January 17, 1966, when a hydrogen bomb that had ejected from a

disabled U.S. bomber fell into the Mediterranean Sea off of Palomares,

Spain. Eighteen days later, the Mizar and a contingent of NRL scientists was on its way to the scene. It was a politically charged event. For

one thing, Allied nations could place restrictions on the flying of

nuclear bombers over their territory, or worse, the bomb and its secrets could have fallen into undesirable hands.38

 The search began at a location pointed out by a Spanish fisherman who had seen the bomb fall. While the crew of the Mizar searched

with the ship’s towed instruments, the manned, 22-foot Alvin, which

the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute operated for the Office of

Naval Research, was scouring the steep and rugged sea floor looking

for the bomb in an area just southeast.

As in the Thresher search, Buchanan’s team and the Mizar located

the lost military asset and provided the navigational guidance for deep

submersibles. In place of the Trieste submersible were the Alvin and

the Aluminaut, which was owned by the Reynold’s Aluminum Company and retained for the search under contract. With a special undersea telephone to the oceanauts in the Alvin, which was about to

embark on its first scientific mission when it was called to the Hbomb search, the Mizar could guide the submersible much as an air

traffic control tower guides aircraft.

On March 15, the Alvin spotted the bomb at a depth of 2,800 feet.

Since it could remain submerged for only short periods of time, the

Aluminaut, which could remain submerged longer, was directed to

the spot. It served as a marker so that the Mizar could use its navigational and location finding equipment to obtain a precise fix on the

bomb. That, in turn, enabled the Alvin to bring recovery equipment

to the bomb.

First, the crew of the Mizar lowered a steel lifting line and “work

table” to the site of the bomb. Then the crew of the Alvin used the
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 241

vessel’s telerobotically controlled arm to entangle the lifting line

around shroud lines of a parachute attached to the bomb.

So far so good. But just as the bomb was lifting from the bottom,

the lift line broke. The nuclear weapon slid further down the steep

slope. In a second recovery attempt on April 8, the Mizar directed

Alvin back to the sight. Despite a harrowing few minutes when the

crew of the Alvin quickly maneuvered to avoid getting entangled in

the parachute shroud, the Mizar hoisted the bomb to its deck.

Two years later, just as Buchanan’s team was testing a new wideangle camera with increased film capacity, the Mizar and NRL scientists were again called upon. On May 27, 1968, another submarine,

the USS Scorpion, had tragically sunk to the bottom of the ocean west

of Azores with the loss of 99 officers and men. During its 172 day

search cruise between June 2 and November 22, 1968, the Mizar’s

crew relied on their home-made “fish”—a towed aluminum cage and

platform bearing magnetometers, sonars, cameras, and other equipment attached to the Mizar by a 20,000 foot armored umbilical. The

“fish” camera photographed a bent piece of metal at a depth of about

10,000 feet 18 days into the operation, but it could not be clearly

linked to the Scorpion.

The search went on for another five months elsewhere before the

Mizar and its “fish” returned to the site of the bent metal. There, a

magnetometer and side-looking sonar both picked up signals diagnostic of a man-made object. Photos taken of the site revealed a large

section of the Scorpion’s hull. At the end of a subsequent run with the

“fish,” the tow cable gave way just as the “fish” was breaching the

surface and the instrument-laden platform joined the Scorpion nearly

2 miles below. That the cable had worked at all was testimony to the

detailed physical investigations and mathematical modeling that NRL

researchers had conducted in order to better understand the kind of

behavior to be expected from long underwater tow cables. Despite

the loss of this valuable equipment, the operation yielded over 150,000

photographs continuously covering 12 square miles of ocean bot-
242 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

tom. The final 10,000 of those photos, which revealed the Scorpion’s

hulk and debris, were taken with a spare “fish” after the primary “fish”

went down. The Scorpion and its occupants were not retrieved.

Even before the Mizar returned, word of yet another deep sea loss

came through. On October 16, 1968, the Alvin went down off the

Coast of Martha’s Vineyard due to a handling mishap. But since the

Mizar’s equipment was in bad need of refurbishing, upgrading and

replacement, it wasn’t until the following June that the vessel steamed

out to the site to search for the Alvin. The previous five-years worth of

practice on such items as lost submarines and thermonuclear weapons paid off. After only four days of searching, the Mizar’s sensors

found the Alvin at 5100 feet. From photographs, it appeared that the

submersible was in fine shape save for some damage to the propeller

assembly.

The recovery effort included the Mizar, several other surface ships,

and the Aluminaut. After initial failures to attach a toggle bar that was

part of the lifting apparatus to an open hatch on the Alvin, and some

delay due to rough weather, the Aluminaut dove again and successfully attached the bar to the Alvin. Tension was high because the next

step of hoisting the Alvin to the surface required that a 41⁄2 inch diameter nylon line hold together under these conditions. Although calculations suggested the operation ought to work, no one had ever atSuccessful conclusion of the Alvin

salvage operation
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 243

tempted such a feat. Rather than pulling the Alvin completely out of

the water, the Mizar towed the submersible to shore where she was

pumped dry and later refurbished.

Calls for new search operations continued coming in. On March

4, 1970, the French Navy submarine, Eurydice, sank in the Mediterranean near Toulon. The French government quickly asked for U.S. assistance. After getting the go-ahead from the Chief of Naval Operations, the Mizar set off across the Atlantic on March 25. One month

later, the first photos of the Eurydice were in hand and a transponder

was placed amidst the debris so that the French Navy could later return to the site with their own deep sea submersible, Archimedes.

The same year, the Mizar played an important role in the controversial scuttling of an obsolete Liberty Ship LeBaron Russel Briggs, whose

holds had been laden with 418 steel-encased concrete vaults, each

filled with 30 nerve-agent rockets. After heated Congressional hearings and court actions that followed the public announcement of the

plan, the scuttling took place on August 18, 1970 about 240 nautical

miles east of the Florida coast in a 16,000 foot basin.

NRL’s technical role was to participate in the pre-scuttling survey

to characterize the marine life and chemical composition and to conduct several post-scuttling surveys and analyses to monitor the effects

of the procedure. In October, the Mizar conducted the first post-disposal inspections. Sonar and magnetometer readings showed that the

hull had remained intact and water samples taken were all devoid of

detectable nerve agents or expected breakdown products. The Mizar

obtained similar results in four subsequent returns to the site, the last

one in January 1974.

Throughout the Laboratory’s era of searching the deep sea floor,

NRL scientists and engineers developed and honed sensors, cameras,

hoisting techniques, more controllable towed platforms, and a host

of other technologies that subsequently served both for searches and

fundamental investigations of deep-ocean phenomena and environments. Despite the track record of NRL’s deep-sea search research and

development team, the cost of running the Mizar had become too
244 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

high. NRL transferred the Mizar to the Naval Electronics Systems Command and with that ended the Laboratory’s era of deep-sea floor

searches.

Walter Brundage, an Acoustics Division researcher who had been

involved in the deep-sea searches, later remarked that it was only natural for NRL to relinquish its near-monopoly on deep-sea search technology. By the mid-1970s, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

had developed its own “fish,” ANGUS, or the Acoustically Navigated

Geophysical Underwater Survey. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography had its own version, Deep Tow. “The Navy could turn elsewhere

for help on deep-sea floor missions and the Laboratory could turn its

research and development elsewhere,” Brundage concluded.39

Making Nuclear Submarines Habitable

Ironically, nuclear submarines like the ill-fated Thresher never

would have had a chance to become part of the awful Cold War staleSonar image taken by

NRL of the scuttled

LeBaron Russel Briggs
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 245

mate of Mutually Assured Destruction without NRL chemists. They

spent the 1950s and 1960s identifying and solving myriad gas chemistry issues central to keeping the interior of a nuclear submarine habitable.40 When the USS Nautilus made history in 1956 by becoming

the world’s first deployed nuclear submarine, NRL scientists knew their

fingerprints were all over this accomplishment.

Before the advent of nuclear propulsion, submarines spent most

of their time cruising on the surface. Non-nuclear submarines were

more like surface ships that had the ability to intermittently submerge.

“With nuclear reactor-powered submarines, it became evident to

NRL chemists that the period of submergence would no longer be

[so] limited . . . and that additional far-reaching measures to control

the bubble of air [the vessel’s atmosphere] would soon be needed,”

recalls Carhart, who in 1998 remains an active emeritus scientist at

NRL and is widely viewed as the Navy’s guru on fire science and prevention. During the first half of the Cold War, however, the NRL’s

chemists’ work focused more on making closed submarine environments safe and habitable for as long a time as possible. “It was obvious that means for the continuous replenishment of oxygen, removal

of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and other contaminants, and monitoring would be a must,” Carhart noted.41

In the early 1950s, as many as 20 NRL chemists under the leadership of Bill Zisman simultaneously worked on the submarine atmosphere habitability problem. Failure to solve the problem would mean

that an increasing load of “indoor pollution” during a cruise of a

nuclear powered sub would force the vessel to surface way before

military planners had hoped. The advantage of a revolutionary nuclear

propulsion system, therefore, was at risk of being squandered.

Proof that the NRL chemists had gone a long way toward solving

the indoor air pollution problems on nuclear submarines came by

way of the “Habitability Cruise” in 1955. A cadre of NRL chemists

boarded the USS Nautilus with a battery of analytical instruments for

identifying volatile chemicals in the air. The Nautilus was able to stay
246 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

submerged and habitable for 11 days, a length of time that until then

had been unheard of in the submarine world. As exhilarating as that

was, the NRL chemists did make some troubling observations. One

of them was an unexpectedly high level of the kinds of hydrocarbons

found in paint solvents.

“Since the first few nuclear submarines were the object of almost

constant visits by important and interested people, surfaces that needed

it were touched up, in the good old Navy tradition, even while submerged,” Carhart recalls.42 The amount of volatile hydrocarbons was

so great at times that in as little as two days it could saturate the beds

of activated charcoal that were part of the submarines’ ventilation

systems to remove odors.

The obvious solution was to end the practice of painting surfaces

inside of submerged submarines where there was no way to vent the

volatile paint vapors from the vessel. “It was difficult to break the

‘tradition’ of painting at the slightest provocation but in time it was

done, with NRL’s encouragement,” Carhart recalls.43

Not all traditions die so easily. The tradition of smoking on board

submerged submarines was one of them. The conditions aboard a

submarine were austere enough that to take away the privilege of smoking, one of the few perks available to the sailors, was simply not an

option during the era of the first generation of nuclear subs. As a

result, invisible carbon monoxide from the burning tobacco as well

as smoke became contaminants that had to be scavenged from the

air.

Rather than relying on a behavioral solution as they did for the

paint solvent problem, NRL chemists this time turned to a World War

I era catalyst. Called Hopcalite, it could oxidize carbon monoxide to

the less toxic carbon dioxide when moderately heated. The carbon

dioxide then could be readily removed from the air. The problem

with moderately heated Hopcalite, however, was that it tended to

absorb organic compounds from the atmosphere, which could then

react with explosive force in the bed of catalyst particles.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 247

That problem could be solved by heating the catalyst hotter yet,

since the additional heat would destroy any adsorbed organic compounds before they could build to explosive levels. The trouble with

that solution, on the other hand, is that very hot Hopcalite starts to

break down refrigerant molecules (CFCs), which occasionally leaked

into the submarine interior from the submarine’s cooling and refrigeration systems. With Hopcalite, this could become dangerous since

some of the breakdown product of the CFC molecules would be in

the form of airborne hydrochloric acid and hydrofluoric acid—both

very strong, corrosive, and injurious materials. “The thin line of compromise in temperature to optimize burning and minimize halogen

acid production had to be found, and was,” Carhart states.44 Later,

NRL chemists helped to find more stable refrigerants, thereby further

reducing the hydrofluoric acid danger, he adds.

Carbon monoxide from burning tobacco was an invisible poison

that Hopcalite and other catalysts could take out of the air, but the

visible smoke from cigarettes also was a problem. Early tests indicated that tobacco smoke accounted for about 75% of the aerosol, or

visible particulate haze inside of submarines. The solution of the NRL

chemists in this case was to modify highly efficient electrostatic precipitators so they could clear 12,000 cubic feet of submarine air per

minute.

There were other more insidious problems that became apparent

once the larger and more obvious habitability problems had been

solved. One of these was a strangely extensive degree of corrosion on

new submarines. The NRL chemist/sleuths identified the culprit as

methyl chloroform, a solvent that was being used for the first time as

part of the adhesive systems for sheets of insulation along the hull.

The methyl chloroform, a toxic compound better left outside of a

submarine, was entering the catalytic burner used to break down other

contaminants, yielding a combination of hydrochloric acid and vinylidene chloride. The acid was causing the corrosion and the vinylidene chloride was even more toxic than the methyl chloroform.
248 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

That revelation spelled the end of methyl chloroform use on submarines.

“In similar vein, NRL has had to play detective repeatedly and by

finding sources of lachrymotors [tear-jerking emanations like onion

vapors and tear gas], irritants, poisons, etc., was able to eliminate many

causes of discomfort and danger,” Carhart recalls. Their detective work

sometimes turned up surprises. “Who would have thought that by

allowing men to bring aboard their propellant-type shaving creams

and deodorants, something on the order of 30 pounds of fluorinated

propellants of undetermined composition would get “dumped” into

the atmosphere on a single patrol?”45 Once in the atmosphere, these

propellants then would transform by way of the sub’s catalytic burners into troublesome airborne agents.

Since NRL chemists equipped with laboratory analytical equipment were not going to be assigned to each submarine to keep track

of atmospheric conditions, the habitability chemists began developing a series of chemical analysis machines that could be put on-board

and run by trained sailors. The first was the Mark I Analyzer. Later

models still in use in the 1970s monitored oxygen, carbon dioxide,

carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and refrigerants. To keep track of the

hydrocarbon contaminants, the chemists developed a specialized gas

chromatograph, the Total Hydrocarbon Analyzer, which was first installed on nuclear submarines in the early 1970s.

These monitoring devices were precursors to a more sophisticated

yet user-friendly system known as the Central Atmosphere Measurement System, or CAMS, which was designed under the auspices of

Fred Saalfeld, who left NRL in 1982 as superintendent of the Chemistry Division and joined ONR where he now is Deputy Chief of Naval

Research. Progeny of the first CAMS remain in use today aboard the

United States’ fleet of nuclear submarines.

Making Nuclear Tipped Missiles That Don’t Break

A group of NRL researchers adept in the minutia of materials science and engineering also helped usher in the age of nuclear warfare.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 249

The cold reality that things break, shatter, corrode, rip apart, and otherwise disintegrate always has been a sobering part of the human experience in general, and the Naval experience in particular. The downing of the Thresher was a dramatic reminder of how terribly wrong

things can go. Ever since the late 1920s when Robert Mehl took little

medical radium pellets to Norfolk to uncover flaws in enormous ship

castings, NRL has contributed solutions to the perpetual Naval concern about its assets breaking for both expected and unexpected reasons.46

Consider George R. Irwin, a materials researchers who devoted

his NRL career to the questions of why and how things break. When

he arrived at NRL as a graduate fresh from the University of Illinois in

1937, he joined the Ballistics Branch of the Mechanics Division where

his task was to better understand what makes armor better or worse.

The branch, one of several in the Mechanics Division, had built a

number of compact silencer-equipped guns that they used in their

study of ballistic impacts on materials. “Because of the convenience,

variety, and speed of testing thus permitted, NRL soon gained a leadership position in the development of aircraft and personnel armor,

which continued through the Korean War period,” Irwin later recalled.47

During World War II, NRL had focused its work on immediate

problem solving rather than the slower sort of research required for

studying the detailed physical and chemical mechanisms behind the

strength, brittleness, and fracture-resistance of materials. In accordance

with the general realignment of the Laboratory toward more basic

research after the war, Irwin began turning to the tougher, longer term

problem of what makes materials go bad. The most important of these,

known as “fracture mechanics,” reached into the heart of an issue

near and dear to the Navy (and, in fact, to anyone else who has watched

hopelessly as a wine glass or plate fell to the ground to end up in

shattered pieces). To study fracture mechanics is to study why things

break. It is the way to learn if you can do anything about it. During

World War II, the Navy was reminded over and over again of the im-
250 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

portance of this issue as one after another after another of the welded

steel hulls of its 2,160 Liberty ships cracked,48 sometimes completely

in half.

Irwin knew that the roots of such problems reached deep into the

anatomy of materials. When he and his colleagues started the work,

no one even quite knew how to articulate the question of what makes

a material more or less apt to fracture. Irwin argued that a material’s

“fracture-toughness” ought to be measured in terms of its resistance

to allowing small, even microscopic cracks to proliferate or grow. After all, as the Liberty ships proved all to well—small cracks become

bigger cracks that become bigger cracks that become the fractures that

make things break into pieces.

Throughout the 1950s, they applied their increasingly sophisticated and science-fed intuition in material fracture to solve the kinds

of practical problems that turned heads. Irwin had his favorite list:

“In chronological order, these were the development of stretch-toughened PlexiglasTM [used for cockpit canopies among other things], the

pressurized fuselage fractures of the DeHavilland Comet commercial

jet airplane [the plane that ushered in the ongoing era of large-scale

jet travel], the sudden fracture of heavy rotating components of large

steam turbine electric generators, and the hydrotest [a water-pressure

engineering test] fractures of the ultrahigh strength steel rocket chamber for Polaris [missiles].”49

The last of these had everything to do with submarine nuclear

warfare. The mission of the Polaris missile was to sit inside of bays on

stealthy nuclear submarines until their nuclear payloads were needed

in the war to end all wars—an all-out nuclear war between the U.S.

and the USSR. To test welds used to make the Polaris’s ultrahighstrength steel rocket chambers, engineers filled the chamber with water

and applied increasing amounts of pressure. In the autumn of 1957,

so many welds were failing under these conditions that managers

feared the missile program would fall behind schedule, a situation

that could lead to all kinds of embarrassing political and military
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 251

repercussions. Even those rocket chambers that passed the hydrotests

were still not tough enough to endure the conditions of an actual

firing rocket, Irwin recalled.

The main responsibility for solving the potentially show-stopping

problem fell onto Irwin’s shoulders. He recruited five NRL colleagues

and a handful of others from other military facilities and universities

for a crash effort to get the Polaris program back on schedule.

Within months, the team had discerned the problem and figured

out what was needed to be done to correct it. The problem centered

on tiny microscopic cracks left behind in the steel welds. These then

became starting points for crack growth and proliferation under the

stressful conditions of the hydrotests. Particularly alarming was that

these initial welding flaws could be so small that no known in-situ

inspection technique could detect them. The only way to discover

them, therefore, was to take a sample from the weld and put it under

a microscope. But that entailed cutting a hole in the very rocket chamber that was supposed to go into a Polaris missile.

The initial solution, which was put into place at the end of 1958

at the Aero-Jet Corporation where the chambers were being made,

was to grind the welds smooth. This got rid of the initial cracks, thereby

removing the seeds of larger, possibly catastrophic cracks. The more

expensive solution, which came later, was to buy more sophisticated

welding equipment with which Aerojet engineers could better control the welding process to begin with. These welding practices segued

right into the Minuteman Missile program, which was about one year

behind the Polaris program.

By studying the detailed, often microscopic physics going on behind the scenes of a material going sour, Irwin and his colleagues

helped to develop a very basic understanding of material weaknesses

and flaws widely applicable in the Navy and elsewhere. Their professional peers recognized the work with awards as well as by using the

work as starting points to delve further into other materials-related

fields such as metal fatigue, stress corrosion cracking, and adhesion.
252 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

George Irwin, who followed his NRL career by becoming a professor at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues did not get

banner headlines in newspapers. Yet their esoteric and pioneering

investigations into tiny cracks left marks on the most awesome weaponry the world has ever seen while simultaneously pushing forward

fundamental knowledge about how materials work.

So seminal and lasting were Irwin’s influences on the field of fracture mechanics that the organizers of a major technical conference in

the materials world, known as the ASM-TMS Materials Week, saw fit

in September 1997 to convene a special G.R. Irwin Symposium to

honor Irwin for his lifelong accomplishments. In the symposium’s

inaugural address, Bahkta Rath, Associate Director of Research in NRL’s

Materials Science and Component Technology Directorate, had this

to say:

“Professor Irwin’s contribution is a blend of physical concept,

mathematical analysis, and test procedure, which allow the results of laboratory tests to be directly useful in predicting the fracture behavior of real structures. Now an established part of the

general discipline of structural engineering, Fracture Mechanics

allows design against plastic deformation. There is no other

achievement of recent decades in the area of design procedure,

that we know of, that compares with his contribution.”50

Testing Goes Underground and Other Places

The infrastructure of Mutually Assured Destruction—the heart of

Cold War Strategy for thirty years—has thousands more components

than meet the public eye. Missiles, warheads, submarines, and planes

are just the most obvious components. The varied career of David

Nagel, now superintendent of the Condensed Matter and Radiation

Sciences Division, is a reflection of that truth.

When Nagel had first heard of the Naval Research Laboratory in

1962, he was a twenty-something officer finishing a two-year tour at

sea with the Navy following his ROTC experience at Notre Dame

University. He had just finished delivering a nuclear reactor to
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 253

McMurdo Station in Antarctica where it seemed, perhaps ironically,

that nuclear power could serve as the environmental answer to large

and messy traffic of oil-filled 55-gallon drums. “I was in a monsoon

south of what was then called Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), when the

teletype clicked out a message on its yellow paper saying that Lt. Nagel’s

next duty station was NRL,” Nagel recalls.51

He reported for duty at NRL in June 1962, just months before the

last legal above-ground nuclear tests would be conducted. Nagel’s ongoing kaleidoscopic experience at NRL represents the strange and rich

brew churning at the Navy’s corporate laboratory. Almost immediately

he began working with NAREC, the Naval Research Computer, on missile defense calculations. The NAREC, acquired, in part, to support the

Stump Neck antenna, was a mammoth machine built of thousands of

vacuum tubes, miles of wires, and which required an entire branch of

people just to maintain and operate it. It was one of the most powerful computers on Earth at the time. It was, in Nagel’s words, “a homemade vacuum tube supercomputer.” Today, a laptop with a Pentium

microprocessor would run circles around it.

The impetus for the work, which occupied Nagel for more than a

year, was the Navy Space Surveillance System (NAVSPASUR), which

had grown out of the NRL’s Minitrack system that just a few years earThe room-sized Naval Research Computer, or NAREC, which was used

at NRL from 1954 until 1972
254 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

lier had tracked the first man-made satellites. NAVSPASUR already

had radar beams monitoring the heavens for satellites flying over U.S.

territory. The question military planners wanted answered was whether

the same system could be used as a missile defense warning system.

The task boiled down to programming the computer to run orbital

mechanics calculations (that can describe the trajectory of such things

as moons and missiles). Programming NAREC and other computing

machines of its ilk in the early 1960s, however, was to know the machine down to its tubes. Since an entire night’s run would be lost if a

tube burned out, Nagel often would sleep at NRL with a set of code

sheets on hand. That way, if a tube did go cold, he would tell the

NAREC operators what binary code (a series of ones and zeroes, represented by certain tube settings) to reestablish so the calculation could

continue.

After his NAREC days, Nagel moved to a secret antisubmarine

warfare program. “The issue was whether you could see on the sea

surface a temperature or other difference due to the passage of a submerged submarine,” says Nagel. Since the general idea here was to

detect submarines by means other than the traditional sonar technologies, it was called nonacoustic antisubmarine warfare. “That is

why it was known as ‘unsound research’,” Nagel jokes.

Part of the project involved airplanes equipped with infrared scanners passing over submarines looking for temperature differences while

a ship dragging an array of temperature sensors would go through the

submarine’s wake. Nagel’s role in these exercises, which took place

off the coast of Rhode Island, was to build an instrument that could

automatically record the ship’s heading and rudder movements. From

this data, the locations and times of the temperature measurements

could be readily and carefully documented.

This tack was reasonable enough, but it was costly. To cut down

on the expense of these at-sea experiments, NRL pursued another route.

Nagel was in on this one, too. A two-man submarine would leave its

berth in Annapolis and arrive at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge by evening.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 255

Already there, inside of a boxcar-sized laboratory hanging under the

bridge’s eastern span, was Nagel, several NRL colleagues, a lab’s worth

of radar and infrared instruments, and recording equipment. Nagel

would phone rudder commands to the submarine below to make

sure it would pass directly underneath the instruments. “I had a bull

horn to warn away other boaters,” he recalls.

The results were negative. There appeared to be no reliable thermal signal that would betray the location of the submerged submarine. “Whether it can be done I flat don’t know,” says Nagel, adding

the often-heard phrase at NRL that “if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.”

Indeed, a lot of NRL’s important accomplishments over the last few

decades remain classified and untellable.

After narrowly escaping recruitment by Admiral Rickover to become a nuclear submarine driver, Nagel shifted gears, joined the Navy

reserves, and began working as a civilian for LaVerne Birks in the Xray Optics Branch. If nuclear submarines were not in Nagel’s future,

nuclear weapons were. In a conversation during an airplane flight

that Birks had with Wayne Hall, NRL’s Associate Director of Research

NRL researchers conducted submarine detection experiments from this

gondola laboratory suspended below the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
256 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

for General Sciences, Hall suggested to Birks that he take a look at the

nuclear weapons testing arena, which international treaties and agreements had relegated to being underground after 1962.

“I remember Birks coming back and talking in hushed tones . . .

that maybe there was something to do in that arena,” Nagel recalls. At

the time, weapons designers at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos

weapons laboratories were designing hydrogen bombs that would release more than half of their energy in the form of X-rays. The idea

here was that such weapons could disable Soviet nuclear-loaded reentry vehicles by exploding nearby and sending out a fast-as-light front

of X-rays intense enough to vaporize the reentry vehicle’s skin and

further damage it with the resulting impulse. That was the theory, but

the only sure way to know if the weapons worked as intended was to

measure the kinds and intensities of energy coming out of them. “The

assessment of X-ray emission from nuclear weapons was a very, very

key thing at that time,” Nagel recalls. That’s why the X-ray Optics

Branch, including David Nagel, became regulars at the crater-pocked

Nevada Test Site.

Birks, Nagel, and their colleagues decided they ought to get a definitive, detailed X-ray spectrum from these weapons as a baseline for

a range of weapons effects studies on various materials, components,

and even entire reentry vehicles. Money for each test came in chunks

of $50,000 to $70,000 from the Defense Atomic Support Agency,

which later became the Defense Nuclear Agency, which later became

the Defense Special Weapons Agency. With this support, Nagel and

colleagues built X-ray measuring equipment that they hauled to the

Ranier Mesa in Area 12 of the test site. Amidst their work on the most

terrible weapons ever made, “we would look at mustangs running

wild,” Nagel recalls.

Once at the test site, he and his handful of colleagues would take

the equipment several hundred feet underground through mined

shafts to a vacuum system that was 20 feet in diameter. X-rays from a

nuclear device placed some distance away would travel down vacuum
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 257

pipes and, thereby, into NRL’s measuring instruments. After a shot,

Nagel explains, “they would open the plug at the end of the tunnel

and we would don oxygen breathing apparatus, suit up like we were

on the Moon, and, sometimes in knee-deep water, move in and recover our equipment using flashlights.” Therein lie the nitty-gritty details of a Cold War.

After an initial string of a half-dozen failures, Nagel recalls the

team’s first success. “We actually got a spectrum that was on scale,

quantifiable, and, by any measure, a breakthrough,” Nagel says. No

one before had obtained a fine-scale X-ray spectrum of a nuclear explosion. The NRL team was able to measure the energy and the wavelengths of the emitted X-rays so well that they saw an unexpected Xray line. They surmised it was due to the presence of silver.

“We went to Dave Hall at Livermore and said, we think your bomb

has silver in it,” Nagel recalls. “He smiled. We never found out what

the silver was for.”

About twice each for five years, Nagel and his colleagues in the Xray Optics Branch would intermittently spend weeks at the Nevada

Test Site. Their measurements on the blasts got more and more sophisticated, but for Nagel the work was becoming routine and uninteresting. For some in the business, nuclear weapons testing gets boring. So the NRL bomb-testers gladly handed over their tools and responsibility to the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory and to

people they had gotten to know from the Los Alamos and Livermore

labs, whose missions were officially centered on nuclear weapons. “It

had been wonderful in its own way,” recalls Nagel, but it was time to

get out of the business.

But Nagel did not get out of the business completely. Although

he had begun to expand his own research portfolio with more fundamental physics studies using some of NRL’s powerful instruments for

probing the interaction of radiation and matter (such as a Van de

Graaff ion accelerator), nuclear weapons research began to touch him

again. Another division in the Laboratory, Plasma Physics, also would
258 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

follow up on the military conundrum that came with the nuclear

weapons test ban—answering such questions as what happens to a

nuclear warhead when it is struck with the X-ray energy from another

nuclear weapon (launched to intercept the incoming one) without

being able to blow up any nuclear weapons to help answer the question.

In the early 1970s, NRL had built one of the leading, high-powered neodynium lasers in the world using a series of glass amplifiers

acquired from France as well as others designed at the Laboratory.

This effort took place early in a long-term and ongoing commitment

to plasma physics, which focuses on the intriguing form of matter in

which atom’s negatively charged electrons and their positively charged

nuclei dissociate from one another to form a kind of soup of electrons and nuclei. Plasmas like this form when the vast energy of nuclear

explosions or intense laser pulses interact with the atoms and molecules in the atmosphere or with nearby liquid and solid materials.

“Laser targets would go from room temperature to a million degrees on a scale of nanoseconds (billionths of a second),” Nagel recalls. “These targets were more than red hot, more than white hot,

more than UV (ultraviolet) hot, they were X-ray hot.” So there was

Nagel, a member of a very good X-ray group with access to a world

class laser that could produce high energy plasmas, which emitted

eminently publishable X-ray data with a flick of a switch.

The situation went several ways. One was in the direction of basic

research. Since materials on Earth had never been subjected to such

powerful laser blasts, new results were practically guaranteed just by

putting some stuff in the way of the laser. “We shot Lincoln in the

temple on a penny one day and recorded the spectra,” Nagel offers to

illustrate the kind of fun the group was having. This work yielded

many papers, including several that earned Nagel and his colleagues

a name in the field of plasma physics. (Much of the success of these

studies depended on NRL’s LaVerne Birks and John Gilfrich of the Xray Optics Branch, who led a long-term effort to develop and im-
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 259

prove a technique known as X-ray fluorescence analysis, which is now

used around the world for everything from compositional analysis of

materials to pollution monitoring.)

The other direction taken by this work was again toward the nuclear

testing arena. Each nuclear test in Nevada cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. And since these had to occur underground, it was

hard to know how the results related to more strategically relevant

uncertainties like what happens when nuclear explosions go off just

above the ground or high up in the atmosphere. In lieu of seeking the

right to explode weapons in the air, the Defense Nuclear Agency looked

for alternative sources of the bomb-like X-rays.

That is how machines like powerful lasers and electron beam machines that can simulate the effect of nuclear blasts on smaller scales

under more controlled circumstances came to dominate NRL’s involvement in weapons testing in the 1970s and thereafter. “The weapons simulation work has evolved greatly,” says Nagel, who took on

his present job as head of the Condensed Matter and Radiation Sciences Division in 1985.

That evolutionary development also took some other branches

that had little or no relevance to weapons simulation and the Cold

War. “We went from using plasmas for weapons testing work to using

them for X-ray lithography,” or the patterning of microelectronic chips

using X-rays instead of the longer wavelengths chip companies generally have used. The idea here is that the shorter X-ray wavelengths

enable electrical engineers to pack more circuitry on the same chip

area. That, in turn, would yield more powerful microprocessors and

other electronic devices.

The inspiration for Nagel to enter into such a project emerged

after a visit in 1971 from Martin Peckerar (now head of the Surface

and Interface Sciences Branch in the Electronics Science and Technology Division), who then was working on X-ray lithography at

Westinghouse’s Advanced Technology Laboratory in Maryland. “It

occurred to me that we were getting enough X-rays from these laser
260 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

plasmas to do exposures not in an hour (as in Peckerar’s efforts), but

in a microsecond or less,” Nagel says. In time, Peckerar and Nagel

patented a laser-plasma-based X-ray lithography process and continued working in the area with funding from the Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency. A laser at the University of Rochester even

licensed the patent and began developing it toward commercialization until the company went broke and its director committed suicide, Nagel says. X-ray lithography remains as one of the electronics

industry’s candidate next-technologies for chip making and laser-based

methods could become part of this future. For Nagel that would be a

welcome offshoot from the weapons simulation work that got him

into the X-ray lithography business to begin with.

Make-believe Nukes

Weapons simulation work continued evolving at NRL, of course.

In the middle of this evolution for the past 20 years has been Timothy

Coffey, NRL’s Director of Research since 1982. Born in Washington,

DC, he earned an electrical engineering degree at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology before receiving a PhD in physics from the

University of Michigan in 1967. His own research life became deeply

linked with military research during his first post-school job at EG&G

in Boston. There he began working on the antiballistic system known

as “Safeguard.” NRL also had a hand in this program, and it was

through NRL contacts at EG&G that Coffey ended up first being drawn

toward NRL.52

 Coffey’s entry onto NRL’s staff in 1971 came by way of Alan Kolb,

a plasma physicist who had agreed to create a capability in the Plasma

Physics Division to take on the key part of the so-called high-altitude

nuclear explosion program for the Defense Atomic Support Agency.

The crux of the problem was to determine what happens in a nuclear

explosion at very high altitudes where military planners hoped they

could intercept incoming Soviet missiles. Whether such an ABM system would work, however, hinged on whether the debris from the
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 261

intercepting nuclear weapon or the enemy’s incoming weapon significantly interacted with the rarefied atmosphere at high altitudes or

the Earth’s magnetic field. High Altitude Nuclear Effects, or HANE, is

how people in the know referred to such phenomena.

If the bomb-atmosphere coupling were strong, then a lot of ultraviolet and other radiation would result. The expanding front of radiation, in turn, would create ionization that would blind radar systems,

making it hard or impossible to determine if the intercept attempt

had worked and if other missiles followed the first. That, in turn, would

reduce an ABM system to a veritable crapshoot.

Although the high-altitude problem was central to high-level

nuclear weapons and defense strategy, solving it fell squarely within

the realm of fundamental plasma physics. It was the kind of problem

that fit perfectly within the vision of a military corporate laboratory

where the most basic science would have critical consequences for

national defense. After securing funds from the Defense Atomic Support Agency in 1967, Kolb was able to set up a plasma physics program along with another program aimed at creating X-ray simulators

for testing the effects of nuclear weapons on materials and components of military hardware.

By the time Coffey came to work at NRL in 1971 to become head

of the Plasma Physics Dynamics Branch (under Kolb’s Plasma Physics Division), Kolb had built up a powerhouse program involving

top-notch plasma physicists (as NRL employees, contractors, and consultants) from around the country. “I found myself coming from

what I considered, as far as my interests were concerned, to be a backwater up in Boston, into the middle of this exploding area with lots

of money,” Coffey recalls.

Plasma physics at NRL was not the only thing exploding at the

time. Coffey and his family actually arrived in the Washington area in

1968 just as some of the most violent moments of the civil rights

movement were unfolding. “My family flew into Washington just as

the city was burning down,” he recalls.
262 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Although society was undergoing explosive changes at the time,

after 1962 no one had been exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Coffey knew the only way to tackle problems like the

high-altitude nuclear effects problem was to develop bomb-less experiments—computer models and new high-energy laboratory tools

and experiments that could somehow serve as surrogates for the

phenomena that occur in real nuclear explosions. The results of these

approaches could then be compared with the limited cache of data

from tests up to the final 1962 series of atmospheric bomb tests.

Among the more consequential developments during Coffey’s

tenure in the Plasma Physics Division were machines capable of

delivering short pulses of massive amounts of power to various solid

targets, thereby producing the kinds of X-rays that come out of

nuclear explosions. Coffey started working on the NRL campus soon

after a second-generation, pulsed-power machine known as Gamble

II was completed at NRL. Gamble II stored energy slowly but released it an instant. It could deliver 1 terawatt (trillion watts) of

power several times a day. Although that shot of power lasted for

only 50 billionths of a second, during those instants it amounted to

more than the combined electrical power capacity of the United

States. By exposing such items as military electronics and spacecraft

components to the radiation produced using Gamble II and its subsequent upgrade in 1978, Coffey led NRL plasma physicists to improve their ability to assess the effects of nuclear weapons including

the survivability of crucial parts of military machinery in the event

of nuclear war.

Not only did Coffey find himself amongst some of the nation’s

most talented plasma physicists at NRL, he also found himself in

the middle of a politically hot arena. NRL was joining other government laboratories including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and

Sandia as well as contractor laboratories, all of whom were investigating the high-altitude problem. Congressional interest was high.

There also were competing camps in the Department of Defense
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 263

that either favored or opposed the antiballistic missile concept, which

was the basis for interest in high-altitude nuclear effects.

Laboratory machines, such as Gamble II as well as powerful lasers

capable of producing the kinds of physical effects expected from

nuclear explosions, was one of the two major areas in which Coffey

immersed himself. The other, computer-based simulation of nuclear

and atomic processes, provided, in principle, even more versatility.

In the early 1970s, computers were still big, lumbering, and exquisitely slow by today’s standards. Coffey recalls spending plenty of

his weekends at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (where the AbelsonGunn isotope enrichment method was implemented during World

War II) where he could use one of the nation’s most powerful computers to run calculations. “I got into the business at this point of

overseeing development of some of the biggest computer codes that

were ever written,” Coffey says. He spearheaded development of computer codes (programs) that could simulate the complex fluid motions and interactions (along with electrical, magnetic, thermal and

other accompanying effects) that occur at various parts of the atmosphere during nuclear explosions. Since these were and continue to

be such untrodden territories, the work not only led to important

results for military planners but also to more fundamental scientific

understanding of plasma processes in the Earth’s ionosphere. Today’s

efforts at NRL in computational science and techniques for fields ranging from ship and submarine design to flame and fire dynamics can

trace important roots to this work.

Coffey made his first move up NRL’s management ladder in 1975

when he became Superintendent of the Plasma Physics Division. The

move expanded his responsibility from the theory, math, and computer-heavy field of modeling high-altitude weapons detonations into

other big science and engineering arenas. One of these centered on

the development of high power lasers as part of the nation’s nuclear

fusion research program. “The core of the design team that ultimately

designed the [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL] Shiva
264 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

and Nova lasers [for fusion power research] came out of this laboratory,” Coffey says. The LLNL program has been the flagship U.S. research effort in so-called inertial confinement fusion in which banks

of laser beams compress fuel to the point of nuclear fusion.

In the late 1970s, Coffey found himself and his division engaged

in a big-stakes battle with the laser fusion researchers at LLNL including John Emmet, a former NRL branch head in the Plasma Physics

Division who left NRL to run LLNL’s Inertial Confinement Fusion

program.

By that time, the laser fusion program had gotten to the point

where it would take as much as one billion dollars to go to the next

stage, a high-level decision that depended on such arcane issues as

precisely how laser energy couples to the charged particles in a plasma.

Since NRL was well known by then for its expertise in such areas, the

Department of Energy often looked to NRL for advice.

“They really needed us as an independent voice on what was really going on so that the exuberance of people trying to sell the next

biggest laser was tempered by the realities of what the plasma was

doing,” says Coffey, who became a regular on advisory panels created

by the Department of Energy to help make the big-money, fateful

decisions inherent to the inertial confinement laser program. NRL’s

role in revealing fundamental issues important to the goal of inertial

confinement fusion now continues with the very large, Department

of Energy-funded, krypton-fluoride laser facility, known as NIKE (after the Greek goddess of victory). NIKE’s primary function is to examine issues connected with laser beam uniformity and a variant of inertial confinement fusion known as direct drive.

In January 1980, Coffey took another big step up the management ladder by becoming the Associate Director for the General Science and Technology directorate, one of three main organizational

arms of the Laboratory’s research portfolio. Less than two years later,

he stepped up to become the Director of Research in charge of 3,800

full-time personnel, more than half of them PhD scientists and equiva-
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 265

lently trained engineers. Now he was responsible for the Laboratory’s

entire research and development portfolio, not merely that part of

the portfolio focused on nuclear weapons effects.

Red Scares (Or Not) and Secret Capabilities

A few years before Coffey took over the helm of the research program at NRL, his predecessor, Alan Berman, took on a high-priority,

classified project that he says amounted to about as much fun as he

ever has had on the job.

On September 22, 1979, an aging U.S. surveillance satellite, part

of the Vela nuclear detection system, detected what appeared to be

the optical signature of a nuclear explosion in the air off the coast of

South Africa.53 Since the optical signature reported by the Vela satellite was considered ambiguous and the Air Force did not detect any

radioactive material, the Laboratory was requested to exploit available geophysical measurements—including underwater acoustic

data—to determine the geographic location of the signal’s source.

Hopefully, that exercise would solve the existing ambiguities. This led

to a secret investigation headed by then NRL Director of Research

Alan Berman, whose background in underwater acoustics and surveillance made him particularly suited to determine if there were any

corroborating acoustic or other evidence of a bomb blast.

“I put together a team and we looked at all evidence all over the

world, including high levels of radionuclides (fallout) in the pancreases

of Australian sheep,” recalled Berman, who left the Laboratory in 1982,

14 years after he had come in from a university-operated but Navysupported research facility to become NRL’s fourth director of research.

“We found acoustic signals that occurred at various locations and times

that we had predicted should have occurred . . . so we put it all together and we hypothesized that an explosion had happened near

Marion Island and Prince Edward Island [about 1,200 miles southeast of South Africa], and since this was a South African island, the

source of the signal was probably South African.”
266 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

 The issue was politically sensitive. “[We] brought this back to the

White House and there was a group there that objected strongly to it

because it wasn’t the answer they expected to hear,” Berman recalled.

Members of the South African government recently vindicated the

conclusion of the report, Berman says, by admitting they had tested a

nuclear weapon on September 22, 1979. Berman learned much later

that the Presidential Distinguished Senior Executive Service Award he

received after the episode was, in his words, “apparently a recognition

that the NRL analysis was correct.”

This was not the only special, high-priority Cold War project that

had fallen onto Berman and the NRL staff. In the early 1970s, for

instance, NRL became the center of a top secret project in the arena of

submarine detection that was so massive that the budget of the Laboratory was effectively doubled. That amounts to a project of the several hundred million dollar range. Berman recalls that the drama began when an admiral at the Pentagon had called him to an urgent

meeting. “He went on to explain that he had just come back from an

overseas trip and some folks had shown him some remarkable things

that nobody understood and he wanted me to get involved immediately,” Berman recalls in necessarily cagey language.

That began a period of two years during which Berman was doublehatted directing NRL and this massive, top priority project. Researchers dropped what they had been doing to become part of new working teams. “Buildings were taken over suddenly and windows disappeared from buildings,” Berman recalls. “You know that a research

area is black when windows are taken out and cinder blocks get put

in.”

Berman remembers the time as a mix of exhilaration and the kind

of high anxiety and stress that he never wants to experience again. “I

was getting calls from the White House on a regular basis,” Berman

recalls. Even so, NRL’s effort was not initially fruitful, Berman admits.

It did not yield an understanding of the physics behind the apparent

new means of submarine detection that was at the center of the project.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 267

The program subsequently left NRL and became a “major classified program” that went on for many years. Public knowledge of

whether this program produced a new capability will have to wait

many years either until the presumed new military capability is no

longer cutting edge enough to remain classified or until it is used

under the revealing lenses of CNN cameras.

Between this submarine detection project and the Vela satellite

incident, there was yet another high priority mission that Berman

and his diverse NRL staff was asked to take on. The mysterious episode began about breakfast time on December 2, 1977. That’s when

many residents living near the Atlantic coast in New Jersey began hearing strange rumblings, blasts, booms, and other sounds. Something

about them seemed big, very big. “Sounded like a truck hit the back

of my house,” is how one resident in Tuckerton, New Jersey, described

an early afternoon boom on December 2. Earlier that day a Brigantine, New Jersey, man reported hearing a “very strong blast” that he

said shook his house violently for three or four seconds. Strange thing:

he was inside, but his wife, who was outside, did not hear the blast.54

This was not a case of people hearing things that were not there.

The Lamont Doherty Observatory at Palisades, New York, for one,

had a microbarograph (a sensitive instrument for measuring changes

in air pressure) running on that same strange December 2 afternoon.

At 3:04 p.m., it picked up a signal so strong that the instrument’s

recording pen darted to the top of the chart paper where it stayed for

15 seconds until it was manually released.

The “sounds” went on day after day like that. Often one neighbor

would think his house was falling down while a neighbor working

outside in the garden next door sensed nothing unusual. For the next

month and a half, people as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south

as Georgia reported similar experiences, though most of the reports

came from residents of the New Jersey coast.

All the while, the mystery intensified. The CIA, Coast Guard, Air

Force, and Navy all reported having no idea of what could be causing
268 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

the booms. Media reports included speculation about the causes of the

sounds. Supersonic aircraft, meteor fireballs, earth tremors, UFOs, and

unannounced nuclear tests of some kind were among the guesses. One

eminent university scientist claimed it was exploding methane seeping

out of the ocean bottom and a precursor to a major earthquake. Given

the apparent magnitude of the events, and the possibility that some

kind of weapons testing might be involved, it was inevitable that the

Department of Defense would become implicated.

On December 28, Gerald P. Dinman, the principal deputy of the

Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, circulated a

memorandum about the events:

“Over the past few weeks, considerable interest has evolved regarding the unexplained acoustic phenomena which have occurred off

the east coast of the U.S.,” Dinman wrote. “The Department of

Defense has been asked to investigate these incidents to try and

explain their cause and, if appropriate, their effects.”55

Dinman continued:

“Accordingly, it is requested that the Navy perform a short, intensive investigation of these incidents in an attempt to discover their

cause. It is suggested that the Naval Research Laboratory, due to its

multidisciplinary technical capability, could perform this function.

Close coordination should be maintained with the Central Intelligence Agency, as they have been tasked to investigate these incidents also.”

A week after Dinman’s memorandum, during which there were more

acoustic incidents, the Chief of Naval Research officially charged NRL

with the task of getting to the bottom of the mystery. And within hours,

NRL had created a dozen-member task force, including Alan Berman,

NRL’s director of research and himself an ocean acoustics expert. Also

on the task force were experts in technical areas likely to be relevant—

combustion phenomena, plasma physics, atmospheric dynamics, undersea acoustic phenomena, ocean science, and environmental and

geophysical science. Another ten would join the group as needed.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 269

The task force systematically searched every possible clue that

might help solve the mystery. Any commercial or government activity

that could have generated acoustic energy on a massive scale and any

tool that might inadvertently have measured such releases became

prime targets. Historical records and reports of unexplained noises

also became research resources. During their historic trek west, Lewis

and Clark reported hearing loud noises56 while in the Rocky Mountains. In the late 19th Century, multiple observers in the delta of the

Ganges River in India reported hearing sounds like distant artillery.

Half a century later, people on or near Seneca Lake in upstate New

York, reported similar “dull booms.”

Interesting as these apparent historical precedents were, they didn’t

move the investigation forward. One of the major tactics to solving

the problem was to question all military and nonmilitary organizations that conceivably could have been carrying out some kind of

activity that lead to acoustic discharges of the kinds reported. The

initial round of such questioning came up empty. Research and development officials of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Defense Nuclear

Agency, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency all ruled out

any activity within their own domains that could be responsible. Ditto

for quarry operators, petroleum companies, and other firms that might

have been using explosives for doing geophysical, seismic, acoustic,

or other sound-generating investigations at the time of the mysterious acoustic events.

With this unanimous chorus of “it wasn’t us,” the NRL task force

began considering a range of well-known, little-known, and conjectural phenomena that could be responsible. Was it possible that the

annual additions of 5 million tons of wet sludge to a massive sewage

disposal site outside the entrance to the New York Harbor had begun

to release huge volumes of methane into the atmosphere where the

gas might then be exploding? A quick but convincing study by NRL’s

Chemistry Division ruled out methane. Was it possible the events were

due to unusual meteors akin to the famous 1908 Tunguska meteor
270 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

that devastated a remote area of Siberia and that was recorded by

seismometers around the world? Analysis of seismometer data failed

to reveal any Earth shocks of the magnitude consistent with this hypothesis.

There were several important clues already in, however. For one

thing, only people inside or near structures reported the “sound” or

rumbles. That suggested the events themselves were infrasonic, that

is, low-frequency air vibrations below audible ranges. The audible

sounds people reported derived from nearby structures set into motion by the infrasonic energy. By correlating citizen reports of the

infrasound events with the more precisely timed occurrences picked

up by instruments such as those at the Lamont Doherty Observatory

and a network of other observation stations in New England, the NRL

team was able to roughly localize a likely point of origin of the events.

From these calculations, it seemed the mystery sounds in New Jersey

were originating many tens of miles off the coast near the popular

summer retreat of Long Beach Island in areas reserved for military

flight operations.

The timing of the events also suggested to the NRL task force that

some sort of human activity, rather than some natural phenomena,

was the likely culprit. Even with that logical constraint, there was as

yet no smoking gun. The task force was able to conclusively rule out

such possible causes as nuclear explosions, exploding ordnance, missile or satellite launches, civilian aircraft, ship disasters, civilian use of

explosives, and geophysical exploration using explosives.

A break in the investigation came when the task force revisited

the possibility that high-performance military aircraft were causing

the mystery. By modifying a program for underwater acoustics calculations, the task force was able to show that the sounds could be correlated with Air Force and Marine flights in the exercise areas. Moreover, the calculations showed that during the periods in question, a

combination of temperature inversion in the atmosphere and highspeed south-to-north winds could create an acoustic duct that would
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 271

efficiently transport very low frequencies as far as 50 or more miles

from where the sounds were generated.

“Interviews with military pilots established that they do not maintain precise records of their periods of supersonic flight,” the task force

wrote in a preliminary summary report of their investigation in March

1978. But more careful analyses of whether aircraft with supersonic

capabilities were present in or near designated training areas off the

coast of New Jersey and Charleston, South Carolina at times of unambiguous reports of the sounds revealed a correlation of the “smoking gun” variety.

In interviews, pilots flying on days during which the mysterious

acoustics had been detected reported performing the high-speed

climbs, sharp turns, and other maneuvers in their training zones that

were likely to have caused the sonic disturbances. “On every occasion

when significant reports were made by residents and confirmed by

scientific instruments, supersonic-capability aircraft were found to be

operating in nearby [training] areas,” the task force concluded in their

final report of their investigation. Just as significantly, none of the

noises was detected when military aircraft were not engaged in supersonic flights in the designated areas. In all likelihood, the mystery

had been solved with no UFOs or meteors in sight. An equally convincing correlation of supersonic Concorde flights and ducting conditions pinned event that were also occurring in Nova Scotia to a

Concorde turning-point off the Nova Scotia coast.

The solutions were straightforward. Changing flight patterns,

avoiding particularly sharp maneuvers in the western borders of the

training zones, and working around meteorological conditions particularly conducive to propagating infrasonic energy from the supersonic flight would diminish or even put an end to the sounds that

had been mysterious just a few months earlier.

There have been additional “the-White-House-needs-to-know”

missions given to NRL. One of the most important ones was to help

NASA uncover why the Mars Observer spacecraft, which in 1993 was
272 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

to be the first U.S. spacecraft to study Mars since the Viking missions

of the mid-1970s, suddenly lost communication with mission control on August 21, 1993.

NRL Director of Research Timothy Coffey led a board of scientists

and engineers in search of the answer. “We were challenged to conduct an extraordinarily complex investigation in which we had no

hard evidence to examine nor communications with the spacecraft,”

Coffey noted when the board’s final report was released on January 5,

1994. With a deficit like that, no absolute conclusion would be likely.

But, Coffey said, “after an extensive analysis covering every facet of

the mission, operations, and hardware, I believe that we are justified

in arriving at the conclusions we have.”57

In short, the investigation team concluded that the loss of communication with the spacecraft followed a rupture of a fuel line leading to a pressurized escape of both helium and fuel, monomethyl

hydrazine. The escaping gases then probably propelled the spacecraft

into a spin fast enough for the spacecraft to automatically enter a

contingency mode. This, in turn, would have interrupted stored command sequences programmed to turn on the transmitter while preventing the spacecraft’s solar panels from orienting themselves properly, leading to a discharge of the batteries.

These and other findings of the investigation team uncovered additional technical and managerial vulnerabilities. “Their work will help

and guide us in formulating a corrective action plan to help ensure

future success as we plan for recovering our Mars science exploration

objectives,” said Wesley Huntress, Jr., Associate Administrator for

NASA’s Office of Space Science, when the phone-book-sized final report was released.58

The Flip Side of the Cold War

NRL’s role in aboveground and underground nuclear weapons

testing, simulation of nuclear weapons and their effects with highenergy machines and computers, and intermittent investigations into
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 273

mysterious and potentially threatening phenomena were all reflections of the Laboratory’s immersion in the Cold War. It would be so

until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Yet the other side of the Laboratory’s

“split” personality, the part hungry to learn more about the world

simply because there was more to learn, also would take alternative

paths forward into the Nuclear Age. To be sure, nuclear weapons held

the highest drama when it came to nuclear technology, but it was just

part of the enlarging world of nuclear science and high-energy physics of which many NRL scientists were determined to remain a part.

In recognition of the wider implications of nuclear science and

technology, NRL had established a nuclear physics group in October

1947 under the leadership of Ernst Krause, the same man who made

sure NRL would have access to the captured V-2 rockets. A month

later, the group became known as the Nucleonics Division. One coveted portion of the nuclear technology arena that NRL had to acquiesce to others was nuclear propulsion.

This was a bitter pill to swallow since Philip Abelson and Ross

Gunn came up with a preliminary design for a nuclear propelled submarine as far back as 1946. But Vice Admiral H.G. Rickover, head of

the Bureau of Ships, had successfully maneuvered within the newly

formed Atomic Energy Commission to win control of the engineering and development of nuclear-powered submarines, the possibility

of which was first outlined in a classified NRL report by Abelson,

Gunn, and several colleagues.59 In retrospect, elders of the Laboratory

rate the decision as a correct one since a nuclear propulsion program

would have irreparably deflected the Laboratory from its broad-based

mission.

With bomb testing already part of the Laboratory’s fabric, and

nuclear propulsion left to others, NRL researchers turned to the thousands of other avenues of nuclear and high-energy physics, most notably the acceleration and use of particles like electrons and protons

for studying and altering materials.60 During WWII, the Laboratory

already had gotten its hand into the world of accelerators when it
274 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

built a 20 MeV (million electron volt) Betatron. This was a machine

that could accelerate electrons up to energies sufficient to produce Xrays, which NRL researchers put to use largely for analyzing the interiors of metal components including foundry castings and high-explosive shells. In its major role in testing materials without having to

destroy the samples, the Betatron was in direct lineage with the gammaray radiography technique pioneered by Robert Mehl in the early days

of NRL’s Metallurgy Division. It had the advantage, however, of being

able to reveal smaller defects. The Betatron went on-line for the first

time in early 1945.

In 1952, the Nucleonics Division began assembling another type

of accelerator—a Van de Graaff machine—that could accelerate positively charged nuclear particles such as protons (the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) and the nuclei of heavier atoms. A 30-foot long pressurized tank filled with electrically insulating gases surrounded the

large, half-ton accelerating terminal. To house the accelerator and the

control room along with the electrical and other equipment needed

to operate it, the Laboratory built an entirely new building with a

cavernous interior. By 1954, the new accelerator was accelerating protons up to 5.5 MeV, enough for them to penetrate atomic nuclei in

dime-sized targets of materials such as aluminum foil or to knock

neutrons out of target atoms. The neutrons, in turn, became probes

for examining the detailed internal anatomy of materials.

The Van de Graaff’s initial workload focused on basic measurements on a large variety of particle-bombarded nuclei to determine

and quantify the kinds of nuclear reactions in which different elements participate. But the accelerator’s ability to produce a range of

charged particles meant that it could produce emanations similar to

those that satellite-borne instruments might be expected to encounter. The Van de Graaff could serve as surrogate to cosmic sources of

particles and thereby help to calibrate sophisticated detectors intended

for duty in space. Moreover, since charged particles from the accelerator cannot get through more than the surface region of materials, the
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 275

accelerator also became an important tool for studying surfaces. By

bombarding surfaces with particles of specific energies, it became

possible to detect specific contaminants or ultrathin coatings on surfaces by analyzing the types of radiation that emerged once the samples

were irradiated. These kinds of studies can help uncover how and

why materials age, fatigue, and wear.

By the late 1950s, the hunger for more powerful, higher energy

machines began to have its effects. The Betatron, NRL’s electron accelerator, already was heading toward obsolescence. At 5:15 p.m. on

June 27, 1963, the Laboratory’s next generation electron accelerator,

the Linac, yielded its first beam of electrons, which smacked into a

copper target, causing it to become radioactive. Like its predecessor,

researchers put the Linac to use for such jobs as calibrating spaceintended detectors by exciting elements to energy levels at which they

would emit radiation previously produced only in cosmic sources.

Another type of study relied on the Linac’s ability to induce specific

radiation responses in the elements of samples, thereby enabling

This double-exposure of the NRL 5-MeV Van de Graaff accelerator shows

the accelerator component normally hidden within the instrument’s steel

pressure chamber.
276 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

chemists and materials scientists to make precise analyses of the

samples’ chemical composition.

Another foray into “Big Physics” was a circular cyclotron able to

accelerate positively charged protons, or larger nuclear particles, up to

75 MeV. It, too, needed its own new building, which was erected without windows on the south end of Bolling Air Force Base, NRL’s immediate northern neighbor. In the basement of the building went a 250-

ton accelerating magnet housed within a massive vault isolated by thick

concrete walls and enormous steel doors. Another 80-ton magnet extracted only those types of particles a researcher wanted for a particular experiment. The building housed additional equipment for transporting the resulting filtered beam from the cyclotron to experimental

stations and an electronics-filled control room. By the time it was dedicated in March 1967, the cost of the facility was $5.5 million.

Most cyclotron work centered on studies of the structures and properties and materials, but in the fall of 1973, a trickle of cancer patients

began entering the windowless building for radiotherapy. The idea here

was to locally inject tumor-killing radiation where it was needed by

carefully aligning the tumors with a neutron beam created with the

cyclotron. This program eventually was transferred to civilian hospital

settings. The cyclotron closed down in the mid-1980s. Its building now

houses the Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence,

which reflects the general trend toward computational tools and information technology.

Perhaps the single most amazing part of NRL’s plunge into the

realm of nuclear science was to land its very own nuclear reactor within

sight of the nation’s capitol. On April 7, 1954, the day after the Defense Department asked Congress for the authority to build the reactor at NRL, the Washington Post and Times Herald ran a front page lead

story with the headline, “ATOM REACTOR ASKED HERE.”

Given the audacity of the idea, it is no surprise that Ernst Krause

again was a key figure in getting the idea through the powers that were.

Of course, it was only natural for a research division known as the
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 277

Nucleonics Division to want a reactor. “But it was unheard of to place

such a machine in a populated area, especially Washington, so near

the nation’s capital,” Krause recalled in a 1982 interview with historian David DeVorkin.61 Nevertheless, Krause and his associates were

able to convince the Atomic Energy Safety Committee and its famous

chairman Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), that NRL could

build and operate a safe nuclear reactor.

A Congressional appropriation of $996,000 for the Washington,

DC area’s first nuclear reactor came through in the summer of 1954.

Construction of the “swimming pool” reactor began in mid-1955. In

this design, the reactor rests within a 150,000 gallon pool about 40 ft

long by 26 ft wide by 201⁄2 feet deep. On September 15, 1956, the

Atomic Energy Commission granted NRL a license to operate the facility at an initial level of 100 kilowatts. Two days later, the first chain

reaction of nuclear disintegrations began to occur in the small reactor.

(a) The control room

of NRL’s cyclotron

(b) Diagram depicting the

cyclotron’s sometime role

as an instrument for

cancer radiotherapy
278 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

In his January 17, 1957 speech dedicating the new reactor, Charles

S. Thomas, Secretary of the Navy, told his audience what to expect

from the new reactor:

“There is no way of predicting what we will learn, but it will be

used to study the structure of matter including such practical

applications as the structure of new alloys. It will be used to create and study new substances, to make chemicals radioactive for

direct study and to produce chemical and biological changes. In

the reactor, radiation effects upon materials of all kinds—plastics, metals, cable coverings, transistors, and electronic components—will be studied. Shielding problems applicable to propulsion will be investigated. Some day, this research may lead to

nuclear power for trains and planes. All of this knowledge will

lead to quicker development of atomic power for peace and industry.”62

Ten years later, in 1966, there would be seven research reactors in

operation around Washington, DC, including NRL’s reactor, which

The core assembly of

NRL’s research nuclear

reactor, which first hosted

chain reactions in 1956,

is shown suspended in

a pool of shielding water.
chapter 9 – nrl, nuclear fallout, and the cold war ♦ 279

by then was operating at 1 megawatt. But an hour’s drive north at the

National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland (now called

the National Institute of Standards and Technology), a more powerful 10 megawatt research reactor had begun operating. Like the NRL

reactor, neutrons generated from the nuclear reactions inside of the

reactors core served as powerful analytical probes for determining the

internal and surface anatomies of all manners of samples.

The great irony of nuclear physics is that its atomic and subatomic

objects of study are superlatively diminutive, yet its research tools are

about as big and expensive as scientific instruments get. It is true that

NRL’s nuclear physics facilities helped maintain a base of expertise in

an area of physics that NRL would not have had otherwise, but in the

1970s, NRL aimed to broaden its research efforts. One way to realize

that goal was to leave much of the big and expensive physics of nuclear

science to others who wished to specialize in that capital-intensive

field. On June 20, 1970, NRL shut down its historic reactor. The deactivated and decontaminated swimming pool reactor now has a submerged bed of sand that the Physical Acoustics Branch uses to investigate such things as the challenges of detecting munitions buried in

shallow waters where the Navy expects near-future conflicts are most

likely to unfold.

The Nuclear Age, the Cold War, and NRL all co-evolved. It has

been an era marked by an astounding quickening and diversification

in the realms of science and technology in general. In the past few

decades, the increasingly important roles of microelectronics technology, information, computational tools and techniques, new and

more capable materials, global and local communication, and local

and global sensing and surveillance all have become apparent in the

overall portfolio of NRL’s expertise and research organization. Tools

for analyzing, manipulating, and simulating the world as it unfolds

on atomic or cosmic scales, and during time intervals as small as trillionths of a second or as grand as billions of years, have become increasingly more powerful, sophisticated, and revealing.
280 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

NRL reactor log with entry under September 17, 1956, indicating

the reactor’s first operation at “criticality,” or under conditions

allowing sustained chain reactions to occur

All of this scientific and technological evolution has pushed the

envelope of NRL’s more historically rooted disciplines such as chemistry and optics. It also has opened up entirely new fields such as

information technology and biomolecular engineering. And that is

just the point of the Naval Research Laboratory—to have the people

and resources required for going further and deep into known territory or for pioneering into the unknown.
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 281

C h a p t e r 10

From a Golden Era

to Reality Checks

281

To watch NRL’s changing organizational charts since the end of

World War II through the Cold War and onward to the present moment is to see a large research organization navigating the interacting

tides of science, technology, public opinion, and politics. Organizational and administrative changes have occurred at every level of the

Laboratory from the top leadership downward. New research directorates, divisions within directorates, branches within divisions, and

sections within branches have never stopped emerging, coalescing,

getting renamed or reoriented, or disappearing altogether.1

The Nucleonics Division, for one, was created after World War II

as fallout from the nascent Nuclear Age in which nuclear weaponry

and other technical areas specific to nuclear-based phenomena and

technologies would become chronically important. A quarter-century

later, the division would disappear as an identifiable entity as its components morphed into new divisions, such as Plasma Physics and

Radiation Science.

The previously singular Radio Division split into three divisions,

each focusing on different territories of a field that diversified and

speciated at a dizzying pace during and after World War II. This tripartite division covered traditional areas such as vacuum tube and

antenna research, areas that came to the fore during World War II

such as search radar and countermeasures, and nontraditional areas

including psychology.
282 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

The Solid State Division came to be in 1954, partly in response to

the invention of the transistor by three physicists at Bell Laboratories

in late 1947. Interestingly, Bernard Salisbury, a vacuum tube designer

at NRL, had gotten close enough by the summer of 1948 to inventing

the transistor that the Navy initially wanted to share credit with Bell

Laboratories for what has become one of this century’s most important inventions. After a meeting at NRL with a contingent of managers and scientists from Bell, however, the Navy withdrew its claim.

Salisbury was on the right track, but he had not yet observed transistor-like behavior in his gold-coated copper-oxide gadget.2

Some of the organizational changes have been less concrete. In

1954, NRL’s rocket-based science and technology programs and weapons testing efforts revealed how complex NRL’s tasks were becoming.

To anticipate a growing need to handle such programs, the Laboratory created the short-lived Applications Research Division. Its maiden

branches in Data Processing, Engineering Psychology, Operational

Research, and Systems Analysis reflected the multidisciplinary needs

to make modern technology—and its ever larger systems such as rockets and atomic weaponry—work. Some of these efforts merged with

others to become the Laboratory’s present day Information Technology Division, which has links virtually everywhere now that computers and simulation tools have become ubiquitous in all phases of

Naval operations and research.

One of the more fundamental organizational changes since World

War II happened in 1949 when the Laboratory inaugurated the office

of the Director of Research to be held by a civilian scientist. With a

civilian at the head of NRL’s technical program, NRL’s post-WWII senior scientists felt it would be easier to attract and keep the high quality recruits they wanted. The first three directors of research up until

1967 were all home-grown. They had come up from the ranks to run

the Laboratory during what many consider to be a golden era for

American science, when money came easily and public support was

high.
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 283

The first director of research, Edward O. Hulburt, was apropos for

the Laboratory’s renewed vision of itself as a university-like workplace.

What’s more, the academic and gentlemanly Hulburt always had championed the way rigorous fundamental science can find important Naval

applications. He served until 1956 when Oscar Marzke, then Associate Director for Materials, took over the directorship for a short time

during 1956 and 1957, before leaving NRL to become Vice President

of Fundamental Research at U.S. Steel. The third director of research

was Robert Page, whose ambition and engineering expertise hastened

the creation of the United States’ first Naval radar systems in the 1930s

and during World War II. Page served until 1967, by which time the

Laboratory was destined to transform along with the rest of society.

Another large scale and lasting change in the Laboratory occurred

in 1953 under Hulburt’s watch. The Laboratory’s 13 divisions were

divided amongst three new, broader categories—Electronics, Materials, and Nucleonics. Each of these larger organizational units, now

called directorates, got its own associate director of research. That way,

the civilian director of research would not have the unwieldy and

perhaps overly challenging requirement of being directly responsible

for so many different research programs.

The director of research and associate directors, who became

known as “the archangels,” sit at desks along “Mahogany Row”—the

series of paneled offices in Building 43. This layer of upper-management, in their role as the Research Advisory Council, or RAC (and

known inside NRL as “The Rack”) has became an important conduit

of information and advice for the Laboratory’s director of research

and commanding officer in the job of setting the Laboratory’s research

agenda. One way the RAC serves this role is through a key annual

ritual. Laboratory researchers vying for a portion of the so-called “6.1”

and “6.2” money (earmarked for basic and applied research, respectively) that comes to NRL each year from the Office of Naval Research

parade to Building 43 with handouts, viewgraphs, and other supporting materials. There they argue their case before the RAC. Larger is-
284 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

sues and longer-term strategic planning are more likely to occur at

the “RAC retreat,” a several day think tank session convened early

each year.

The creation of the civilian directorship of research at NRL in 1948

helped to boost the Laboratory’s ability to respond to the increasing

complexity and magnitude of the Navy’s R&D program. The creation

of this office in no way diminished the responsibilities of the

Laboratory’s military Director, who maintained authority over the

operation of the Laboratory. However, ambiguities about the respective authority of the Laboratory’s two top offices sometimes arose. So

in 1977, the NRL Director was redesignated as the Commanding Officer. And a year later, the Laboratory’s civilian Director of Research

and Commanding Officer began operating within an official framework of joint executive management within a single administrative

unit. It has been that way ever since. While the Commanding Officer

remains the final authority over all internal matters, he and the Director of Research jointly plan and manage all aspects of the Laboratory.

In its present configuration, the Laboratory has three technical

directorates—Systems, Materials Science and Component Technology,

and Ocean and Atmospheric Science and Technology, as well as the

Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST), which is not officially a

directorate unto itself yet functions somewhat like one. There also is

an administrative directorate, called the Executive Directorate, and a

Business Operations Directorate, whose collective divisions cover such

functions as financial management, contracts, and supply.

Each research directorate has its evolutionary history sketched out

in the changing organizational charts. In 1966, for example, the Nucleonics Directorate morphed into a directorate called Research For General Sciences. It subsumed most of what was covered in the former

directorate while adding an Ocean Science and Engineering Division,

including the Deep Sea Research Branch that became so busy with

search and rescue operations. The new directorate also included the

Plasma Physics Division, whose birth derived largely from the global

ban on above-ground nuclear tests in 1962. Timothy Coffey, the
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 285

Laboratory’s present director of research, would get his start at NRL as

a contract employee in this division in the late 1960s. The creation of

the Ocean Sciences and Engineering Division within this new directorate reflected the Navy’s ever growing need to understand everything it could about the world’s oceans, which to many had become

the Cold War’s most strategic venue. After all, it is in the oceans that

the superpowers’ most credible threat and deterrent, nuclear submarines carrying nuclear warheads, prowled.

That oceanic research trend continued the following year, in 1967,

when the Laboratory expanded the Ocean Science and Engineering

Division to become a new, strangely named fourth directorate—Research For Oceanology, a name that connoted a larger sphere of topics than a more traditional term like oceanography might have. The

present-day Ocean and Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate evolved, in part, from this directorate.

The year the Research for Oceanology Directorate was born, 1967,

was a turning point for NRL. It falls squarely within a transitional

period from the “Golden Era” of science, which Hulburt, Marzke, and

Page enjoyed when they were the Laboratory’s research directors. It

was an era when public support for science was extremely high. With

such marvels as the atomic bomb, radar, proximity fuzes, nylon, synthetic rubber, and antibiotics, Americans saw science as the key to

winning wars and improving the quality of life. It was worthy of their

support and tax dollars.

The Cold War, the Korean War, the nuclear arms race, and the

Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellites all injected a sense of urgency

in the American mindset about the need to nurture and promote domestic science and technology. Much of the enormous R&D infrastructure that was constructed during World War II to tackle specific

technical problems, such as the proximity fuze and radar, remained

in place. Funding came from the Department of Defense, which was

created in 1947 in the National Security Act, or later from the Department of Energy. Even in 1950, when Congress established the National Science Foundation to support science in universities, national
286 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

security was the primary rationale for its establishment. The following two years saw the creation of the Army Research Office and the Air

Force Office of Scientific Research, both of them modeled at least in

part on the Office of Naval Research, which Congress created in 1946.3

With funding agencies for scientific research proliferating and

funds available for the new agencies to distribute, times were good

for research. Moreover, it was the military sector that pretty well set

the overall agenda. Throughout the 1950s, an average of 81% of overall Federal research and development funding came from the military

sector. With the passing of the National Defense Education Act in

1958, the same year NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency

(now DARPA) were established, qualified students were assured access to a college education. The Sputnik satellites spurred Congress to

more than double Federal outlays for research and development between 1958 and 1965. The prevailing attitude on the street and in

Congress was that whatever was good for science would be also good

for the country. More than that, there was some sense that national

prestige, even national survival, depended upon preeminence in science now that the Soviet Union had proven itself capable of such

feats as building nuclear weapons and putting satellites into orbit.

It was a fine time to be running a science and technology research

facility like NRL. Old-timers like Louis Drummeter and Homer Carhart

now recall it as a period when rank-and-file researchers never had to

worry about money. For any reasonable project, the money just seemed

to be there. Says Carhart: “We didn’t worry about money. We’d just go

and say, ‘hey, we’re going to work on this’ and salaries got paid and

we did things as needed. It was quite effective.”4

 The new era marked by Alan Berman’s arrival would constitute a

reality check. The honeymoon of public support for science and technology, and the almost carte blanche attitude when it came to funding, would begin ending in the mid-1960s during the escalation of

the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Not only did the material

needs of the war itself absorb part of the Defense Department’s basic

research budget, but as “an unpopular war,” it led to public scrutiny
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 287

of the government-science connection. Many researchers at universities whose funds came from the Department of Defense became the

foci of campus protests where antiwar activists considered military

research money to be morally tainted.

The Mansfield Amendment of 1970 was an early legislative instrument designed to make sure DoD-supported research, in the

legislation’s wording, would have at least “a potential relationship to

a military function or operation.” Berman notes that the language of

the legislation was porous enough to support almost any project NRL

researchers were doing, but the law did shrink the amount of money

flowing outward to universities from DoD funding agencies like the

Office of Naval Research. Whereas in the 1950s, the DoD funded a

clear majority of all Federal research and development, by the end of

the 1970s the proportion was closer to one-fifth, which amounted to

just over $2 billion.5

 Total Federal spending for R&D now is about

$78 billion.

When Berman began his directorship at NRL, the proportion of

government funding slated for research and development began a

gradual eight-year decline, though in actual dollars the trend remained

Director of Research Alan Berman at his desk in Building 43.

Berman was director from 1967 until 1982.
288 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

slightly upward. During this period, a new ethic of accountability

began to infiltrate the scientific community, NRL included. The consequences on funding would not be as dramatic for the Laboratory as

it was for academic scientists at universities, but the need to justify

and account for money requested and spent already was becoming a

permanent part of the Laboratory’s research culture. More and more

of the staff found themselves doing what they rarely had had to do

before—writing proposals, competing for money, and filling out increasing volumes of paperwork.

Throughout the 1960s, the Laboratory also underwent a spate of

new construction on grounds that had previously been part of the

Washington Navy Yard just north of the original Laboratory buildings and adjacent to the Bolling Air Force Base. Today’s Chemistry

Division, Electronics Science and Technology Division, and Space

Sciences Division as well as a portion of the Laboratory’s administrative services are all in buildings erected at that time and place.

With so much physical and psychological change going on in the

1960s, it was only fitting for the Laboratory to hire Alan Berman as

the new director of research. Berman had been a Navy researcher for

years but never was at NRL. He had begun his own research career on

projects for the Navy as a graduate student at Columbia University

and later became the director of the Navy-supported Hudson Laboratory (whose mission centered on antisubmarine warfare). Still, Berman

was an NRL outsider when he took over the reins from Robert Page.6

Unlike Hulburt, Marzke, and Page, Berman had no personal history invested in NRL. So he had no particular allegiances or personal

baggage to accommodate as he negotiated a new path for NRL during

the Vietnam era and up to the early 1980s—the penultimate decade

of the Cold War that had provided the clear context for Berman’s entire career in military research.

Berman’s life intersected with NRL’s institutional history when

Captain Tom Owen, NRL’s military director at the time, invited him

to apply for the directorship. According to Berman, Owen exercised a

strong-arm approach to placing new blood in the Laboratory’s lead-
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 289

ership as well as to applying more business-based management tactics to the Laboratory’s operation. After convincing himself there was

enough good raw material at NRL, Berman accepted the offer to become the Laboratory’s fourth director of research.

His goals were simple, at least in theory. “I wanted NRL to be a

modern, high-class laboratory that was competitive in terms of professional excellence and I wanted it to be involved with things that

would make a difference to the Navy,” he recalled in his New York

accent thirty years later.7

 And he took on this mission with what would

become a legendary mix of intensity, energy, intelligence, and

micromanagement.

When Berman first reported to work at NRL, he requested a copy

of every article in the scientific literature that had been authored or

co-authored by a member of the present staff. He then immersed himself in the deluge of paper for the next month. It was his way of getting a first-person sensibility for the range of research going on at

NRL. He also immediately began a managerial practice that became

famous. Called “Breakfast with Berman,” the director would meet each

morning with a different branch head, having reviewed a continuously fattening file on the branch the night before. “I always looked

forward to ‘Breakfast with Berman’ because I knew he would tell me

something about my branch that I didn’t know,” recalls James Murday,

now superintendent of the entire Chemistry Division.8

With this management style, Berman equipped himself to make

decisions from both the top-down and the bottom-up. As did any

director of the Laboratory, he had to negotiate the Laboratory’s interests within higher military and political contexts (with the help, of

course, of the military director). To do that, he would find himself in

settings such as the Pentagon or before House and Senate Subcommittees controlling funds for the Office of Naval Research, which had

been a major source of basic research funding for NRL since ONR’s

formation in 1946.

Berman championed NRL as a place where bench scientists could

do top quality research, get recognition for their work by their peers,
290 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

and be happy doing it. Without a strong and steady connection to the

general scientific community, he knew there would be little hope of

maintaining and attracting the kinds of scientists by which an institution can maintain respect in the scientific community. As for those

who would be NRL scientists, he made great demands. A 4.0. grade

point average was almost mandatory for any viable candidate. And

for those already at the Laboratory, he used the “Berman algorithm”

in which he used inputs such as the numbers of journal papers published, conference presentations given, and the like, to calculate professional advancements such as raises and the timing of promotions.9

Prior to Berman’s arrival, NRL researchers published their work

primarily in internal Laboratory formats rather than in the kinds of

journals that would make them and NRL more visible contributors to

the scientific community. By the time Berman left the Laboratory, the

staff was publishing far more often in the open peer-reviewed journals than in internal or classified publications. It was a shift that clearly

helped lift NRL’s prestige and visibility.

Berman set out during his fifteen-year tenure to reshape the

Laboratory’s research portfolio in a way that balanced scientific and

technological trends, funding realities, and the Laboratory’s unique

place at the cross-section of Naval, Defense and intelligence communities, as well as the general science and technical communities. While

closing down research facilities such as the swimming pool reactor,

and later the cyclotron, which he deemed too expensive and otherwise inappropriate for NRL, he strengthened other research areas such

as electronic warfare, electronics technologies, information technology, and optical science.

“Survival of a modern army and navy really is a function of electronic warfare capabilities,” Berman told an interviewer in 1982.10 He

noted in particular that the threat of low-flying antiship missiles concerned him greatly during his tenure at NRL. Key technical challenges

included detecting incoming missiles, having effective countermeasures (such as new generations of chaff and other types of decoys),

and rapidly processing and disseminating data for evaluating threats
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 291

and controlling responses. Optical components, new radar systems,

computer software, and new electronic gadgetry were all part of the

answer to these new missile threats, which is why Berman encouraged these areas at NRL.

“There is a perpetual battle that has been going on between missile designers and decoy designers as to who beats whom,” Berman

said. “The [electronic warfare] group here has been absolutely spectacular in that regard.”11 That explains in part why much of the limited amount of major new construction that took place at the Laboratory in the 1970s and 1980s was the erection and later expansion of

facilities for the Tactical Electronic Warfare Division.

Halfway through his directorship, in 1975 and 1976, even the

strong-willed Berman was overtaken by a controversial, politics-driven

decision to move much of NRL’s own expertise in ocean science and

technology off campus to a newly formed Navy research unit created

ostensibly to bolster the Navy’s ocean-based R&D. For many of those

at NRL and at the Naval Oceanographic Office in nearby Suitland,

Maryland, who also were caught in the middle, this was an unwelcome, wrenching transition. It entailed relocating their work and their

lives to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi at a vacant, former part of NASA’s

Stennis Space Center. There, the NRL contingent consolidated with

related Navy research programs to form the Naval Ocean Research

and Development Activity (NORDA). At the time of the move, Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi was the Chairman of the Armed

Services Committee.12

The political debate within and amongst Congress and the Pentagon, as well as court battles to stop the move and life stories of those

directly affected, played out in scores of newspaper articles and editorials. In the end, the move took place anyway. There would be additional, though less wrenching organizational changes involving

NORDA and other Navy ocean and atmosphere research groups years

later during the directorship of Berman’s successor, Timothy Coffey.

Berman began his NRL directorship during a trend of overall budgetary austerity for military research and development. After reaching
292 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

a level of about $184 million in 1973, NRL’s research appropriations

took a dip and then flattened at $173 million for several years. During the Carter Administration, however, funding levels began rising

again, reaching nearly $215 million by 1979. These numbers do not

include classified sums of money supporting black programs, including a vast program—known as Project Sierra—centered on a new and

poorly understood means of detecting submarines. By the time Berman

left NRL in 1982, the Laboratory’s acknowledged research budget had

increased to nearly $270 million.13

Berman left amidst the military spending spree that came with

Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He handed the research directorship off

to the present director, Timothy Coffey, who had been taking on ever

more responsible positions since he joined the Laboratory as a bona

fide employee in 1971 to head the Plasma Dynamics Branch of the

Plasma Physics Division.

Military R&D spending in the United States rose precipitously

during Coffey’s early years as the Laboratory’s fifth director of research

since 1949. Spending nearly doubled between 1981 and 1985 and

rose even more steeply after that due to the costly and controversial

Strategic Defense Initiative (now known as the Ballistic Missile Defense Initiative and more popularly as Star Wars) that former-President Ronald Reagan believed could lead to a high-tech defensive

umbrella impervious to a rain of nuclear warheads from the Soviet

Union.14

For NRL, SDI money flowed largely through specific doors such

as those of the Optical Sciences Division and of the Naval Center for

Space Technology, which was inaugurated in 1986 as the Navy’s lead

laboratory for space technology. “It was an amazing time,” recalls Tom

Giallorenzi, superintendent of the Optical Sciences Division when

SDI became part of the R&D picture. “People were coming to my door

from SDI asking us to take projects on for like a hundred million

dollars . . . That was a time that won’t repeat itself, but it was an interesting time.”15 Although his division did receive SDI money for some
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 293

laser projects, Giallorenzi points out that large influxes of money

from single sponsors can have double edges.

There are long term risks, he says, because big blocks of money

earmarked under specific programs for specific goals can fundamentally change the character and course of a research division. Since

these changes do not necessarily coincide with NRL’s longer term

mission, injections of money from programs like SDI can—if managers are not careful—deflect a division’s expertise and resources into

what ultimately become dead-ends.

Despite the intermittent influx of support to some parts of NRL,

the Laboratory’s overall unclassified research budget fluctuated between $478 million and $571 million from 1985 to 1989, the year

the Berlin Wall crumbled. The budget then moved upward to a peak

of $810 million in 1993 before dipping back to the roughly $750

million level of the past few years.

When Coffey first came to the Laboratory in 1971 to head the

Plasma Physics Branch, his own technical expertise meshed perfectly

Director of Research

Timothy Coffey. Coffey

has been director since

1982.
294 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

with the technical challenges associated with the then nearly decadeold ban on testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Yet the Cold

War was in full swing. So an enormous amount of research was relying on surrogate laboratory tests, physical theories, and computational

simulations to reveal and understand the probable effects of nuclear

weapons.

Since nuclear blasts turn any nearby materials (like atmospheric

gases, concrete, or people) into plasma—a soup of naked atomic nuclei and electrons—Coffey made it his business to bolster NRL’s

strength in theoretical and experimental plasma physics. Funding came

from such sponsors as the Defense Nuclear Agency and the Department of Energy. Among other things, this kind of research requires

high-energy machines for creating plasmas and the technical expertise to observe and understand how these plasmas behave. It also requires the development of sophisticated theories and access to ever

more powerful supercomputers to help scientists both understand

the results of experiments and link these to what one might expect

from nuclear explosions in different settings.16

Like most things in science, these particular strengths have proven

themselves useful for other kinds of investigations as well. Creating

and studying plasmas for the purposes of understanding the effect of

nuclear detonations, for example, requires many of the same kinds of

laboratory and cognitive tools needed to pursue such national goals

as laser-induced nuclear fusion for generating power. That is why the

Laboratory now has a massive krypton-fluoride laser system, known

as the NIKE laser, which the Department of Energy supports as part of

its overall laser fusion effort (with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory serving as the flagship facility).

Another spin-off from the earlier plasma work, which Coffey has

nurtured, has been the Laboratory’s growing strength and visibility in

the areas of nonlinear dynamics and chaos. Chaotic systems, like plasmas or the weather, are those whose behavior can unfold in dramatically different ways, yet according to definable rules and mathematically describable models.
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 295

And this has led some NRL researchers into unexpectedly promising directions. Louis Pecora, who heads the Nonlinear Effects in Materials and Structures Section in the Materials Physics Branch of NRL’s

Materials Science and Technology Division (within the Materials Science and Component Technology Directorate) says, “Our group is

involved in studying nonlinear dynamics in materials and electronic

circuits.”17

The Cold War surely is why NRL became strong in plasma physics, which is why research like Pecora’s and his colleagues’ on nonlinear phenomena now are part of the Laboratory’s research agenda. But

the most consequential influence on NRL during Coffey’s tenure so

far has been the ending of the Cold War. “The end of the Cold War has

significantly changed the strategic and tactical situation for the United

States Navy,” Coffey has said. And naturally that has been leading to

significant changes at NRL.18

With the changing geopolitical realities, military strategists have

shifted their focus away from Cold War simplicity—a potential global conflict with the Soviet Union—to more complicated scenarios.

“Conflicts impacting U.S. national interests will now be regional in

scope and location and will be waged, from a Naval perspective, in

the coastal seas adjacent to points of contention . . . like the Persian

Gulf and the coast of Mozambique,” Coffey said in 1993 at a conference on the history of oceanography.19

Whereas tracking Soviet nuclear-powered submarines across the

North Atlantic, North Pacific, and even under the Arctic ice mass was

a mainstay responsibility of the Navy in the Cold War framework, it is

far less important in the post-Cold War framework. In Coffey’s words,

“Navy emphasis will now be placed on command and control of coastlines and narrow seas; including amphibious assaults, aircraft strikes,

mine warfare, special operations, surveillance and resupply will become common.”20 Moreover, he adds, submarine threats are now more

likely to come in the form of quiet diesel-powered submarines in shallow water, rather than from the deeply submerged nuclear submarines so emblematic of the Cold War era.
296 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

With threats like these on the radar screen, Coffey has been overseeing a corresponding shift of NRL’s research agenda. Although deepocean environments remain crucial to Naval operations, the oceanography of coastal and littoral waters now has taken on increased

military significance. In these locales, fog and other consequences of

air-sea interactions that effect the performance and capabilities of

weapon and surveillance systems are more likely to become militarily

significant. The acoustic environment of these locales differs from

the deep-sea and Arctic settings the Navy had gotten used to during

the Cold War. To be prepared for conflict, Coffey says, the Navy needs

to thoroughly understand these and the many other differences between warfare in deep water and warfare in shallow water and coastal

areas.

One of the most dramatic organizational changes that followed

in the wake of the Navy’s increasing need to monitor, understand,

and exploit the diverse shallow water and coastal environments took

place in 1992. That is when the Naval Oceanographic and Atmospheric

Research Laboratory (NOARL) with about 475 employees at sites located at Bay St. Louis in Mississippi and at Monterey, California,

merged with NRL.

For many involved, including William Mosely, head of NRL’s

Oceanography Division located at Bay St. Louis, this was a homecoming of sorts.21 Seventeen years earlier, many NRL ocean scientists

were among those who moved from NRL’s Washington, DC campus

in the mid-1970s to the Mississippi facility as part of that controversial consolidation to form the Naval Ocean Research and Development Activity (NORDA). In a second wave of administrative consolidation in 1989, NORDA merged with the meteorology-based Naval

Environmental Research and Prediction Facility in Monterey and several other small laboratories under the offices of the Chief of Naval

Research to form NOARL. So with the NOARL-NRL merger in 1992,

some scientists who had been NRL employees prior to 1975 before

leaving for Stennis to become NORDA employees, returned to the

NRL fold, albeit remotely from their Mississippi location.
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 297

With this new, more unified staff of ocean science researchers,

NRL has begun to put together an unprecedented array of science,

theory, and tools for understanding and predicting sea and weather

patterns on local, regional, and global scales, according to Eric Hartwig,

who had been Director of Ocean Sciences at ONR before becoming

Associate Director of Research for NRL’s Ocean and Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate in 1992.

“We develop the oceanographic models and acoustic models the

Navy uses for ASW [antisubmarine warfare],” Hartwig offers as an

example of how his directorate’s ocean science work links to Navy

operations.22 There are similar linkages for the models designed to

predict ocean currents and large- and small-scale weather patterns,

including those driven by the cyclic surges of warm El Niño waters in

the Pacific. During the Persian Gulf conflict, Hartwig notes that researchers now under his wing delivered to the Fleet an experimental

model that they hoped could predict how mines that had broken

from their mooring lines would drift. That’s the kind of information

that can save ships and lives. “It turned out it worked,” Hartwig says.

The shift from the Cold War, deep-water context to the anywherein-the-world shallow water and coastal context has shown up at NRL

in smaller ways than the merging of NRL and NOARL. Consider what

has become of the concrete cylindrical tank that used to host the core

of the swimming pool reactor. Its nuclear core was decommissioned

and removed long ago, but the tank in which the core had been submerged still sits inside of the cavernous Building 71. Now the tank is

filled with water overlying a ten-foot layer of sand, which makes for

an idealized simulation of conditions near shorelines. Researchers in

the Physical Acoustics Branch are using this facility to develop acoustic methods for finding and recognizing objects, such as mines, buried in the sand.

Besides working to tailor the Laboratory’s expertise to match the

present and projected needs of the Navy, Coffey always has identified

one of his most important roles as nurturing the coexistence of NRL’s

several research cultures. As he sees it, the Laboratory hosts three major
298 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

cultural components.23 One is the direct descendant of NRL’s original

research culture of applied science and engineering. It began with men

like A. Hoyt Taylor, Harvey Hayes, and Robert Page and continues

today in many of NRL’s divisions including the Radar Division, Tactical Electronic Warfare Division, and Optical Sciences Division.

It is a research culture characterized by an engineering mindset

that applies what is known to make new things while maybe also

revealing new science to make those things better or more capable. It

is a culture resembling those at industrial research centers where investigators apply science and engineering to develop specific technologies, abilities, or products that further the interests of its corporate parent. It is a culture also that often is cloaked in secrecy; its results resemble corporate secrets whose revelation to others would spell

the loss of some commercial advantage. In NRL’s case, however, such

a loss of advantage would likely be perceived as going beyond commerce into the realm of national security.

Since Navy decision-makers and commanders can see the link

between the accomplishments of this culture—which include such

technologies as radar systems, electronic countermeasures, new fouling-resistant surface coatings for naval vessels, and new secure communications links—and the Fleet itself, this is the part of the Laboratory that can most easily convince (and evidently has done so since

1923) the Navy Department’s top decision-makers that NRL holds an

important and worthy place in the Navy’s overall R&D effort.

The second component of NRL’s research culture that Coffey has

been nurturing began to thrive at NRL only after WWII. Edward O.

Hulburt was the original human seed of this cultural component,

which first began proliferating in the Laboratory in the 1940s with

researchers like the husband-and-wife crystallographers Jerome and

Isabella Karle and space scientists Herbert Friedman and Richard

Tousey. More akin to academia than industry, the bias of this culture

is pure research, to push the bounds of knowledge. If research spawns

applications for the Navy, so be it, but denizens of this culture often

perceive such results as spin-offs of their work rather than drivers. Yet,
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 299

the intended product of such research—new basic knowledge about

the world—is what reveals the boundaries in which technology can

emerge at all.

The research of this culture generally is of a more fundamental

nature. Its natural line of communication is the open, refereed scientific literature from which scientists make or break their own reputations as they tell their peers what they learned. Members of this culture are the ones who could and did earn NRL a place on the scientific map. They are the ones who have been in a position to make

NRL a respected brand name capable of attracting quality scientists,

who are the ones that can push the horizon of possible technologies

further and further.

Coffey identifies the roots of NRL’s third major research culture

as going back to the Laboratory’s earliest days in the 1920s when

Hulburt and Taylor studied the ionosphere in order to understand

the medium in which the products of the Laboratory’s radio engineers had to operate. No one could have guessed at that time what

would sprout from those roots—rocket science and the Space Age. It

is a more secretive culture whose products help to keep NRL on the

minds of the military and intelligence communities. When the National Reconnaissance Office wants a new space technology idea tested

out, one place they turn to is the Naval Center for Space Technology.

NCST, which formed in 1986, also established a strong link with the

Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (now the Ballistic Missile

Defense Organization). One standout of this linkage, the Clementine

mission, has become an instant classic in the “smaller, faster, cheaper”

paradigm sweeping the satellite engineering community.

“The research guys are the people who keep the Laboratory as a

recognized player in the scientific community,” Coffey says. “The Naval

systems guys [like those in the Tactical Electronic Warfare Division

and the Optical Sciences Division] are the ties with the real operational Navy and they are the ones the Navy sees as the reason to have

NRL.”24 Both of these communities need each other, Coffey says, because the basic researchers make a scientific name for NRL and that
300 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

reputation helps bring in the applied scientists and engineers whose

technology wins over the hearts of the Navy community.

The Laboratory’s multiple personality harbors special challenges.

For example, a significant portion of NCST’s program has been supported by a single sponsor whose own short- or long-term agendas

need not merge seamlessly with those of the Laboratory. “They are in

their own community and are still largely a community we can’t talk

too much about,” says Coffey.25 At the same time, adds Peter Wilhelm,

NCST’s director, the Center’s location within the respected NRL community has made it the space engineering facility of choice for the

less visible space technology world inhabited by the military and intelligence communities.

Like any large and long-lived organization, the Laboratory has

had to wrestle with aging facilities and institutional inertia as well as

the larger military and governmental currents in which it must operate. With its retinue of aging and outdated facilities, maintenance is

no trivial matter for the Laboratory. The situation can get critical every now and again. That happened in a big way when the roof of

Building A-59, the gargantuan facility devoted to spacecraft engineering, construction, and testing showed symptoms of failure (during

high winds and heavy snows) in the late 1980s about the time the

Berlin Wall was crumbling. Finding money for the emergency repair

was less of a concern than making sure several high-priority, classified projects could continue on schedule.26

The aging of NRL’s physical plant has been progressing at a time

when military construction (MILCON) funds have been inadequate

and getting tighter. Due to special entrepreneurial skills to procure

more general military funds external to the Laboratory’s normal budget, some new buildings—including the beautiful Optical Sciences

Division building—have gone up within the last decade or so. For the

most part, however, the Laboratory has been resorting to a cheaper

route—renovating existing buildings. One by one, NRL’s buildings,

including Building 71 (the old reactor building) and Building 30

(which now houses the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engi-
chapter 10 – from a golden era to reality checks ♦ 301

neering), have become mere shells of their former selves with entirely

new and modernized interiors.

Buildings are crucial parts of an institution like NRL. But without

good people working in them, the buildings don’t mean much. Maintaining a healthy balance between talented new blood and experienced old blood in the research ranks has been getting tougher, Coffey

says. For one thing, the overall growth in the country’s science and

technology communities has meant that competition for young scientists, who bring with them the new ideas and approaches needed

to keep military research on the leading edges, has gotten stiffer. Partly

as a result of this, the proportion of veteran researchers, whose experience and wisdom is invaluable for recognizing flaws and pitfalls

(even though they are more susceptible to sticking to outdated concepts and data), has steadily increased. The problem has been exacerbated by the Federal salary caps that have made it impossible for government research centers like NRL to offer salaries to top candidates

that match what the candidates can make in the private sector.27

There are more ominous troubles to contend with as well. Since

the late 1980s, the larger tides in the Department of Defense and in

the Government in general have put NRL and many other government laboratories on the defensive. Their existence is not a given anymore. Congressional demands for more direct, clear relevancy to the

missions of the parent agencies, and pressures to downsize, have only

been increasing with time. Moreover, money-consciousness now appears to be on a chronic upswing at a time when downsizing has

become a favorite means of reducing costs.

No institution is free of both small and large problems like the

ones enumerated above. Yet it seems that every generation perceives

the problems of their own time as the ones that really could sink the

ship. That kind of angst is present today at the Laboratory. For the

foreseeable future at least, Coffey and other managers in and out of

NRL believe the Laboratory is and will remain healthy. The best bet

for long-term survival, they say, is to fulfill the Laboratory’s directive—to do top quality research whose goal is to bring the Navy new
302 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

or improved technology, as well as a better understanding and ability

to exploit the vast sea-to-space environment in which it operates. This

is made explicit by the Laboratory’s formal mission statement:

To conduct a broadly based multidisciplinary program of scientific research and advanced technological development directed

toward maritime applications of new and improved materials,

techniques, equipment, systems, and ocean, atmosphere, and space

sciences and related technologies.28

Quantifying and validating the multifaceted and often intangible

value of broad-based laboratories, including NRL, has never been easy.

But it is just such validations and quantifications that have become

central to the way government facilities now earn the right to continue at taxpayers’ expense. Coffey notes that this task becomes harrowing when measures of success used by administrators and legislators in the Pentagon or Congress involve time frames too short to

accommodate the longer-term payoffs that tend to come from places

like NRL, or when those measures of success depend on the tallying

of something, even if that something is not necessarily a genuinely

telling measure of the value NRL is supposed to produce.

Harrowing maybe, but so long as the Laboratory maintains its

reputation as a quality player in the scientific community and as a

supplier of innovative, advantage-supplying technology to its Naval

constituency, Coffey says he expects NRL to reach more milestone

anniversaries beyond the 75th anniversary that it is celebrating this

year. His optimism for NRL’s future derives from the corpus of consequential work the Laboratory has produced during his own nearly

30-year-long tenure at NRL. The following chapter portrays a small

portion of that corpus and the consequences that have come of it.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 303

C h a p t e r 11

Pixels of a Very Big Picture

303

The continued existence that Timothy Coffey predicts for the Naval Research Laboratory, as well as the respect the Laboratory continues to command in both the military and scientific communities, are

testimony to the successful shepherding work of Coffey and his predecessor in the director’s chair, Alan Berman, over the past 30 years.

Jack Brown, who retired from the Laboratory six years ago, has had a

privileged perch from which to observe NRL’s last few decades. Having attained the rank of Colonel in the Army before starting a second

career at NRL, Brown rose high enough in the hierarchy to see how

things work and was connected enough to know about pretty much

any classified work going on at the Laboratory. He has been an active

participant and diligent student of NRL’s recent history.1

Every Thursday, Brown arrives at a quiet back room office in NRL’s

Ruth T. Hooker Library. He’s retired, but he can’t stay away. His presence and wise counsel are welcomed and solicited by Coffey and others. He started working at NRL in 1971 as Associate Superintendent of

NRL’s Plasma Physics Division, after having served as a program manager and Director of the Vulnerability Directorate of what then was

called the Defense Nuclear Agency, or DNA (formerly the Defense

Atomic Support Agency). At NRL, he eventually became an Associate

Director of Research for the Support Services Directorate, which no

longer exists.
304 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

For years, Brown commuted to work with his neighbor Alan Berman.

During those commutes, “we solved all of the problems of the world

and of NRL,” Brown jokes. Even before he arrived at the Naval Research Laboratory, Brown was well acquainted with NRL. As a longtime DNA program manager, he had chosen NRL as the lead DoD laboratory for the challenging task of studying the effects of nuclear weapons at a time when it no longer was legal to conduct tests in the open

atmosphere. Brown recalls that NRL was the only place he knew that

could adequately assemble everything needed to study the entire problem, from the early instants of a nuclear explosion through the subsequent and evolving effects on the atmosphere and military systems.

In time, Brown has gotten to know and understand NRL as well as

anyone. In his view, the quintessential meaning of NRL, and its uniquely

broad research spectrum, is to preempt technological surprise on the

battleground. It is on NRL’s shoulders to provide leading edge naval

technologies and to have scientific and technological imaginations that

are a match for any real or potential adversaries. And the only way to

do that, he says, is to have high quality plasma physicists, acoustics

scientists, chemists, specialists in electronics and optoelectronics and

optics, computer and information science aficionados, biomolecular

researchers, oceanographers, experts at simulating large-scale and smallscale phenomena, materials researchers, systems engineers who can

put technologies and techniques together into such things as radar systems or electronic countermeasure systems, and experts of many other

stripes all in one place where they can cross the gaps between their

respective specialties and integrate their expertise into technology products.

NRL’s kaleidoscopic collection of scientists and engineers sum into

something like an omnidirectional light that can look all around and

up and down in order to see what militarily significant science and

technology is on, or even beyond, the horizon. The collective purview

of a narrower laboratory would be more like a search light capable of

illuminating only what is in front of it.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 305

The Laboratory’s research agenda has been expanding—along with

science and technology in general—since the end of World War II.

With the diversity of topics proliferating so steadily, the administrative task of keeping NRL strong in those areas most likely to be important to the Navy has become more complicated. Moreover, that

proliferation has transformed the Laboratory from its earlier, simpler

incarnations, where it was possible to hang the Laboratory’s research

agenda on a comprehensible number of technical themes, into a more

complex institution that no longer is simply defined.

Even so, there is at least one clue visible all over the Laboratory’s

campus, even on its publications and stationary, that graphically attempts to provide the big picture—NRL’s four-sector rondelle. It symbolizes the Laboratory’s research and development mission in a way

that transcends the yearly fluctuations of its organizational charts.

The upper-left sector of the rondelle is a stylized representation of

how atoms bond. It symbolizes the Navy’s many-faceted relationships

with the very stuff of the world from which ships, planes, munitions,

radar systems, satellites and all other material things are made. It is

where Nobel Prizes can, and in NRL’s case, have come from.

The upper-right sector depicts

Poseidon’s three-pronged staff

emerging from the sea. It represents the Navy’s need to master

the seas, and NRL’s striving to provide the Navy with the god-like

knowledge and, if possible, control over what lurks both upon

and below the water.

The bottom-right sector of the

rondelle is a depiction of Vanguard I, the first satellite NRL put into

orbit on St. Patrick’s Day in 1958. It represents NRL’s ongoing quest

to understand and exploit space for the benefit of the Navy. That first

satellite embodied the engineer’s spirit in that it took practical prob-

•••• •
306 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

lem-solving to build it and get it into orbit. It also embodied the scientists’ spirit in that it provided a new perch from which to observe

the Earth and the cosmos. It represents a well-funded, truly awesome,

and often highly classified, component of the Laboratory’s R&D personality.

Finally, the rondelle’s bottom-left sector—a stylized trace of an

oscilloscope—represents the multifarious electromagnetic and other

more or less obvious physical phenomena on which so much of the

Navy’s communications, command, control, and intelligence are based

and by which the Navy senses both natural and humanly constructed

environments.

Together, the four sectors of the rondelle graphically state that

NRL’s purview extends from the ocean bottom to outer space and

throughout the visible and invisible realms of the world. That all encompassing mission encapsulates how NRL has continued along its

now 75 year quest to provide the foundations of knowledge and technology from which come the million-and-one technical details comprising a leading-edge Navy.

Every big picture is made up of parts, just as a TV image is composed of thousands of picture elements, or pixels. Indeed, each sector

of NRL’s rondelle is itself such a big picture within the overall NRL

portrait. What follows are accounts of only a few of those thousands and

thousands of pixels of the Laboratory’s expanding research portfolio during

the directorships of Alan Berman and Timothy Coffey.

Unlike earlier chapters of the Laboratory’s story, the more contemporary phase of the Laboratory is harder to tell with neat linearity

or any kind of defensible simplification. Only as history unfolds will

we know with any certainty which of the myriad recently completed

or still ongoing projects will end up having dramatic and historically

important consequences, which are destined for obscurity, and which

will fall between those extremes. Thickening the fog is that many of

NRL’s important research accomplishments over the past few decades

remain secret, which itself is a sign—although surely not proof—that

the nation considers the work actively or potentially important.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 307

Despite those disclaimers, there already are a few clear standouts

from NRL’s contemporary era. One of them is the awarding of the

1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman

for their work in X-ray crystallography. How can it but stand out like

a neon sign to the correctness of the Laboratory’s post-WWII decision

to nurture basic science along with applied science and engineering?

The Laboratory’s role in the early design and evolution of the Global

Positioning System is another clear standout that has brought much

praise and prestige to the Laboratory. So has the Laboratory’s more

recent tour de force in the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization’s

Clementine mission, which flew only in 1992, yet became an instant

classic in the annals of satellite technology.

But like the talents of child prodigies, those are unusual standouts.

The consequences and value of the vast preponderance of work at

NRL during the last few decades remains unknown. The following

pixels of this work suggest at least part of the big way the Laboratory

recently has been striving to fulfill Jack Brown’s view of NRL’s mission—to preempt technological surprise by discovering what is possible in the first place.

Biotechnological Pixels

In 1967, Joel Schnur, a graduate student at Georgetown University, came to NRL to interview for a summer job with Herbert Rabin

and several colleagues of the Quantum Optics Branch.2

 Impressed by

Schnur’s impromptu seminar on liquid crystals (liquids whose constituent molecules align with one another in a more regimented, crystal-like fashion instead of in a random, fluid jumble and have become important in display technologies such as computer monitors),

Rabin hired him.

That was just the beginning. Schnur later landed a post-doctoral

position at NRL initially via a program run by the National Research

Council that Alan Berman liked because it furthered his long-term

administrative aim of bringing top-notch candidates to the Laboratory. In 1973, the Optical Science Division hired Schnur to work full-
308 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

time. That’s about when the seemingly endless possibilities available

through NRL’s diverse research portfolio began to inspire Schnur and

thereby influence the Laboratory’s recent history.

Schnur quickly discovered connections between his liquid crystal

work and the work of others at NRL, such as chemist Bill Zisman, a

well-known and often-cited expert (Nobel-caliber to some including

Joel Schnur) on the molecular structure of surfaces. He also saw connections with the work of researchers such as Jerome Karle, then still a

future-Nobel laureate whose work centered on more standard solid

crystals. A laser-based laboratory technique Schnur had mastered for

his liquid crystal studies led him into an area of unambiguous military

interest—energetic materials, a.k.a. explosives and propellants. Using

ultrafast laser pulses as optical probes that could take snapshots of

extremely fast chemical events, Schnur and colleagues were able to

tease out some of the chemical and physical details that sum into a

chemical detonation.

By then, Schnur was hungering for ways to use the fundamentals

of science for technological development. In 1983, Al Schindler, then

Associate Director of Research, gave him the opportunity. Schindler

was following up on a directive from Director of Research Timothy

Coffey, who could see that the field of biotechnology was taking off

and that NRL ought to get its feet wet before the wave of opportunity

had passed.

Even though Schnur was in the Optical Sciences Division, Schindler

suggested that he run the new initiative. After all, there was a natural

connection between Schnur’s expertise in liquid crystals (cell membranes, which are important model systems in the biotechnology arena,

are composed largely of molecules that arrange into none other than

spherical liquid crystals) and the new biotechnology initiative Coffey

had in mind. Coffey subsequently added force to Schindler’s suggestion by himself inviting Schnur to take on the challenge.

“I was convinced there would be new science coming out of this

biomolecular approach,” Schnur recalls thinking. “It was engineering
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 309

molecules using biology as a role model, making molecules, learning

how they assemble and looking for functions for advanced materials.”3

The timing was right for other reasons. Congress, the Office of

Naval Research, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency)—in short, almost everybody with research money to distribute—saw gold in the realm of biotechnology. While at the time most

were thinking along the lines of genetic engineering, Schnur was looking more broadly at molecular design, which made more immediate

sense for the Navy. Not only was funding available for biotechnology,

Schnur was good at convincing potential research sponsors to put

their signatures on paper.

It was neither easy nor particularly smooth, but Schnur and five

others from the Optical Sciences Division made the move to the Chemistry Division in 1983 to spearhead the new initiative embodied by

the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering. They brought

with them a half-million dollars of NRL money signed over by Coffey

with nods from his in-house advisors, and $1 million from DARPA.

In its 15 years of existence, the center has expanded dramatically and

now occupies its own renovated building on the Laboratory’s main

mall.

Schnur recalls that one of the center’s most fruitful projects began

even before the center existed during a tennis match he had with Tom

Walsh, who was head of Electronics at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “If only you had long thin objects that were conducting

they would be the world’s best radar absorbing material,” Schnur recalls Walsh saying.4

 Schnur soon convinced himself and colleagues

(and Walsh) that the task could be done using lipids, which are long,

oily molecules he had become extremely familiar with during all of

his liquid crystal research.

Schnur’s coworkers in the Optical Sciences Division, Paul Shoen

and Paul Yager, opened the door to a solution when they found a way

to get lipid-based molecules to arrange themselves into the kind of
310 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

microscopic cylindrical structures—now called microtubules—Walsh

had in mind. The research team led by Schnur suspected that these

biomolecular structures, which could serve as temporary skeletons

for more permanent coating materials, could lead to more than just

radar absorbing materials. They began to envision new more environmentally sound antifouling coatings for naval vessels, new drug

delivery systems, and other specialty items based on filling the tiny

tubes with different things. So just as Coffey was putting administrative commitment behind the Laboratory’s foray into biomolecular

engineering by setting up Schnur and his cadre of biomolecular scientists in the Chemistry Division, DARPA came through as a big, patient sponsor.

The tubule research soon worked in synergy with projects of other

team members. Bruce Gaber, for one, joined the group in 1977 and

brought with him another biomolecular project. The audacious goal

of the project was to develop artificial blood using encapsulated hemoglobin molecules inside of liposomes, or little spheres made of

lipid-based molecules. Hemoglobin is the oxygen-ferrying protein

inside of red blood cells and a liposome is much like a cell membrane. So liposome encapsulated hemogloblin (LEH) resembles blood

This electron micrograph of a lipid tubule is 0.5 microns in diameter

and 30 microns long. It is longer than the diameter of a typical

human hair.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 311

cells in form and function. Along with Gaber, Martha Farmer and

Alan Rudolph have been major players in this work.

Frances Ligler would bring another important research capability

into the group—developing new sensors for biological and chemical

warfare agents and other toxic agents. Her tack was to use exquisitely

sensitive and capable biological molecules such as antibodies, which

are a kind of protein specialized for recognizing and binding to specific chemical structures such as toxins. By coating these onto optical

fibers that could detect when binding had occurred, she and her colleagues have developed a basis for new generations of chemical and

biological sensors.

The Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering grew rapidly from five people in 1983 to 40 by 1986. And by then its budget

had grown to $3 million with nothing but more growth in sight. In

1989, the Laboratory committed money to renovate Building 30 along

the main mall into a modern facility into which the burgeoning center with its increasing cache of equipment could all move together. By

1994, the building was ready for its new occupants. The roster now

includes about 80 full-time staff, which grows by about 50% in the

summer with an influx of visiting scientists and undergraduate summer students.

Even a truncated list of the Center’s active research topics belies

the huge new swaths of science and technology NRL now has within

its fence in the dual goals of preempting technological surprise while

helping the Navy do more.5

 Lipids are the starting point for new combat care technologies, among them resuscitative fluid (artificial blood)

and cryopreservation techniques for increasing the shelf-life of artificial and natural blood supplies. Another of the center’s research thrusts

centers on how liquid crystals and other organized molecular systems

might lead to, among other things, next-generation recording and

display technologies.

The center’s researchers also are looking into how tubules and

other structures made using biomolecules can lead to new ways of
312 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

monitoring environmental quality, defending against biological warfare agents, and thwarting marine organisms from fouling naval surfaces such as hulls. Controlling the delivery of medicine, countering

mines, making new generations of integrated circuitry, and assembling nanoscale devices (that are measured on the billionth-of-a-meter

scale) for uses such as new sensing elements and even for directing

the growth of inorganic crystals for electro-optic signal processing,

are all on the Center’s radar screen. As such, the center hosts a large

array of research pixels that together foreshadow some of the ways

biotechnology will become part of the Navy’s operations.

Hair-Thin, Glassy Pixels

Another set of striking pixels of NRL’s big picture emerged from

an interaction among researchers in the Optical Sciences Division and

the Acoustic Division. The question both groups were asking independently at first was this: what good might optical fibers be for the

Navy?6

As did many other scientific organizations, NRL first began seriously looking at optical fibers in the early 1970s when glass researchers at Corning Glass Works in upstate New York invented a way to

make optical fibers through which light could travel clearly and cleanly

for miles rather than the few feet that had been the limit.

This scanning electron

micrograph shows a large

population of liposome

encapsulated homoglobin

(LEH) particles amidst a

couple of much larger

human red blood cells.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 313

In 1976, NRL acoustics scientists, including Joseph Bucaro, C.M.

(Mickey) Davis and visiting professor Edward Carome from John

Carroll University (University Heights, Ohio), were looking into using optical fibers as sensors of acoustic energy in fluids such as the

ocean. For Bucaro and Carome, who was Bucaro’s professor a decade

earlier when Bucaro was a student at John Carroll University, it was a

reasonable pursuit since they knew the pressure waves associated with

underwater sound could subtly yet detectably affect the way light traveled down the fibers. In time, they realized they could modify optical

sensors with various coatings and in other ways that transformed them

into sensors of such phenomena as temperature, electrical fields, and

mechanical strain.

Scientists in the Optical Physics Branch, including Tom Giallorenzi,

were approaching optical fibers from another angle. “We started working on all components needed for airborne and shipboard [communications] applications” of optical fibers, Giallorenzi recalls.7

 One of

the earliest problems he and his colleagues faced was the way even

subtle vibrations, of which there was no shortage on planes and ships,

could interfere with light, especially as it passed through a coupling

from one fiber and into another. These early optical fiber components could even detect voice-induced vibrations. Since acoustics and

vibrations are so closely related, it was practically destined that these

two groups would themselves couple into an interdisciplinary fiber

optics program. It’s just the sort of synergy that Brown identifies as

one of NRL’s most crucial characteristics.

By early 1977, Bucaro says he and Carome successfully demonstrated the first “interferometric fiber optic external field sensor,” which

is to say, an optical hydrophone. Bucaro believes this was the catalyst

that led to the first DoD program in fiber optic sensors. In September,

excited by this and further laboratory successes, Davis, Bucaro, and

Burton Hurdle (the Division’s ocean acoustics guru) went to DARPA

seeking support to develop ocean applications for what had been

demonstrated in Bucaro’s laboratory. As Bucaro recalls it, their DARPA
314 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

contact, Captain Harry Winsor, encouraged the NRL researchers to

“find a good program manager” and come back with a unified program. By early November, they did just that. Jack Donovan, a hydrophone systems manager just leaving the Naval Materiel Command,

was recruited as Program Manager. Davis joined Giallorenzi’s group

to integrate the work of their respective branches, and together they

all convinced one another that optical fibers had to be part of the

Navy’s future.

With that in mind, the extended group composed a unified proposal to DARPA to develop fiber optic sensor technology that they

would demonstrate in the form of a towed acoustic array. DARPA liked

what it saw and its subsequent funding gave birth to the Fiber Optic

Sensor System (FOSS) program. (According to Mickey Davis, it was

no mere coincidence that the project’s acronym FOSS, resembled the

name of Dr. Fossum, DARPA’s new director at the time.) Other funding agencies including the Office of Naval Research and the Naval

Materiel Command also supported the project.8

The first project—a towable submarine detection system made

with a fiber optic-based array of acoustic sensors—married the

strengths of the two participating divisions quite naturally. “The Acoustics Division did the acoustic part and Optical Sciences did the optical part and together we were the first to do an at-sea demonstration

of fiber optics in a towed array,” Giallorenzi noted.9

 One of the most

impressive early results came in the guise of a failure. During the first

attempt to take the towed assembly into the water, the water pressure

broke through the assembly’s protective rubber dome and all of the

electronics and optical fiber components became flooded. “We dried

it out and tried it again and it worked perfectly,” Giallorenzi recalls.

“Under these conditions of failure, [the Navy observers who would

actually make the decision to use such equipment] had never had a

sensor that wasn’t destroyed.”10

The crux of these optical arrays was an acoustic sensor that worked

according to the century-old concept of interferometry, or the mea-
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 315

surement of the way two sources of light interfere with one another.

The principle here was to mix the light from a reference optical fiber

that was shielded from underwater sound with that light traveling in

a second fiber “listening” in the water. The result is a characteristic

interference pattern that light detectors can monitor. If the second

fiber “hears” something, its light changes and that, in turn, alters the

interference pattern its light forms with the light of the reference fiber. The changes that are detectable are exquisitely minute; even tiny

sounds will affect the interference pattern. That makes for a very sensitive underwater listening device indeed. Bucaro claims that NRL has

the first (U.S. Patent 4,162,397) patent for such a device based on

work that he and colleagues in the Physical Acoustics Branch had done

before the FOSS program got underway.11

Besides the fibers, this interferometric system required the development of other components, including couplers and light detectors.

The work led to dozens of patents for both the acoustics and optics

scientists. The first at-sea tests in the late 1970s and early 1980s of a

towed array of fiber-optic-based acoustic sensors included plenty of

electronic components as well as optical ones. The reason for this was

that the light signals intermittently had to be converted into electronic

signals and then back again into light. Though necessary at the time,

all of these conversions degraded the quality of the signals and the

overall capabilities of the system.

To circumvent this limitation, Giallorenzi and his colleagues began selling the idea of the next-generation towed array. This one would

be almost entirely optical—no light-to-electron transitions, except at

the end when people, computers, or both would need to make sense

of the signals. “Through a good part of the 1980s, we did various

phases of development on that array and, in about 1990, it was chosen to be the replacement array for the Navy,” Giallorenzi says.12

Many of the Navy’s surface ships would have been equipped with

the NRL-developed “all-optical towed array” by now had the geopolitical situation not changed so drastically just as the technology de-
316 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

velopment was coming to completion. The end of the Cold War and

the fall of Communism beginning in 1989 changed everything, including the perceived need for a new generation of towed arrays for

surface ships.

The technology has not languished, however. Instead, it is slated

to become a major component of the latest generation of nuclear

submarines—the 688 class. “When they put Tomahawk missiles on

these submarines, they didn’t retain sufficient reserve buoyancy to

permit these boats to carry the 42-ton [wide aperture] acoustic array

originally specified for the 688s,” Giallorenzi says. “They asked us if

the fiber array could be lighter,” Giallorenzi recalls.13

Early patent for fiber-optic-based sensors invented

by NRL researchers
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 317

Yes was the answer. “It basically was taking the towed array technology and putting it on the side of submarine,” Giallorenzi says. At

18 tons, the system shaved 24 tons off of the new submarine’s design.

The Optical Sciences Division developed yet another incarnation of

the all-optical towed array technology. This one is in the form of a

rapidly deployable bottom-mounted device whose significantly

smaller size and reduced power needs lead to an extremely powerful

underwater listening system that can be quickly and readily deployed

almost anywhere. Some of the first tests of this version of the work

that began in the late 1970s took place in May 1996 off the coast of

San Diego.

As Bucaro, Davis, Giallorenzi, and others intuited more than 20

years ago, optical fibers have become useful components of Navy surveillance systems, communications networks, navigational instruments

like gyros, and electronic warfare systems.

Optical fibers also have become important tools for research. For

example, researchers in the Physical Acoustics Branch, which Bucaro

heads, are using them to investigate the acoustic properties of new,

stealthier submarine designs. And Fran Ligler’s group in the Center

for Biomolecular Science and Engineering is investigating their potential use as sensors for biological and chemical warfare agents.

Superconducting Pixels

There are scores of important pixels that have to do with the materials of which the Navy’s high and low technologies are made. Superconductive materials—or substances through which electricity

passes resistance-free and therefore with 100% efficiency—constitute

one of them. These remarkable materials had largely fallen in the

exotica bin ever since a Dutch physicist discovered the phenomenon

in mercury in 1911. Nonetheless, NRL had had a small effort in superconductivity going on for years when Donald Gubser, now head of

the Materials Science and Technology Division, joined the staff in

1969 straight out of graduate school.14
318 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

At the time, superconductivity was one of those areas more promising to physicists than to anyone who might have wanted to develop

practical superconductor-based technologies for the Navy. Until about

12 years ago, all known superconductors would only work at temperatures rivaling winter on Pluto. Yet if researchers could develop

more convenient superconductors that operated at warmer temperatures, the payoffs to the Navy and across the board could be huge in

the form of more efficient and powerful motors, magnets, propulsion

and transportation systems, or even computers.

In his early years at NRL, Gubser built a unique experimental chamber in which he simultaneously could cool new candidate superconducting materials while pressing them at great pressures within a diamond-jawed anvil that can squeeze objects more strongly than any

other tool. It was the type of study that could help reveal just what

made these mysterious materials tick so that maybe people could start

systematically inventing better ones. “For awhile, we had the world’s

only instrument that could really go to those pressures at those temperatures,” Gubser recalled.15 He and colleagues, including Stuart Wolf,

now head of the Materials Physics Branch, began making names for

themselves by their publications and by running conferences.

Gubser recalls getting requests from the Chief of Naval Research

to check out various claims (both within and outside of the Navy)

about breakthroughs—such as new superconductors that would work

at much higher temperatures. The claims invariably turned out to be

false or overblown, he says.

Then, in the middle of December, 1986, the arcane world of superconductivity research ignited into a wildfire. The flame reached

NRL via a meeting at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey

where a colleague of Gubser’s showed him a preprint of a paper by

Japanese researchers that convincingly demonstrated a new superconductor that worked at the record temperature of 30 degrees above

absolute zero (30 K or -436° F). “Right there at that point, my life

changed,” recalls Gubser.16
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 319

The Japanese paper was a confirmation of work by two researchers in Switzerland who months earlier had quietly reported the first

examples of a new class of ceramic superconductors that shed their

resistance to electrical currents at record high temperatures. A few days

before Christmas, Gubser and Wolf decided, in Gubser’s words, “to

stop every bit of research we were doing” and focus entirely on the

new, so-called, high transition-temperature superconductors (HTSC).17

Gubser and Wolf were lucky to have been at NRL. Although they

knew their superconductivity physics, they didn’t know much about

making ceramics. But they were able to make up for their own limitations by drawing upon the experience of NRL’s materials researchers.

Within days, Gubser, Wolf, and a pair of post-docs were grinding ingredients, mixing the resulting powders, and then sintering the mix

into wafers ready for testing. Whenever they made a new material,

they could draw on their years of experience to determine what in fact

they had made.

The little nucleus of NRL scientists that had begun working on

the instantly famous field of high-temperature superconductivity were

joined by hundreds, then thousands, of scientists around the world.

There was no hotter topic in science in 1987 than superconductivity.

Tim Coffey appointed Gubser to oversee the expanding NRL effort

and Gubser and his close colleagues found their own profile within

the Navy on the rise. When the Chief of Naval Research wanted to

find out why the scientific community was going so bonkers and what

the Navy was doing about it, Gubser and Wolf were the ones he sought

out.

It only took a few years before researchers began to realize that

these very exciting materials, some of which remained superconductive at temperatures above 130 K (-336° F), also would prove exceedingly difficult to convert into practical forms. Ceramics, after all, are

like rocks. They are brittle and hard to form into the kinds of useful

shapes, like wires, that you might want for electrical systems or for

windings to make motors. The task shifted from merely finding new
320 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

materials to developing some way of coercing these ceramics to behave more like metals when it came to their mechanical properties

and to manufacturability.

Gubser recalls that he had to walk a fine line between optimism

and realism. He felt it was his responsibility to point out to sponsors

and Navy leadership in and beyond NRL that these new superconductors had their difficulties and did not constitute a clear ticket for

things like faster ships. Yet if he went too far with that kind of realitychecking, funding for the work could disappear. A lot of the early

funding came from the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gubser recalls the

first and very remarkable meeting SDI officials asked him to attend.

“I walked right in and they said we are going to give Don Gubser

there from the Navy a budget of five million dollars to do research

this year and then we’re going to increase it to ten million the following year, and then up to 30 and 40 . . . ” The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency also became a sponsor of NRL’s superconductivity work.18

The funding never did ratchet upward as dramatically as the SDI

officials had suggested, but enough money did flow to get NRL’s superconductivity research effort onto a steady, secure basis, which is

just what Gubser knew would be needed. In the years since the initial

breakthroughs of the mid-1980s, Gubser says NRL has honed its

strength in those areas that will give it a good footing for the long

haul that will be necessary before new classes of high-temperature

superconductors become routine components of the operational Navy.

“Our strongest effort is in the fundamentals, understanding the mechanism (of superconductivity), and understanding the fundamental

properties of the materials,” Gubser says.19

Which is not to say NRL has been ignoring the potential applications of these new materials. Not by a long shot. High on the wish-list

of applications for the superconductors from the beginning has been

new electric propulsion for ships. And a collaborative project with

the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Annapolis branch to replace the
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 321

superconducting magnets of a motor originally designed using conventional, low-temperature superconductors with magnets made out

of the high-temperature superconductor bismuth-strontium-calciumcopper-oxide just recently resulted in the world’s highest power superconducting motor ever made with high-temperature superconductors. The motor produced 320 horsepower of shaft power when chilled

with liquid helium at 4.2 K and 104 hp when chilled with the less

expensive and technically easier to use liquid nitrogen at 77 K. The

superconducting wires and coils were made by an industrial partner

in the project, American Superconductor, to the specifications of the

NRL and NSWC scientists.20

The new motor is just one step toward the 20,000 hp motors that

submarines need. Still, the advance is clear evidence that the kind of

patient work NRL and its collaborators are undertaking could ultimately yield some of the payoff touted by visionaries more than a

decade ago. Besides new electric propulsion systems, Gubser and his

colleagues hope their work in superconductivity eventually will apExperimental high-temperature superconducting motor developed by NRL

in collaboration with the Naval Surface Warfare Center
322 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ply to other technologies important for mine sweeping, energy storage, communications, and radar.

Even if none of NRL’s work in high-temperature superconductors

were to yield applications soon, however, Gubser and the dozens of

other NRL researchers who have kept NRL in the superconductivity

game have been doing the job that Jack Brown and others agree is

crucial—making sure that the Navy has a very good idea about what

high temperature superconductivity really might be able to do if and

when it’s ready for prime time.

Pixels of Fire

Superconductivity is a pixel of NRL’s recent research portfolio that

thrives at frigid, cryogenic temperatures. Fire, on the other hand, is a

high-temperature phenomenon that is dreaded by a floating Navy,

and is the focus of another important pixel of NRL’s big research picture. The Laboratory’s present research program on fire suppression

stems from NRL’s earliest days when the originals in the Chemistry

Division were tasked with finding out how to reduce fires caused by

storage batteries on submarines.

Homer Carhart is a senior scientist emeritus in NRL Chemistry’s

Division and the Navy’s guru on fire suppression. He has 56 years of

research and experience behind him (see Chapters 6 and 9) and succinctly states the general problem for a Navy full of ships: “Ships are

floating arsenals which are densely packed with explosives, large volumes of fuel and other combustibles, and many men, who—in case

of fire, have no place to run.”21

One of the Laboratory’s early successes in fire suppression, which

Carhart describes from first-hand memory, came out of work done

during WWII. That’s when Dick Tuve and co-workers developed the

“bean soup” fire suppression system. It consisted of a protein-rich

concentrate prepared from such ingredients as feathers, fish scales,

and soybean residue that was mixed with water and then sent through

a special nozzle that aerated the mixture. The result: thick foam that
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 323

can blanket and snuff out burning fuel. After the war, NRL researchers

and industry collaborators developed a new, more chemically sophisticated version of the “bean soup” known as Aqueous Film Forming

Foam (AFFF). In response to the disastrous fires on the USS Forrestal

and USS Enterprise in the 1960s and 1970s, NRL developed and helped

the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) adapt the AFFF system

to flow through a ship’s sprinkler nozzles—whose original intention

was for protection against nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—and quench flight deck fires.22

The concept was implemented quickly by the Navy and then by

other sectors of society. “AFFF systems are now used throughout the

world,” Carhart says. Purple-K-Powder, or PKP, is another NRL-developed fire suppression system—this one a dry chemical that helps to

reduce the fire’s heat output and therefore slow down its spread—

that has found worldwide use.23 And, Carhart notes, all major airports have AFFF systems on hand for emergencies.

The more contemporary phase of NRL’s fire suppression innovations has been accomplished with a variety of testing facilities that

can bridge the crucial gaps between theory, laboratory tests, and real

fires. “We are still too ignorant of fire behavior to be able to extrapolate directly from the laboratory bench to the real world,” Carhart

warns.24 One test facility at NRL’s Chesapeake Bay Detachment, called

A helicopter applies

NRL-developed “light

water” to suppress

an aircraft fire.
324 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Fire I, is a pressurized chamber specially suited for investigating fire

risks and evaluating new firefighting protocols for the submarine fleet.

And since its dedication in 1987, the 457-foot, 9,000-ton ex-USS

Shadwell, which is moored at the U.S. Coast Guard’s Fire and Safety

Detachment in Mobile, Alabama, has provided NRL and the Navy

with a full-scale floating test bed. (The WWII-era ship was named after the house near Charlottesville, Virginia, in which Thomas Jefferson

was born in 1743. The house was destroyed by fire in 1770).25

Everything about a ship that is important when it comes to damage control is maintained on the Shadwell—ventilation, heating and

air conditioning, electrical systems, lighting, internal communications.

The lessons learned from tests on the Shadwell regularly become important parts of the operational Navy in the form of damage control

equipment, materials specifications (so that materials like fuels and

insulation can be chosen to minimize fire-based risks) and in

firefighting and damage control documentation and training.

Success in the fire suppression research and development business comes in the form of fires that don’t start, or in Carhart’s words

Homer Carhart with his

unmistakable handlebar

mustache
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 325

“the nonfire”; fires that don’t get out of hand; or fires that get out of

hand later than they would have without the additional, research-derived knowledge. “The more successful we are, the less we have to show

for it,” Carhart says. “You can’t document a disaster that doesn’t happen.”26

Solar Pixels

Fire has everything to do with another pixel of NRL’s research portfolio—solar physics. Like fire research, its roots extend to the

Laboratory’s earliest years when the likes of Taylor and Hulburt were

learning about the way the Sun interacts and molds the ionosphere, a

start that Friedman, Tousey, and their colleagues would later build upon

as soon as they could put solar radiation measuring instruments on

rockets in the 1940s. The tradition of making ever better and more

revealing measurements of solar activity has never been broken.

One of NRL’s most consequential modern-day extensions of this

tradition in solar physics is in the form of the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronograph (LASCO). NRL built LASCO in collaboration with

groups from England, France, and Germany. The instrument’s three

corona-viewing telescopes have been aboard the orbiting Solar

Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which NASA and the European

Space Agency jointly launched on December 2, 1995.27

Since it began sending back data in 1996, LASCO has been continuously revealing new details about the turbulent and dramatic conditions in the Sun’s corona, which begins above the star’s seething,

fiery surface and extends outward from there. The instrument relies on

a special occulting disc that creates a permanent artificial eclipse so far

as the instrument’s detectors are concerned. That way, the Sun’s more

intense emissions cannot swamp out weaker signals emanating from

the corona.

The magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology described one

category of the discoveries being made with LASCO in their May 6,

1996 cover feature.28 The article included a series of four LASCO im-
326 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

ages taken over a period of 8 hours during which millions of tons of

solar material were ejected from the Sun’s equatorial surface at a speed

of 341 miles per second. By the end of the sequence, the ejected material had traveled 10 million miles, or about one-ninth the distance

from the Sun to the Earth. “To almost everyone’s astonishment, LASCO

found equatorial ejections emitted within hours of each other from

opposite sides of the Sun,” wrote Tufts University astronomer Kenneth Lang in the March, 1997 Scientific American.29 That such concerted action occurs on such a vast scale is startling and not yet understood.

Guenter Brueckner, head of NRL’s Solar Physics Branch and the

Laboratory’s focal point on the LASCO project, says that the LASCO

data is leading to ways of predicting when coronal mass ejections

(CME) like these occur and what effects they will have on and near

Earth. “In the days preceding such an event, multiple magnetic loops

appear on our SOHO images of the inner corona. They tell us the Sun

is reorganizing its magnetic field,” Brueckner says.30 He and other researchers surmise that this reorganization, which has the effect of concentrating material along certain magnetic “streamer belts” in the Sun,

destabilizes the solar atmosphere until these belts blow open to form

the massive ejections.

All of this basic solar physics is relevant to Navy concerns. After

all, ejected coronal material constitutes the solar wind. And researchers have known for decades that the solar wind affects communications and electrical systems on and near Earth as well as aboard spacecraft. But until LASCO, Brueckner says, “no one had actually seen the

solar wind at the Sun.”30 Since human audacity has yet to reach the

point where controlling solar activity such as coronal mass ejections

is on the table, predicting and understanding them with tools like

LASCO remains the goal. “We have made a lot of progress in understanding how CME’s evolve, where they come from, how they interact with the Earth, and that has enabled us to come up with reliable

forecasting of large geomagnetic storms,” Brueckner says.32
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 327

LASCO images also reveal what is happening deep within the Sun’s

interior. One image taken on August 21, 1996, for example, shows a

luminous helical string of material stretching in a northwesterly direction (with respect to the observing instrument) as though it were a

spring that someone had pulled outward. The magnetic forces generating this coronal structure begin in convective motions inside of the

Sun that get swept to the Sun’s surface. There, this swirling convective

energy gets vented outward, leading to the formation of helical filaments. It’s all just the latest installment in NRL’s perpetual study of

the Sun and its effects on the Earth and Naval operations.

Chaotic Pixels

Gargantuan events such as the coronal mass ejections NRL’s LASCO

team is investigating, as well as the more terrestrial challenge of understanding fires, are exercises in understanding chaotic situations. A

relatively new pixel of NRL research focuses on a burgeoning and still

unproved field of science often known for short as chaos. Chaos in

LASCO image

showing coronal

mass ejection (CME)

of April 13, 1997
328 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

this context does not refer to happenings seemingly devoid of rhyme

or reason. On the contrary, it refers to complex and hard-to-quantify

phenomena whose specific behavior nonetheless is definable with

mathematical clarity.

Chaos scientists investigate a huge range of seemingly disparate

phenomena, from the electronic fluctuations within circuitry to changing animal populations and from heart rhythms to weather patterns.

Though different in physical and material circumstances, the behavior, or dynamics, of such phenomena often unfolds according to similar, often mathematically definable rules. So many phenomena once

thought to be too complex to predict indeed may be predictable, even

controllable, as Louis Pecora and his colleagues have been proving.

Pecora, who came to NRL in 1977 to work as a post-doctoral associate in the Materials Physics Branch, has become a well-known

part of the chaos research community in the decade since he entered

it.33 He started out as a materials scientist using a rather arcane technique involving positrons (the antiparticle of electrons) for probing

the internal microstructures of materials. But by the mid-1980s, Pecora

had become smitten with the field of nonlinear dynamics, which subsumes the science of chaos. Timothy Coffey was also convinced that

it would be a good idea for the Laboratory to develop its own expertise in the field. So in the mid-1980s, Pecora, along with Thomas

Carroll, who Pecora hired as a post-doc, were on their way into new

territory.

They started off by investigating a magnetic material, yttrium iron

garnet (YIG), which the Navy had used for many years in radar and

other systems because it automatically stops an electromagnetic signal, such as an enemy’s antiradar jamming signal, from entering and

blowing out sensitive electrical equipment if that signal’s power exceeds a safe range. That kind of sudden cut-off behavior places this

magnetic material squarely within the realm of nonlinear dynamics.

The NRL group’s concern was to try and better characterize the

material’s behavior right near its normal cut-off limit, which in fact
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 329

displayed erratic tendencies, sometimes cutting off at higher powers,

sometimes at lower ones. Pecora’s and Carroll’s colleague, Fred

Rachford, suggested that the group look especially carefully at the

material at power levels approaching those at which the material’s

behavior becomes erratic. It was the kind of work that conceivably

could lead to better, more predictable signal-limiting technologies,

which, in turn, could help engineers design more capable and reliable radar and other military systems. Their efforts led in December,

1987 to a paper in the prestigious Physical Review Letters,

34 which Pecora

believes helped establish NRL in the nonlinear dynamics research

community.

Now that they had gotten their feet wet, they began thinking more

broadly about topics that both would interest them and the Navy.

“Tom and I were searching for other things to do with chaos and we

started to talk about communications,” recalls Pecora.35 What came

out of that talking was the idea of synchronizing electronic fluctuation in physically separated circuitry of sending and receiving equipment. Says Pecora: “We knew we could characterize these chaotic systems [scientifically], but we thought it would be really neat if you

could show somebody how to use them.”36

They developed the idea further. Their goal, loosely defined, was

twofold: first they hoped to find ways of exploiting chaotic electronic

fluctuations in transmitters in order to scramble, or encrypt, a signal

carrying a message; then they hoped to find a way to synchronize the

chaotic fluctuations in the receiver’s circuitry with those of the transmitter. The result would be a brand new channel of secure communications.

That idea was good enough for Coffey to approve additional funding. Soon thereafter, the researchers were wheeling an oscilloscope

and some homemade circuitry down to the Director of Research’s

office to show him in no uncertain terms that they were making real

headway. There were other good signs. The researcher’s patent applications were getting approved—they were up to six by early 1998—
330 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

and their work was getting written up in popular magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and Science News, thereby bringing good visibility to the Laboratory.37

The work recently has begun extending beyond the Laboratory.

“Many variations of synchronization schemes are now being tried with

many attempts to apply the results to communications systems,”

Pecora says.38 What’s more, Dynetics, Inc., a Huntsville, Alabama firm,

signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the

Laboratory to explore the use of chaos synchronization as a basis for

providing secure communication on notoriously insecure cellular

phones.39

There are no guarantees that Dynetics, the Navy, or anyone else

will successfully convert any of this work on controlling chaos into

new secure communications systems. But the effort serves an equally

important, albeit less tangible, role for a laboratory charged with remaining on the leading edges of science and technology. For one thing,

by studying the impact of chaotic behavior on Navy systems, researchers at least can help engineers avoid or manage chaos when it becomes troublesome. At best, however, their work could create a new

leading edge by improving existing technologies or by leading to brand

new ones yet to be imagined.

“Present applications should be viewed as just scratching the surface,” remarks Pecora.40 Besides magnetic materials and electronic circuitry, researchers have shown that chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics are applicable to analysis of lasers, heart activity, and the biomedical course of vaccines, among other phenomena. In that sense,

the work by Pecora’s group fits snugly into Jack Brown’s view of NRL

as a place for creating beneficial technological surprises and for preempting ones that could prove harmful.

Digital Pixels

Pecora and his colleagues are doing their bit to keep the Navy

informed about how chaos might be important for future communi-
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 331

cations systems. That places their work in a much bigger portion of

NRL’s big picture—information science and technology. It’s an area

that NRL has become increasingly committed to since the late 1960s

when the Navy, including Alan Berman and NRL, was learning how

information-intensive, data-intensive, and computationally intensive

was the challenge of building effective countermeasures to new threats

such as high-speed, low-flying antiship missiles.

One very visible sign of NRL’s foray into information technology

is a starkly white building on the grounds of Bolling Air Force Base. It

used to house the Laboratory’s cyclotron but since 1981 it has been

home to the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence

(NCARAI). “That was directly created by Rear Admiral A.J. Baciocco,

then Chief of Naval Research, who thought [artificial intelligence]

would become very important,” remarks Randall Shumaker, superintendent of the Information Technology Division.41 The general aim of

researchers at NCARAI is to develop computers and robotic systems

that are more human-like—systems that can learn from experience,

adapt to each other and to humans, and have the ability to carry out

the kind of reasoning required for complex decision-making.

Another sign of NRL’s commitment to information technology is

the Laboratory’s acquisition of leading-edge parallel supercomputers.42

NRL currently has three of the 200 largest computers in the world.

This status follows the Laboratory’s leap in 1986 when it became the

first government laboratory to get a Thinking Machine, one of the earliest massively parallel computers. This entry into parallel computation was part of a DoD/DARPA program whose goal was nurturing

this radically different style of computing from infancy into more

mature forms that could push the envelope of many other technologies and capabilities.

Those efforts have evolved into new supercomputational capabilities. “We are working on protocols to let large numbers of entities—including real people as well as simulated aircraft and tanks, and

simulated people—interact in a large scale simulation,” says Shumaker
332 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

by way of example.43 One goal of this work, which DARPA is funding, is to develop simulations that can handle as many as 50,000

entities, thereby dwarfing any prior battlefield simulation system in

potential complexity.

Shumaker describes another set of leading edge capabilities his

division is working on that fall under the new world rubric of virtual

reality, or VR. One of them is essentially a fantastically modernized

version of the age-old planning table in which military leaders play

out tactics by moving little models of tanks, ships, and groups of

soldiers like so many game pieces. Only with the VR table, Shumaker

says, “you can use electronic models with real-time data feeding in

from sensors and other intelligence-gathering systems.”44 Those

around the table wear data gloves and special headsets that let them

interact with the simulated environment, say, by pointing to spots

they would like enlarged or through which they would like to take a

simulated walk. The system has worked “extremely well” in Marine

exercises, says Shumaker. “We are on the verge of putting these into

ships and elsewhere.”45

In another leap into VR, the Laboratory has acquired and installed in building 34 a virtual reality facility, dubbed the “grotto,”

which is about as close to the famed Holodeck in Star Trek: The Next

Generation as can be achieved today. “It’s a room with projectors in

the floors and walls and ceilings” creating the virtual environments,

Shumaker says.46 The grotto works with either real-world, or simulated, data input into computers that convert that data into orchestrated projections, thus creating simulated environments in three

dimensions.

“Suppose you want to train firefighters how to deal with smoke

and heat in a realistic but safe setting,” posits Shumaker. The grotto

ought to help, he answers. “What if you want to evaluate the effectiveness of a new weapon or tactic but don’t want to build a town,”

he posits again. His answer: the grotto. But military settings are only

part of the plan. “How would you like to get inside of atomic struc-
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 333

ture and look around . . .

or look at 10,000 miles of

the ocean bottom, and

zoom in and out when

you want to?”47 The gadgetry and “oh-wow” character of these kinds of information technologies

can overshadow their real

value. On the other hand,

remarks Shumaker, if

these technologies lead to

better, faster military decisions, or spawn new scientific or military

insights, they also could become crucial parts of the dynamic by which

the more tense and violent variety of world events unfold. Which is

why the Laboratory is making sure it is right there on the forefront of

VR technologies.

Shumaker points out another kind of technology in the works

that is anything but virtual—swarms of tiny unmanned micro-air vehicles (MAVs) for intelligence and battle management—that has

brought those in the Information Technology together with many

other researchers, especially those in the Tactical Electronic Warfare

Division. “These are palm-sized air vehicles with small payloads,”

Shumaker says.48 One type of research vehicle, aptly known as the

MITE (for Micro-Tactical Expendable), has a six-inch wingspan, weighs

in at three ounces and has a payload capacity of about one ounce.

Individually, the flying widgets might not be able to do much.

But, asks Shumaker, “what if you wanted to search for tanks in a forest. You might let loose a swarm of 50 of these to basically roam

around.”49 This kind of new military system can only emerge from

combined expertise in such widely disparate areas as lightweight sensors, battery technology, propulsion, search protocols, new materials,

robotic control, and communications. Not only does it fit within the

Schematic of the MITE MAV. This design weighs

in at under two ounces.
334 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

Laboratory’s mission to preempt military surprises, but it’s the kind

of project that stands a chance of becoming more than just a

technophile’s dream primarily because of NRL’s kaleidoscopic expertise.

Internet Pixels

Lee Hammarstrom, an engineer in NRL’s executive directorate, is

another champion of information technology. Double-hatted as chief

scientist of the National Reconnaissance Office, Hammarstrom identifies his own forte as “systems engineering of really big systems”—

like the new socially transforming “big” system known as the Internet.50

Yet even the Internet in its present form cannot begin to move the

enormous information products, such as imagery and data from sensors and satellites, that U.S. military and intelligence organizations

require for Information Superiority in the modern-day “information

race.”

Formally known as the “Global Grid” since 1990, this next-generation information infrastructure is in the process of becoming, in

Hammarstrom’s words, “orders of magnitude beyond the present

Internet in speed and richness of protocols.”51 By “richness of protocols,” he means the way computers talk to one another and the ways

telephony, e-mail systems, data links, video and other forms of data

and communications all link together. “This is the key to information

superiority” for the Department of Defense, Hammarstrom says.52

Hammarstrom and several dozen other NRL researchers, as well as

many others throughout Government, academia, and industry have

been working to realize this goal.

The Global Grid has been under continuous construction for several years. It is a combination of existing and newly developed physical components, such as satellites, optical fiber, computers, data storage systems, and switches, as well as a range of encryption, security,

communications, management protocols, and other procedures that

ensure the whole system can meet the needs of the intelligence and
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 335

military communities that the Global Grid initially has been designed

to serve.

An illustration of just how far advanced Global Grid’s designers

intend it to be is the rate at which a copy of the film Jurassic Park

could be downloaded. Using today’s faster household modems (56

kilobits/second), the transfer would take about 5 days. The transfer

would take about 2 days using an ISDN (integrated services digital

network) link. Using the Global Grid technology, which already has

been extensively implemented throughout U.S. military and intelligence installations, that transfer would take only 3 minutes (at a rate

of 155 megabits/second). At the 10 gigabit/second rate, which the

more mature Global Grid will have, the entire movie would download in 2 seconds.53

The Global Grid initiative also involves how the information coursing through the grid interfaces with people. Hammarstrom points out

that the initiative has been ushering along technologies that enable

inclusion in the Global Grid of protocols and hardware (such as new

cameras), which can allow high definition television (HDTV) visualization to work seamlessly in both television and computer monitor

formats.

“NRL has provided the key technical leadership in defining and

developing these next-generation capabilities,” Hammarstrom says.54

Consider the role that Henry (Hank) Dardy, chief scientist in the Information Technology Division’s Center for Computational Science,

has been playing in the emergence of the Global Grid. Dardy has

been combining concepts of parallelism in computers with gargantuan and ever-growing information systems like the Internet. The result, says Hammarstrom, has been the development of some new

hardware and a lot of information-handling protocols that shuttle

almost incomprehensible amounts of data at almost incomprehensible speeds.

A main pillar of this claim has do with a protocol—called Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)—of breaking up all kinds of infor-
336 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

mation traffic (voice, video, data, or whatever) into uniform packets

that can be more efficiently and rapidly sent and reassembled across

an international network of switches specially designed for the ATM

protocol. Dardy was a central player in working with specialty companies to get the necessary switches designed and built to sell at affordable prices. “Hank was the first to make real hardware out of the

ATM,” Hammarstrom says.55 He also helped transfer ATM technology

to companies like Fore Systems and Yurie Systems so that the switches

would become widely available. Such switches already have helped

manage vast amounts of military information in Bosnia, Haiti, and

elsewhere.56

Dardy says that ATM technology provides a versatile framework

whose compatibility with so many old and new, commercial and

military systems explains why it has been integrating with relative

ease and swiftness into the next-generation information systems in

military and intelligence settings. With ATM technology already diffusing into dedicated military and intelligence networks, and increasingly through industry, academic, and other government sectors,

Hammarstrom believes this pixel of NRL research will have an “enormous impact” for both the military and civilian sectors.

He’s not the only one saying such things about the role ATM technology is having. “The network has cut the time to compile and build

products by orders of magnitude,” says Anne Jorefsburg, manager of

Microsoft’s Information Technology Group. And UUNet, one of the

world’s major Internet carriers, also has implemented the new switching technology. With testimony like this and a modicum of boosterism,

Hammarstrom views Dardy’s and NRL’s work as fulfilling a maxim

that guides his own way of thinking: “Don’t ride the wave of technology; but make the wave and shape it.”57

Electronic Warfare Pixels

It is ironic how ready, almost eager, John Montgomery is to speak

about the Tactical Electronic Warfare Division (TEWD), which he has

been running since 1985, and how often he will say something like,
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 337

“the details of what we did are not repeatable to this day.”58 Such is

the conundrum with telling a story about this crucial part of NRL’s

R&D persona: tales from TEWD are worthy of a Tom Clancy novel,

but the best ones cannot yet be told except in the most gray and general hues. Anyone can go to the division’s site on the World Wide

Web and read a description of the division’s research in such areas as

“Aerospace Electronic Warfare Systems,” “Offboard Countermeasures”

and “Integrated EW [Electronic Warfare] Simulation.” You’ll even find

some pretty cool pictures and a handful of hieroglyphic, acronymriddled lists of this or that system, gismo, or research project. But a

few minutes of person-to-person prying invariably yields even more

interesting results. “You can bet that any piece of (enemy) missile

that we learned about after a battle in the Persian Gulf—that we will

look at it, and within weeks come up with a countermeasure for it,”

Montgomery says without saying much more by way of detail. “TEW

is the bridge between people out there in the Fleet and the researchers

here who can turn the need for a capability into a real thing.”59

Bill Howell, the division’s Chief Scientist, recalls one request that

came into the division in 1988 from the Kuwaiti government during

the war between Iran and Iraq.60 The division had a worldwide reputation for building decoys capable of deflecting heat-seeking and other

kinds of something-seeking missiles. He and colleagues went to Kuwait with the mission of building decoys to protect the country’s oil

terminals, which had the unfortunate trait of being large radar targets

in the Persian Gulf. That had the more unfortunate consequence of

attracting Iranian missile attacks.

 The team quickly came up with a solution—pyramid-shaped floating decoys with special reflectors and other components that magnified their appearance in the eyes of radar systems as well as to the

seeking systems of the hostile missiles. Howell and the rest of the

team later heard from their Kuwait military contacts about an unexpected kind of evidence that the countermeasures were effective. The

story that came back, says Howell, is that “some of the locals, other

than military, made small replicas [of the decoys] and were wearing
338 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

them on their necks and putting them on cars.”61 To them, the replicas must have symbolized protection, Howell speculates.

This kind of quick response work is part of the culture within

TEWD. For Desert Storm, Montgomery says, “we had 120 people

working on projects with people on cots, sleeping on the floor, working for weeks nonstop.”62

The division has roots way back to the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s,

when NRL radio engineers were pioneering intercept and jamming

countermeasures for communications and then later radar systems.

These efforts evolved first into the Countermeasures Branch of the

Radio Division in 1951, which enlarged and reorganized in the mid1960s to become the Electronic Warfare Division before becoming

the Tactical Electronic Warfare Division in 1970.

In a schematic history of the division, Allen Duckworth, director

of the ENEWS (Effectiveness of Naval Electronic Warfare Systems),

notes that the growth in size, funding, and capability of TEWD “allowed the challenges of threat weapons of the 1970s (like heat and

other kinds of homing missiles) to be equally challenged with EW

counter technology.”63 Among the specific countermeasures TEWD

had been developing throughout the 1970s are offboard expendable

systems such towed decoys and rapid-blooming offboard chaff (RBOC)

for subverting tracking radars (John Montgomery personally worked

on these in a rapid response project during the Vietnam War); power

sources such as batteries; penetration aids; threat simulation; and techniques for measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of electronic

warfare concepts.

Throughout the 1980s and until the present day, weapons systems around the world have become more clever, more computerized, more high-tech in general, and more expensive. Moreover, new

kinds of information warfare began to enter the list of serious threats

at a time when communications systems and computers were increasing in power, capacity, and sophistication. So, in addition to such

traditional work as new and improved versions of chaff, jammers,
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 339

decoys (including remotely piloted ones), signal processing, and identification systems, TEWD also has been learning how to integrate all

of these with command, control, communications, and intelligence

systems. All of this, Duckworth points out, has opened the way since

the 1980s for the “conception, design, and implementation of future

‘intelligent’ systems.”64

John Montgomery says that he would love to tell some of the

more dramatic consequences that have come from TEWD products in

the field. It’s just that they happen to be classified. In some ways, the

division itself is like those missile avoiding tactics its researchers have

been developing for decades. “We are publicity avoiders, not seekers,”

Montgomery says. “We (and the users of our products) get no benefit

from publicity, only lots of risk.”65

Nobel Pixels66

And then there are those particularly bright pixels among the

Laboratory’s big picture that flaunt the rich payoff that has come from

the Laboratory’s post-WWII decision to nurture basic science alongside its older culture of applied science and engineering. No specific

Nobel laureates Herbert Hauptman (left) and Jerome Karle.
340 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

pixel could be more emblematic of this than the awarding of the 1985

Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It went to Jerome Karle, who at 80 remains

at NRL in charge of the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter, and

Herbert Hauptman, who was a member of Jerome Karle’s group until

1961, and is now President of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical

Research Institute in Buffalo, New York.

Karle and Hauptman received their award in 1985 for seminal

work they and Jerome Karle’s wife, Isabella Karle, had begun decades

earlier on, in Karle’s words, “the structure of materials at the atomic

level: in other words, the determination of the arrangements of the

atoms in the materials.”67 Research in the physical sciences cannot get

much more basic than that.

Isabella and Jerome Karle moved to Washington, DC, to continue

their careers at NRL in 1946. They brought with them experience in

using the analytical technique known as electron diffraction to determine the structures of molecules in the gaseous state. In the years

prior to their arrival, the two had completed their PhD degrees at the

University of Michigan and worked on the Manhattan Project before

taking jobs at the university. Isabella taught chemistry and Jerome

worked there as an employee of NRL on a wartime project for NRL’s

Chemistry Division.

The Karles’ initial work was to improve both the theoretical foundation of electron diffraction as well as the instrumental and experimental aspects of the technique. “The Naval Research Laboratory afforded an outstanding opportunity to pursue this area,” Jerome Karle

remarks.68 Not only were senior members of the Laboratory supportive of this fundamental work even though there was no guarantee of

a payoff for the Navy, but the Laboratory’s top-notch machinists proved

crucial in helping the Karle’s create new instruments and improve the

technique in record time. “This led to the possibility of locating the

atoms in a gaseous molecule with high accuracy,” Karle says.69 Key

among the improvements in theory was the use of the so-called “nonnegativity criterion,” which helped simplify the daunting mathematical aspects of the technique.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 341

Herbert Hauptman joined the group in 1947 with a background

in mathematics and experience with radar while serving in the Navy.

At the suggestion of Jerome Karle, Hauptman and Karle began looking into the possibility of applying the non-negativity criterion to the

analysis of molecules in crystal structures (rather than in the gaseous

state) using X-rays rather than electrons. It was a fruitful suggestion.

The two investigators quickly adapted the mathematics the Karles had

used in electron diffraction of gases for the crystal analyses. They could

not have known it at the time, but, in Karle’s words “the resulting

conditions were such that they contained a major part of the mathematics now employed in crystal structure determination.”70 Indeed,

at the time there were still major problems to solve, the most challenging one being “the phase problem.” The conditions are in the

form of mathematical quantities called determinantal inequalities.

Work on special inequalities of significance for phase determination

was published a year before that of Karle and Hauptman by David

Harker and John Kasper, then at the General Electric Company.

To understand the phase problem in X-ray crystallography, you

first have to have some idea of how X-ray crystallography proceeds. In

1993, during his comments at a 75th birthday celebration for Jerome

Karle, Herbert Hauptman explained the technique about as clearly as

anyone might: “A source of X-rays is caused to strike a crystal, the

crystal scatters the X-rays in different directions, and the scattered Xrays are caused to strike a photographic plate [now more likely an

electronic detector], which is blackened at the points where the scattered X-rays strike the photographic plate. The amount of blackening

depends on the intensity of the corresponding scattered X-rays. The

positions of the spots on the photographic plate are a measure of the

different directions in which the X-rays are scattered. In this way, the

so-called diffraction pattern of the crystals is obtained.”71

The actual diffraction pattern itself, however, was thought to be

insufficient for working backwards to directly infer the molecular structure of the crystal. The reason for this limitation was that the spots of

an X-ray diffraction pattern yielded data about the intensity of X-rays
342 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

scattering from the crystal, but not the phases of the X-rays producing

the pattern’s spots.

“The phase problem is related to the fact that X-rays travel in the

form of a wave and it was apparent that in order to solve crystal structure problems directly it was necessary to know at what part of its

wave motion the X-ray wave had been when it scattered from the

crystal,” explains Jerome Karle.71 Without that knowledge, the problem had appeared insurmountable. This dilemma was known as the

phase problem and seemed at the time to be an ineluctable limitation to the structural information one could glean from X-ray diffraction.

Karle and Hauptman showed how dead wrong that assumption

was and thereby helped transform X-ray crystallography into one of

the most powerful analytical tools available to 20th Century scientists. The crux of their discovery was that the coveted phase information actually was present in the X-ray diffraction patterns all along,

only it took some mathematical insight to realize it. They developed

mathematical procedures by which they could extract phase information from the intensities recorded in the diffraction patterns. In

other words, they had found a way to beat the phase problem, a necessary step for transforming X-ray crystallography into a priceless

method-of-choice for directly and confidently determining molecular structures.

At least Karle and Hauptman were convinced of that. Much of the

scientific community remained skeptical. “[Solving] the phase problem was thought to be impossible,” recalled Dudley Herschbach, a

1986 Nobel-winning chemist at Harvard University.72 So anybody

claiming to have solved the phase problem might as well as have

been claiming to squeeze blood from a stone. “I shudder to think

what may have happened to this research project had the administrators of my program felt impelled to act on the judgment of the crystallographic community regarding its value,” Karle recalled later, adding that “ . . . the phase problem was regarded as insoluble even in

principle.”73
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 343

The first kinds of crystal structures to be successfully analyzed

with the new approach were ones whose molecules contained a center of symmetry, which limited the complexity of the analysis. The

researchers knew, however, that molecules with centers of symmetry

constituted only part of the molecular diversity in the world. They

also knew that using X-ray diffraction for analyzing the structures

crystals devoid of a center of symmetry would require additional insights and ideas.

Isabella Karle became a prominent part of the story in about 1956.

She quickly mastered the experimental procedures of X-ray crystallography, thereby providing the Laboratory its own data. Her first

study concerned the complex, centrosymmetric crystal of p,p’-

dimethoxybenzophenone, whose structure she solved. After

Hauptman left the group in 1961, Isabella worked closely with Jerome

on a more general methodology—called the Symbolic Addition Procedure—that would enable analysis of a much wider range of crystal

structures, namely the determination of the structures of the broad

group of crystals that were devoid of a center of symmetry.

Noncentrosymmetric crystals are of special importance because they

include, to a large extent, the molecules of life. The Symbolic AddiIsabella Karle, recipient in 1995 of the National Medal of Science, is shown

here in 1963 preparing a crystal for analysis.
344 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

tion Procedure was also much more effective than the previous methods with those crystals, which had a center of symmetry.

There were several very difficult problems to overcome. These either were unique to noncentrosymmetric crystals or the problems were

even more difficult for the case of centrosymmetric ones. Examples of

unique problems were the discovery of useful probabilistic formulas,

the development of procedures for their use, and measures of their

probability. There was the daunting fact that whereas there are only

two possible values for phases in centrosymmetric crystals, 0° and

180°, noncentrosymmetric ones can have any value between 0° and

360°. Another unique problem arose from the fact that, in centrosymmetric crystals, the usual X-ray diffraction data can be satisfied by two

distinct structures which are mirror images of each other. It is necessary to have a practical way to select one uniquely or the phase determination will fail. Other problems that had to be overcome arose

from the fact that ambiguous mathematical solutions normally occur

in this probabilistic methodology and steps must be taken to control

the degree of ambiguity. Finally, only partial structures or small fragments often are obtained. It was, evidently, necessary to develop a

suitable calculation that could produce a complete structure from a

fragment of a structure. The delicacy of the interactions among these

various considerations probably accounts for the fact that it took at

least 5 years before other laboratories began to pursue investigations

of noncentrosymmetric crystals.

During the 1960s, Isabella was using the method to determine

various noncentrosymmetric crystal structures, work that inspired

many other laboratories to adopt the procedures. By the end of the

decade, other researchers incorporated the programs developed for

application of the Symbolic Addition Procedure into their codes and

added their own variations. Thereafter, the work of the Karles spread

more and more, often hidden inside of computer codes that were

helping other researchers make sense of their raw X-ray crystallography data.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 345

Over the years, the Karles and their colleagues have solved multitudes of molecular structures. One important early example was for

11-cis-retinal, a molecule in the light sensitive cells of the eye that is

pivotal in the translation of light energy into neural signals that the

brain can process. The structural data that resulted was key in helping

vision scientists uncover the detailed physical mechanisms by which

this molecule works its visual wonders. At the same time, Barry Honig

and Martin Karplus of Harvard University were performing theoretical calculations on cis-retinal. The X-ray diffraction and theoretical

results were in agreement.

In the late 1960s, the Karles reported the structure of reserpine, a

compound isolated in 1952 from Indian snake root. Reserpine’s effect on cells of the nervous system had made it both a pharmaceutical

agent and research tool. NRL scientists helped the U.S. Department

of Agriculture determine the molecular structure of barassinolide, a

powerful hormone that stimulates plant growth. They helped determine the structures of molecules that pack into explosive materials,

as well as molecular structures of proteins, frog toxins, plant alkaloids, and a menagerie of other chemical compounds and minerals.74

Jerome Karle points out that the most useful method for determining crystal structures before the phase problem was solved arose

from the work of the late A. Lindo Patterson, then at Bryn Mawr. The

method is called the heavy atom method and involves having one or

a few heavy atoms in a molecule. The solution of the molecule’s structure follows from knowledge of the location of the heavy atom or

atoms which can be determined from the use of a “Patterson function.”

There were limitations to this method, Karle notes. It often was

impossible to introduce heavy atoms into molecules, or the molecules

that had been successfully modified with heavy atoms would lead to

crystal structures different from the unmodified ones. “And so,” says

Karle, “people used insight, trial and error, and a variety of other approaches to solve structures without heavy atoms.”75 There clearly was
346 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

plenty of incentive to try and develop a direct method of structural

determination, which is what solving the phase problem made possible.

In 1968, NRL recognized the significance of the Karles’ research

productivity by establishing the academically modeled Laboratory for

the Structure of Matter on campus with Jerome Karle as the director.

Seventeen years later, in 1985, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the achievement of Jerome Karle and Herbert

Hauptman by awarding them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Jerome

heard the news amidst cheers and a popping champagne bottle when

the pilot of the plane he was on announced that passenger Jerome

Karle had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Meanwhile, his colleagues back at NRL were popping their own bottles and fielding media

calls. For her pivotal role throughout the years, Isabella Karle also

received many prestigious awards, including the Gregory Aminoff

Award of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and National Medal

of Science in 1995.

Wayne Hendrickson, a former colleague of the Karles at NRL who

now is a professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and

Surgeons and head of a Howard Hughes Institute at the university,

wrote about the Karle and Hauptman Nobel award in Science magazine soon after the award was announced. He assessed the work of his

former NRL colleagues this way: “Whereas in the early 1960s a single

crystal structure could constitute a PhD thesis project, now that same

structure might be solved and refined within a couple of hours after

the data collection (which itself is timed in hours) is completed. The

advance is not only in speed . . . quite large structures can now be

tackled: organic molecules with up to 50 non-hydrogen atoms are

almost always routine, those of 50 to 100 atoms generally cause little

trouble, and structures have been done with more than 200 atoms in

the asymmetric unit of the crystal.”76

And that was more than 10 years ago. “It is estimated that somewhere between 10 and 20 thousand structures are determined each
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 347

year,” Karle offers as an update.77 Those structures include minerals,

molecules of chemistry and biochemistry, and more recently those of

very large macromolecules (such as proteins) that are crucial to the

life sciences and medicine. In fact, Karle notes, researchers now can

elucidate the crystal structures of molecules made of many thousands

of atoms.

“Computers and diffractometers contribute greatly to present-day

productivity,” Hendrickson wrote in his Science article, “but it is the

phase-determining methods that are most responsible for making crystallography a reliable ‘nonsporting’ science.”78

The analysis of very large molecular structures like those of macromolecules entails the use of a special heavy atom method, which helps

to simplify the interpretation of these molecules’ extremely complex

diffraction data. One of the modern and rapidly growing methods for

doing so is a product of the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter.

Called multiple-wavelength anomalous dispersion, or MAD, it is a

mathematical framework (based on a set of exact linear equations for

the analysis of anomalous dispersion data) developed by Jerome Karle

in 1980. Both Hendrickson and another former employee of the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter, Janet Smith of Purdue University,

have been finding ways of applying MAD (along with high-quality

and especially intense X-ray sources from machines known as synchrotrons) to solve previously impossible structural determinations of

molecules. One of Smith’s studies involves a structure that contained

almost 15,000 non-hydrogen atoms.

From neurotoxins to energetic materials, a.k.a. explosives and propellants, the researchers in the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter

have accrued an enviable record of structural determinations. Isabella,

in more recent years, has made major contributions to peptide chemistry and has been well recognized for her contributions. Richard Gilardi

has prepared a compendium of the structures of about 500 materials

that are either precursors, intermediates of, or the final products of the

chemical synthesis of energetic substances, most of which he deter-
348 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

mined himself. Clifford George and Judith Flippen-Anderson have

been studying the structures of neuropeptides associated with drug

abuse. John Konnert has been studying substances in the crystalline

and glassy state, and, more recently, has been investigating the process of crystallization using the Atomic Force Microscope.

Jerome Karle says that a major current interest is the developing

field of research which he and his colleagues Lulu Huang and Lou

Massa call “quantum crystallography.”79 This field involves the intimate joining of crystallographic results with quantum mechanical calculations and theoretical chemistry. The objective is to enhance the

quality and extent of information available from each of the two fields

separately. The methodology is broadly applicable to all sorts of crystalline substances. Energetic materials are currently of special interest

with the usual objective of helping to develop materials of enhanced

performance.

Karle argues that the history of structural chemistry at NRL provides strong testimony for the wisdom of mission-oriented environments (which includes NRL) supporting basic research, even when it

is not clear how, or even if, that research will pay off in the form of

technology or other applications. “The structural research program

originated in a strong interest to enhance the capabilities of the technique of electron diffraction of gases,” Karle says. “The value of the

non-negativity principle found in this study led to the application of

this principle to the phase problem in crystallography, which ultimately resulted in the solution to the phase problem. This solution

was adopted throughout the world and generated a great number of

investigations that continue to this day.”80

And the payoff has been great. Not only has X-ray crystallography

helped the Department of Defense learn more about the chemistry

and physics of decidedly military phenomena such as detonations, it

has contributed to many areas of basic science as well as to the chemical, pharmaceutical, petroleum, and many other industries. In this

way, says Karle, “the broad investment in basic research reaps the de-
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 349

sired reward for national security and the nation’s economic and social benefits.”81

Magnetic Pixels

The Nobel Prize happens to be the science world’s highest and

most visible accolade. Yet even a Nobelist like Jerome Karle can lay

claim to only a limited number of the many pixels comprising the

Laboratory’s big picture. The pixels attributable to Gary Prinz, a physicist specializing in magnetism who started working at the Laboratory

in 1967, represent the way many other NRL researchers also have set

off important cascades of scientific and technological developments

both within and outside the Laboratory.82

Magnetism has been an important field of study at NRL because,

in Prinz’s words, “you cannot build a radar set without magnetic materials.”83 And NRL has been developing all kinds of radar technologies for more than sixty years. Radar may have provided the impetus

for research into magnetic materials, but that research took on a life of

its own, particularly after 1955 with the establishment of the Magnetism Branch, which since has undergone many administrative moves,

mergings, reorientations, renamings, and other transformations.

Prinz entered the picture when he turned down an offer of a job

and higher salary by the famous Bell Laboratories because he liked the

intellectual freedom the Magnetism Branch’s head, George Rado, gave

to those working for him. Prinz’s initial work centered on detailed

analyses of new magnetic materials with the goal of laying bare the

basic physics and detailed atomic structures underlying the materials’

behavior. This interest led him into a collaboration with a researcher

in the Semiconductor Branch, Robert Wagner, in which they homebuilt their own version of a recently invented type of laser whose emissions were in wavelengths matched for studies of new magnetic compounds involving rare earth elements of the Periodic Table.

Just when the researchers had begun publishing papers at a steady

clip using their new apparatus, Prinz intuited that he needed to move
350 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

his work in a dramatically different direction if he were going to make

important, lasting contributions in the field of magnetism. The new

direction Prinz took was away from analyzing existing materials and

toward synthesizing new magnetic materials with unprecedented degrees of control and purity. Prinz could tell a good thing when he saw

it and when he learned about a new technique—called Molecular

Beam Epitaxy—that researchers at Bell Laboratories had been pioneering during the 1970s for growing semiconductor crystals even

one atomic layer at a time could, he knew it also would become important for making new magnetic films.

It took some doing, and skillful diplomacy by a savvy colleague

of Prinz’s who secured $155 thousand dollars from several other ongoing programs at the Laboratory, but in the end Prinz was able to the

buy the Laboratory’s first MBE machine in 1979. “It opened up a new

world and it has become a very broad world,” Prinz says.84 Since an

MBE machine works by leaking elemental ingredients into a vacuum

chamber in whatever sequence a researcher chooses, the technique is

the route to designer crystals with specifications down to the atomic

level. And for nearly two decades it has continuously led to collaborations amongst NRL’s materials researchers, surface scientists, physicists, and many others with differing expertise.

Results from that first MBE machine in 1979 helped Prinz and

others argue for NRL to acquire additional and even more expensive

MBE systems, and even to link some of them into more powerful

instrument assemblages. The payoff here comes in the form of new

kinds of hybrid materials made with MBE-grown semiconductors and

MBE-grown magnetic films. In time, others at NRL, including Berend

Jonker, found themselves in charge of their own MBE-based laboratories. With more than a decade of learning and experience behind

them now, NRL’s contingent of MBE users have been routinely inventing, probing, and developing a menagerie of new crystals with

potential applications as electronics devices, optical detectors, magnetic recording and reading heads, and new data storage substrates.
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 351

Even as researchers were developing film-growing skills with the

growing set of MBE machines, Norman Koon (who died in a tragic

skiing accident in December 1997) of the Metallurgy Division was

examining new compositions—in this case one of neodynium, iron

and boron—in search of magnetostrictive materials that change their

shape slightly in a magnetic field. Prinz remembers the evening in

1981 that Koon came up from a basement laboratory for making

measurements on hard stiff samples with a telling piece of recorder

paper in his hand: “I was working late, as we often did then, in Building 60 on the third floor and I was outside of George Rado’s office.

We were talking about physics problems when Norm came upstairs

carrying a piece of recorder paper and said, ‘You guys want to see

something neat?’”85

What he showed Prinz and Rado was a recorder plot showing that

it took an enormously high applied magnetic field to reverse the direction of the new neodymium, iron, and boron magnet’s own magnetic field. As Prinz recalls it, Rado was skeptical and said something

like “nothing switches at fields this high.”86

Koon evidently knew he had done the measurements correctly

and that he just might have happened onto the kind of magnetic

material suited for the millions of electric motors made each year to

power everything from windshield wipers to fans to tools. ”He immediately went and got patents written up,” Prinz says. As it happens,

other groups around the world who also were probing into these new

compositions also were putting in patent paper. “There still are big

patent struggles over this,” Prinz says.87

Prinz continued to concentrate on thin films and not just so far as

NRL was concerned. Besides sowing the MBE seed at the Laboratory,

he also helped put the MBE/magnetic-materials connection into the

minds of those who could support other groups to get going in the

new area. For example, he helped convince program managers at

DARPA that ever-improving abilities to grow thin films of magnetic

crystals could conceivably open routes to new kinds of nonvolatile
352 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

computer memories that retain information even in the absence of

voltage. That bit of selling has had consequences well beyond the

Laboratory itself. Now, besides supporting NRL’s effort in this area,

DARPA supports those of other laboratories, including ones at

Motorola, IBM, and Honeywell.

Prinz sees a big future for magnetic memories, particularly ones

made of materials exhibiting so-called giant magnetoresistance (GMR).

These are multilayered materials in which the flow of electrical current is dramatically altered depending on the orientation of magnetic

fields within the thin magnetic layers, which are separated either by

alternating nonmagnetic layers or different kinds of magnetic layers.

The French researchers who first reported the phenomena in 1988

credited the earlier work of Prinz and his colleagues on the growth of

iron films atop gallium arsenide crystal surfaces with leading them to

the discovery.88 The French team made their discovery by taking the

additional step of growing a layer of nonmagnetic chromium over

the iron layer and topping these with additional alternating layers of

the two metals. GMR research has mushroomed into a high-stakes

race because of the value these new materials and related ones have

in novel data storage technologies.

For their bid in this race, Prinz and his colleagues have been growing stacks of alternating cobalt and copper layers atop a base of silicon nitride. From the work they have done under patient ONR sponsorship, Prinz expects to be able to fabricate memory arrays with bit

sizes about the size of a protein molecule, leading to data densities of

about one billion bits per thumbnail-sized area of chip space. That’s

equivalent to the capacity of scores of 3.5 inch floppies. The nonvolatile, random access memory that Prinz thinks such GMR arrays enable will be immune to radiation, power failures, and most other external disturbances. Moreover, they will consume small amounts of

power and only when they are informed with data or when data is

read from them.

For those reasons, these multilayer materials have obvious military possibilities. For one thing, says Prinz, they could replace older
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 353

generations of bulky, expensive and less reliable magnetic memory

technologies still deployed in such venues as Trident Missiles and P3

subchaser aircraft. “More importantly, these could go into all tactical

missiles,” he adds.89

But Prinz envisions even more audacious outcomes. Using GMR

structures for new kinds of computer memory is just the first application that comes to mind. He says the materials could also conceivably become the basis of a computer’s brain—its microprocessor.

The advantages of this switch could be far-reaching, he says. Conventional microprocessors are the semiconductor-based chips that

make a PC a PC, a Macintosh computer a Macintosh, or any specific

kind of computer that kind of computer, each with its own pros and

cons. They are what the “Intel Inside” logo is reminding PC users

about. “What if you wanted to turn your Mac into a Unix system,”

Prinz asks and then answers, “you can’t because the chip you have is

the chip you have.”90 But with GMR microprocessors, Prinz says, it

would be possible to build computers with reprogrammable microprocessors. That way, software designers could make products that

reconfigure the machine into the optimum computer—say, a parallel

computer instead of a serially processing computer—for each particular problem.

“There have been a few attempts to make reprogrammable processors” out of semiconductor materials, Prinz notes. But, he says,

these ended in failures and had made the idea somewhat far-fetched.

“Now, with GMR memory chips, people believe you might be able to

do this.”91

Prinz has no way of knowing if these kinds of visions will flesh

out. But he notes with a mixture of pride and regret that there now are

precious few other places where such ideas are likely to ever get much

attention. That’s because high-tech companies that had research groups

focusing on magnetic materials have been downsizing or closing down

those projects. “We (NRL) now have more technological memory in

these areas than industry has,” Prinz notes. And those few industry

laboratories still working on new magnetic memories remain in the
354 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

game largely because they receive support from agencies like ONR

and DARPA, which Prinz has helped convince to run research programs in new magnetic materials. In that way, Prinz represents those

NRL researchers whose role as experts and advisors have molded the

nation’s overall research portfolio.

Pixels of Battlefield Omniscience

There is no doubt that the world gets more wired everyday. There

are more computers, more databases, more optical fiber trunks and

satellite links, more communications systems, more sensors and surveillance systems, more transmitters and receivers: indeed, there is

more of everything when it comes to acquiring, processing, transporting and using data. The civilian version of this is sophisticated all

right, but it provides just a hint of the digitized battlefield that is in

the process of becoming a reality. What the Internet is to the civilian

sector, C4

I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) is to the military sector.92

Lots of NRL researchers have their imprints on the many, many

pieces comprising C4

I and their linkages to the Global Grid (see pages

334 to 336). That involvement stretches all of the way from conception to research to development to implementation. Those in Code

8100—the Space Systems Development Department—sometimes even

strap into military aircraft in the penultimate development steps before a new piece of the C4

I system takes its own place in an overall

system that makes James Bond gadgetry seem unimaginative.

Consider just one of NRL’s more successful and mature contributions—the MATT, or the Multi-Mission Advanced Tactical Terminal.

These are at the end of the line of the military’s enormous C4I network. They are the terminals by which the enormous infrastructure of

data, intelligence, and analysis gets to the ship commander, the pilot,

and even the soldier on the ground.

A key step toward development of these information tools took

place in the early 1980s, when NRL engineers designed a remarkably
chapter 11 – pixels of a very big picture ♦ 355

inexpensive space test. Called Living Plume Shield 2 (LIPS2), the heart

of the experiment was to put prototype communication devices onto

an expendable part of a launch vehicle—the plume shield—that normally protects a satellite from exhaust particles. “They put attitude

controls on it and solar cells,” says electrical engineer Charles Herndon,

whose own work since he arrived at NRL in 1986 has followed from

LIPS2. But the key, he adds, is that “it carried transponder experiments that validated [certain] coding schemes that allowed communication from LEO’s, or fast-moving low earth orbiting satellites, to

shipboard.”93

Using such relatively quickly deployed satellites is challenging.

“They are traveling overhead for 10 to 12 minutes and their signals

have to be robust and work even in the presence of powerful search

radars” (and many other potential sources of electromagnetic interference), Herndon points out.94 Once the communication scheme was

validated, the next step was to develop receiving equipment for the

Fleet. Look on almost any Naval ship today and you will find an OE82

antenna that links with LEOs. Satellite-to-ship communication was

just the beginning of the more extensive communications and data

system upon which Herndon and others have been working.

The next step was to build deployable ground-based receiver suites

(collections of ground components including UHF satellite communication receiver, cryptographic components, and a message processor), which Herndon and his colleagues did. These suites are known

in this acronym-jammed C4

I business as TREs, or Tactical Receiver

Equipment. TREs are rugged boxes with receivers, cryptographic cards,

and processors for intelligence broadcasts. These turned out so well,

says Herndon, that they now are the Fleet standard for tactical receivers.

The TRE work then led in the late 1980s to MATT, the Multi-Mission Advanced Tactical Terminal, which NRL developed for the U.S.

Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which had significant

requirements for real-time tactical data. Herndon points out that the
356 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

acronym MATT was matched to Captain Matthew Rogers, who saw

how the Navy was getting intelligence information to the floating Fleet

and wanted the same capability in the cockpits of tactical aircraft. The

first MATTs were ready in 1991. They have become standard equipment in EA-6B aircraft whose mission is to gather electronic intelligence (ELINT) on “wild-weasel-like” runs in which the aircraft deliberately fly in an adversary’s territory to “light up” and then analyze

signals from various radar and other optical and electromagnetic

threats within range. Since 1993, MATTs have become standard equipment “in a lot of ground operations,” Herndon says.95

The sequence from LIPS2 to TRE to MATT is not complete, and it

is only one part of the C4

I universe. Consider the IDM, or Improved

Data Modem. This is the unit that Herndon recently validated by sitting in the back seat of an F-16 trainer. Until the IDM, pilots in the air

could only communicate by voice with one another; they were not

equipped to share intelligence, targeting, or other data. The IDM, he

says, has changed that. So far, over 2,200 IDM units have been built

with DoD requirements calling for at least 1,250 more.

Unsung Pixels

There literally are hundreds, even thousands, of other pixels that

could complement, supplement, and otherwise join the ones above.

But that would merely lengthen, rather than improve on the main

point already made by the limited set of pixels. The picture that emerges

from the pixels is none other than NRL, a place the Navy can go for a

preview of what looms on the technological horizon and for the kind

of brain power that can leverage Naval brawn in the world’s seas. Beyond platitudes like that, the breadth of NRL’s research portfolio defies summarization. And nowhere else but at an NRL, with its unique

mix of mission and research cultures, could so much consequential

research and development be done by so few for so many contemporary and future defense needs.
chapter 12 – pushing on the horizon ♦ 357

C h a p t e r 12

Pushing on the Horizon

357

When NRL opened for business in 1923, it began to make its way

tentatively like a small creek. Its vitality at any time was greatly dependent on dry spells and sudden rain showers. Despite mortal threats

in its early years from lack of money or overbearing Navy bosses, who

would sooner nip the young laboratory in the bud than see it evolve

to have an institutional mind of its own, NRL grew and strengthened

over the years. Radar and sonar technologies helped the Laboratory

ascend from a small-time job shop for Navy Bureaus earlier in the

century into the full-blown corporate laboratory that its founders had

hoped it would become.

Even during the Laboratory’s first decades, new ideas, people,

funding, and resources continuously fed into NRL like tributaries. Then

came the turning point—World War II. Like a great rain, the war amplified the steady stream of applied science and engineering that NRL

had become before the war and transformed the Laboratory into the

mighty R&D river that it has been ever since the war ended.

“You cannot step into the same river twice,” wrote Heraclitus, a

Greek philosopher born in the mid-6th Century BC. Heraclitus’s aphorism concisely captures the quixotic essences of both rivers like the

Potomac, whose passing waters NRL has witnessed for the past 75

years, and great institutions like the Naval Research Laboratory itself.

A river is a forwardly surging entity in the world that maintains a
358 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

lasting identity even as it constantly changes. Great institutions like

NRL are the same way. They always are the same and not the same.

NRL’s staff has grown from a few score in 1923 to over 3,000

today. The building count at NRL’s main campus has gone from 5 to

over 100 while the setting has changed from its bucolic, country beginnings into a sparsely treed industrial-looking present. The budget

has increased from the million dollar range to edge toward the billion dollar range, all of it supporting work at NRL and its 14 smaller,

specialized facilities and support installations around the country.

Most importantly, however, the Laboratory has emerged from its

scrawny, anonymous beginning as a specialty radio engineering laboratory into a top-tier facility of immense breadth that has imprinted

its mark on many of the advanced military and civilian technologies

characterizing both our times and those of the near future.

Even a short recitation of the Laboratory’s most current portfolio

of projects reveals the polymathic result of Thomas Edison’s and

Josephus Daniel’s brainchild:

♦ New stealth materials based on metal-coated microtubules

that become part of coatings capable of catching radar energy like a

catcher catching baseballs.

♦ Cloaking devices for Navy Seals, special forces, and other aficionados of camouflage, that render users invisible to microwave-based

intrusion sensors.

♦ A more secure means of routing messages (Onion Routing)

that can thwart attempts by eavesdroppers to trace the path of a message (which can harbor compromising intelligence information)

within information networks such as the World Wide Web.

♦ An anti-sniper defense system known as VIPER (Vectored Infrared Personnel Engagement and Return fire) that detects infrared

flashes from a sniper’s gun muzzle, alerts users to the sniper’s presence even before the sniper’s bullet arrives, and even guides automatic counterfire.

♦ Applications of a laser-based method (called pulsed-laser

deposition) for reassembling the major ingredients of bone—the
chapter 12 – pushing on the horizon ♦ 359

protein collagen and the mineral hydroxyapatite—into synthetic structures that mimic real tissue for improved orthopedic implants.

♦ Next generation semiconductor materials to enable radar systems to see more threats, quicker and more accurately, or that expedite the ever-heavier traffic of data and information that will flow

through the military’s growing C4

I systems.

♦ Using tools like an Atomic Force Microscope to form some of

the smallest electronic components possible—measuring in billionthof-a-meter (nanometer) range—thereby putting them squarely into

the range where quantum behavior dominates.

♦ Developing synthetic aperture-sonar (SAS) for next-generation

countermeasures against mines in very shallow water contexts of about

10 meters.

♦ Uniting new sensor technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles

(some as small as hummingbirds), and communications systems in

an effort to develop a badly needed means of identifying chemical

and biological warfare agents dispersed as vapors and airborne aerosols, respectively.

And those are merely some of the newest pixels of NRL research.

Teams of scientists and engineers at the Laboratory also are investigating new semiconductor structures less vulnerable to damage from

both artificial sources of radiation as well as naturally occurring sources

such as cosmic rays; the influence of subsurface bubbles on acoustic

scattering (important for sonar performance and interpretation); the

adaptation of a technique known as nuclear quadrupole resonance

for detecting concealed explosives; micro-air vehicles weighing a few

ounces that can carry radar jamming equipment, cameras, microphones, chemical and biological agent sensors, and other payloads to

carry out military, intelligence, illegal drug interdiction, and other

missions; database and data retrieval methods enabling users to rapidly integrate different forms of data—images, texts, numeric data,

maps—into forms and displays that help in the process of making

tactical decisions and planning missions; an analytical technique for

revealing 3-dimensional views of the internal microstructure of ma-
360 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

terials; the effect of small-scale ocean waves (capillary waves less than

an inch from crest to crest) on the exchange of carbon dioxide between the air and sea; new light emitting devices based on organic

molecules suitable for making flat-panel screens that can be rolled up

like a scroll and hung up wherever one pleases; computer simulations of new, high-energy fuels; and the coupling of global atmospheric models with ocean models to extend weather prediction from

a few days to weeks or even months.

Multiply by ten the preceding catalog of research pixels and that

still would only account for a small part of NRL’s overall technical

portfolio. Few laboratories in the world, and perhaps no other ones

throughout the Department of Defense, are home to such a vast swath

of research.

One sign of how much NRL’s research plays into the nation’s general technological landscape emerged in 1997 in an NSF-funded study

on research policy that included a comparison of how often the research at different U.S. research institutions was cited in U.S. patents1

.

Presumably, the more any particular institution’s research is cited, the

more impact that institution has in creating new ideas, technology,

and patents.

The study, which broke down the research cited into several categories, such as physics and chemistry, found that over 430 research

institutions were cited in a survey of patents granted during the years

1987, 1988, 1993, and 1994. Of those 430 institutions, NRL ranked

fifth with respect to the patent citations of physics papers that Laboratory researchers had published. Only AT&T Bell Laboratories (now

Lucent Technologies), IBM Corporation, Stanford University, and

Bellcore came out ahead of NRL in this analysis. The Laboratory ranked

eighth with respect to citations of the Laboratory’s engineering and

technical papers.

In a separate citation study, this one by the Institute of Scientific

Information, NRL ranked amongst the world’s top ten institutions

when it came to the number of times its researchers’ papers were cited

by others in 150 materials science journals.2
chapter 12 – pushing on the horizon ♦ 361

Those rankings notwithstanding, no Government laboratory, no

matter how impressive its past or present capabilities, has guaranteed

longevity. As budgetary, military, political, social, national, and global

contexts change, the roles of nationally supported R&D assets, including NRL, get revisited. The kind of audacious plans that have been no

stranger to NRL tend to get more sparse at times, like those during the

first term of the Clinton Administration, when Congressional quests

to balance the national budget led to such proposals as disbanding

long-standing institutions such as the Department of Commerce or

the Department of Energy. Rather than expecting annual budgetary

increases as it has in the past, the Department of Defense is learning to

plan for a more financially austere era.

Military R&D has become vulnerable to larger scale budgetary

strains that span up to the levels of the Department of the Navy and all

of the way to the Department of Defense. Shrinking funds inevitably

bring unpleasant consequences: smaller payrolls, back-pedaling on

programs, and overall belt-tightening. But involuntary austerity also

can inspire innovation. To do more with less takes genuine creativity.

Those who feel the brunt of budgetary cuts or the pressure to change

tend to perceive the magnitude of such challenges as bigger than their

predecessors ever had to confront. But big challenges are nothing new

at NRL. Indeed, NRL’s first quarter-century was marked by several lifeand-death struggles. The 40 years following the end of World War II

coincided with the Cold War, which provided a political justification

to support a large portfolio of military R&D so long as it stood a chance

of furthering U.S. military capability. This was a smoother sailing period for NRL, at least so far as its right to exist was concerned. In the

last decade, however, the national and global contexts have changed

so much that NRL once again is being confronted with the kinds of

financial and programmatic challenges that cut to the core as they did

earlier in its institutional life.

What is different this time is that NRL has a 75-year record that is

replete with documented instances of world-changing significance as

well as an encyclopedic list of lesser, though often quite consequen-
362 ♦ Pushing the Horizon

tial, scientific, technological, and military payoffs. It is a record of

accomplishment that comes of its multifaceted culture in which engineering and scientific mentalities have mutually bootstrapped one

another in a context driven by the ever-changing vision of what a

leading-edge Navy is. Get rid of the science culture and NRL disappears. Get rid of the engineering culture and NRL disappears. Decrease

the diversity of expertise and you flirt with losing the critical mass by

which NRL has been able to both react to and anticipate the seething,

changing landscape of research and development challenges. That,

too, would make NRL disappear.

As NRL enters the last quarter of its first century, it enters an era in

which the potential types and sizes of military threats are more varied

and less predictable than during the Cold War. It enters an era where

blue sea warfare appears of less strategic importance than near-shore,

littoral warfare. The Laboratory enters a more budget-conscious era

in which technology will be needed to leverage the force of ever smaller

amounts of human resources. It enters an era in which information

weapons seem on a trajectory to be at least as militarily important as

bullets and bombs have been. In brief, it enters a time when the Navy

likely would have to invent a Naval Research Laboratory had Thomas

Edison and Josephus Daniels not gotten to it first more than 75 years

ago.
R e f e r e n c e s a n d N o t e s

363

Chapter One

1. This figure, which was provided by the Office of Naval Research

covers only research categories 6.1 and 6.2 (which refer, respectively,

to basic and applied research).

Chapter Two

My three major sources for this chapter were Lloyd Scott’s History of

the Naval Consulting Board of the United States (Washington, DC:

Government Printing Office, 1920); David van Keuren’s, “Science,

Progressivism, and Military Preparedness: The Case of the Naval Research

Laboratory, 1915-1923” in Technology and Culture (Chicago: Society for

the History of Technology, 1992); and David K. Allison, New Eye for

the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research Laboratory

(Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, September 29, 1981).

1. Note sent to Germany on May 13, 1915 by President Woodrow

Wilson under the signature of Secretary of State William Jennings

Bryan. Printed in United States, Foreign Relations of the United States,

Washington,DC, 1915, Supplement, pp. 393 ff.

2. Entry Lusitania of on-line Britannica Encyclopedia.

3. David van Keuren, Science, Progressivism, and Military

Preparedness: The Case of the Naval Research Laboratory, 1915-1923, pp.

714-716.

4. Quote appears in Reference 1.

5. New York Times, May 30, 1915, pp. 6 and 7.

6. DvK, op. cit., pp. 715-717.

7. Letter from Secretary Daniels to Thomas Edison, dated July

7, 1915, reprinted in Lloyd Scott, History of the Naval Consulting Board

of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,

1920), pp. 286-288.

8. Ibid.

9. New York Times, July 13, 1915, p 1.

10. New York Times, July 16, 1915, p 1.

11. David K. Allison, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at

the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval Research

Laboratory, September 29, 1981), see note 14 on page 21.
12. United States, Statutes at Large, Public Laws, vol. 39 (64th

Congress, first session) ch. 417, 1916, p. 570, reprinted in David K.

Allison, New Eye for the Navy (Washington, DC: Naval Research

Laboratory, September 29, 1981), pp. 27-28.

13. Allison, op. cit., p. 30.

14. Ibid., p. 31.

15. F.A. Hessel, et al., Chemistry in Warfare: Its Strategic Importance

(New York: Hastings House, 1942), p. 86.

16. Allison, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

17. Letter reprinted in Herbert J. Gimpel, unpublished history of

NRL, 1975, p. 16. See his note 17 of chapter 1 for reference.

18. Allison, op. cit., p. 33.

19. From “Quarters A and Surrounding Area,” a loose-leaf

compilation of historical records and writings mostly derived from

the Records of the Historical Society of Washington, DC.

20. Allison, op. cit., p. 35, reprint of part of a letter from William

Saunders to Edwin Denby, March 17, 1921, in W. Saunders archival

material, records of the Naval Consulting Board, record group 80,

National Archives Building.

21. Ibid., p. 37, from transcript of tape recordings on “Radio-RadarSonar” pp. 67R160 and 67R161, box 38, Stanford C. Hooper papers,

Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

22. U.S. Congress, 6:4, House, Hearings Before the Subcommittee

of the House Committee on Appropriations in Charge of the Navy

Department Appropriation for 1923 (Washington,DC: Government

Printing Office, 1922, p. 728, excerpt in Allison, op. cit., p. 46).

23. Gimpel, op. cit., p. 30, note 17 cites Edison letter.

24. Albert Hoyt Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research

Laboratory (Washington, DC: The Navy Department, 1948), p. 4.

Chapter 3

Much of the material for this chapter was derived from the two history

narratives by Albert Hoyt Taylor, the ranking scientist at NRL for the

Laboratory’s first 25 years. One of these works, The First 25 Years of the

Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948)

is rich with broad brushstroke accounts of the research going on in

the various research divisions whose number continuously grew during

Taylor’s tenure at NRL. This dense 75-page account also is rich with

first-person, human-interest details that give some sense of what it

felt like to be at NRL. The second Taylor history, Radio Reminiscences:

A Half Century (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1948),

364 ♦ references and notes
republished in 1960, is a nearly 250-page account about the ascent of

radio technology in the decades predating NRL’s commissioning and

the several decades following. It is a more rambling and idiosyncratic

work, but it is another good source for the early history of NRL.

Another useful source was Herbert Gimpel’s 580-page History of NRL,

which was completed in the mid-1970s as part of NRL’s 50th

anniversary in 1973. Though typeset, the massive work was never

published.

1. Albert Hoyt Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research

Laboratory (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948), p. 7.

2. David K. Allison, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at

the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval Research

Laboratory,1981); see funding table on p. 51.

3. Louis Gebhard, Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and

Contributions of the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval

Research Laboratory, 1979), p. 18.

4. Ibid., p. 39.

5. Allison, op. cit., quote from oral history of Gebhard, p. 45, in

NRL Historian’s office.

6. Taylor, op. cit., p. 17.

7. Ibid., p. 105.

8. Albert H. Taylor, Radio Reminiscences: A Half Century

(Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1948 (republished in

1960)), p. 90.

9. Allison, op. cit., Young is quoted from oral history, p. 39.

10. Ibid., p. 54.

11. Ibid., excerpt of letter, p. 40.

12. Timothy Coffey, personal communication in which Coffey

recalled Charles Townes telling him about the highly rated work; see

also H. Henry Stroke (editor), The Physical Review: the First Hundred

Years (A Selection of Seminal Papers and Commentaries), American

Institute Press (New York: 1995).

13. Letter signed by Breit, Tuve and Hulbert and dated 1927, NRL

Historian’s office.

14. Taylor, 25 Years, op. cit., p. 16.

15. Herbert Gimpel, op. cit., p. 57

16. John J. Sweeney, Elias Klein: the First Eighty Years, January 1980,

short biography of Elias Klein.

17. Gimpel, op. cit., p. 62.

18. “A Brief History of the Sound Division,” NRL, by Harvey Hayes,

in NRL Historian’s files.

references and notes ♦ 365
19. Taylor, 25 Years, p. 22.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., p. 23.

22. Edward O. Hulburt, oral history, NRL Historian’s file.

23. Gimpel, op. cit., p. 73.

24. Hulburt, op. cit., p. 15.

25. J.A. Sanderson, Applied Optics 6 (12), p. 2031.

26. A. Hoyt Taylor and E.O. Hulburt, Physical Review, 27, p. 185,

1926.

27. Gimpel, op. cit., p. 75; Taylor, 25 Years, p. 23.

28. Taylor, 25 Years, p. 26.

29. Materials Science and Technology Division, History

(Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1993), Robert Mehl

recalls his NRL years in a letter reprinted on pp. 89-95.

30. Ibid., p. 91.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., p. 92.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 93.

37. F. Russell Bichowsky, quoted in Betty Gibbs, A History of the

Chemistry Division, Naval Research Laboratory, 1927-1982, NRL-MR-5064

(Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1983), p. 62.

38. Gimpel, op. cit., p. 45; Taylor, 25 Years, pp. 13 and 24.

39. Bichowsky in Gibbs, op. cit., p. 61.

40. Ibid., p. 62.

41. Ibid., p. 63.

42. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

43. Ibid., p. 66.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., p. 69.

Chapter 4

1. David K. Allison, New Eye for the Navy (Washington, DC: NRL,

1981), p. 30, referring to Lloyd Scott, Naval Consulting Board of the

United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920)

p. 23.

2. Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research Laboratory

(Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948), p. 14.

3. Allison, op. cit., p. 51.

4. Taylor, op. cit., p. 29.

366 ♦ references and notes
5. Ibid., p. 67.

6. Leo Young, quoted by Allison, op. cit., p. 61.

7. Taylor letter excerpted in Allison, op. cit., p. 62.

8. Almy letter excerpted in Allison, op. cit., p. 63.

9. Allison, op. cit., p. 63.

10. Ibid., p. 68.

11. General Order, November 3, NRL Historian’s files.

12. Excerpt of Hooper memorandum reprinted in Allison, op. cit.,

p. 69-70.

13. Admiral Robinson, Letter, Oct. 14, NRL Historian’s files.

14. Oberlin letter, Oct. 22, NRL Historian’s files.

15. Oberlin letter, Nov. 2, NRL Historian’s files.

16. Allison, op. cit., pp. 68-78.

17. Oliver rebuttal excerpted in Allison, p. 75.

18. Allison, op. cit., p. 77; Taylor, 25 Years, p. 31.

19. Taylor, 25 Years, p. 32; Herbert Gimpel refers to an unpublished

history by A.T. Drury, 1954.

20. Taylor, op. cit., p. 32.

21. Ibid., note at bottom of p. 38.

22. The following radar story relies heavily on David Allison’s

wonderful, thorough account in New Eye for the Navy.

23. Robert Morris Page, oral history, NRL Historian’s files; Allison

provides biographical sketch of Page on pp. 85-88 of New Eye for the

Navy.

24. Ibid., p. 88.

25. Ibid., p. 82.

26. Taylor, Radio Reminiscences, p. 173.

27. Ibid., p. 173.

28. Ibid., p. 174.

29. Bowen’s letter is excerpted in Allison, op. cit., pp. 95-96.

30. Ibid.

31. Taylor, Radio Reminiscences, p. 191.

32. Robert Morris Page, oral history, pp. 116, 117.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid. p.118.

35. Allison, op. cit., p. 110.

36. Ibid., p. 112.

Chapter 5

1. Albert Hoyt Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research

Laboratory (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948), p. 33.

2. Ibid., p. 42.

references and notes ♦ 367
3. Ibid., p. 33.

4. Herbert Gimpel, unpublished history of NRL, 1975, p. 108.

5. Much of the material about the Chemistry Division is derived

from Betty Gibb’s short history of the Chemistry Division, and from

Gimpel and Taylor.

6. Taylor, op. cit., pp. 33-34.

7. Ibid., p. 50.

8. Interestingly, the Army would draw on these negative results

when it returned to the possibility of using artificial light to camouflage

airplanes during World War II. The Army’s Air Corps wanted its torpedohunting planes to get within 30 seconds flying time of a surfaced

submarine before being detected by vigilant lookouts. At this time,

radar equipment was still crude enough that submarines still relied on

human lookouts. Since the torpedo-hunters would approach a

submarine head-on, the Army wondered if only the front end of the

plane needed lighting instead of the entire fuselage. Research conducted

under the auspices of the powerful wartime research coordinating

organization known as the National Defense Research Committee

ended up proving the principle with test flights. By that time, however,

radar technology had progressed to the point of rendering the

illumination irrelevant as a concealment tactic. (AAHS Journal, 15(4),

25-262). As in the living kingdom, the principles of evolution describe

the survival or disappearance of new technological species.

9. Taylor, op. cit., p. 51.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., Taylor quotes Edison’s remarks to the House committee,

p. 53.

12. Ibid.

13. David K. Allison, New Eye for the Navy (Washington, DC: Naval

Research Laboratory, 1981), p. 133.

Chapter 6

1. Albert Hoyt Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research

Laboratory (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948), p. 55.

2. The Pilot ran regularly during the war and was a precursor to

the present day Labstracts. Copies of old issues are in the office of the

NRL Historian as well as in NRL’s Office of Public Affairs.

3. Taylor, op. cit., p. 55.

4. Henry M. Suski, letter to me, July 22, 1997.

5. Louis Gebhard, Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and

Contributions of the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval

Research Laboratory, 1979), p. 255.

368 ♦ references and notes
6. Ibid., pp. 256-258; Taylor, op. cit., p. 61.

7. Taylor, op. cit., p. 61.

8. Harold Bowen, Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks; The

Autobiography of a Naval Engineer (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1954), pp. 157-158; Jack Brown, personal communication.

9. Taylor, op. cit., p. 68.

10. Harold Lorenzen, Report of NRL Progress (Washington, DC,

1973) page 56.

11. Alfred Price, History of Electronic Warfare (U.S.: Association of

Old Crows, 1984), volume 1, pp. 15, 35.

12. Gebhard, op. cit., p. 300.

13. Price, op. cit., pp. 21-33.

14. Harold Lorenzen, Short History of Countermeasures at the Naval

Research Laboratory, unpublished, NRL Historian’s office, p. 1.

15. Ibid.

16. Price, op. cit., p. 94.

17. Taylor, op. cit., p. 69.

18. Lorenzen, NRL Progress, p. 57.

19. Lorenzen, A Short History, op. cit., p. 3.

20. Ibid., p 3.

21. Taylor, op. cit., p. 69.

22. Price, op. cit., p. 32.

23. Ibid., p. 99.

24. Ibid., p. 256.

25. Marvin Lasky, U.S. Naval Journal of Underwater Acoustics—

35(3), p. 570.

26. Navy Department Booklet, Sonar (Washington, DC: Navy

Department, 1946) p. 6.

27. Ibid., p. 7.

28. A. H. Drury, War History of the Naval Research Laboratory,

unpublished, 1954, p. 221.

29. Navy Department Sonar booklet, op. cit., p. 2.

30. Ibid., p. 3.

31. H.C. Hayes, “Antisubmarine Warfare,” NRL Report S-1959, 5

November 1942; a write-up by Burton Hurdle.

32. Ibid., p. 11.

33. Quoted in “SONAR . . . Detector,” OPNAV publication P413-

104 (Washington, DC: Navy Department, April 9, 1946), p. 1.

34. Drury, op. cit., p. 229.

35. Richard Tuve, talk entitled “The Evolution of the U.S. Navy

‘Shark Chaser’ Chemical Shark Repellent,” given at the Symposium

in Basic Research Applications to the Development of Shark

references and notes ♦ 369
Repellents at annual meeting of Institute of Biological Sciences in April,

1958).

36. Constance M. Pechura and David P. Rall (editors), Veterans at

Risk (Washington, DC: Institute of Medicine, 1993), p. 9.

37. Ibid., p. 10.

38. Homer Carhart, oral history conducted by David van Keuren,

1991, tape 1, side 2, p. 8.

39. Ibid., p. 9.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p. 11.

42. Ibid.

43. Pechura, op. cit.

44. Ibid., p. 36.

45. Carhart, oral history, p. 13.

46. Ibid.

47. Pechura, op. cit, p. 36.

48. Ibid.

49. Carhart, oral history.

50. Ibid., p. 21.

51. Ibid., p. 26.

52. Carhart interview, March 1997.

53. Ibid., oral history, p. 27.

54. Pechura, op. cit., p. 43-44.

55. Carhart interview, March 1997.

56. NRL Twentieth Anniversary booklet, NRL Historian’s office.

57. Ibid., p. Roosevelt’s letter is reproduced.

58. Ibid. p. 9.

59. Memorandum, 5/1/46, NRL Files; Harold Bowen in Mossbacks,

op. cit., indicates the amount was $1500, p.182.

60. Ibid.

61. Letter, Einstein to Roosevelt, August 2, 1939.

62. Memorandum, see isotope separation file, NRL Historian’s

office.

63. August 9, 1945 memoranda to the Chief of Research and

Invention, who was none other than former NRL director, Rear Admiral

Harold Bowen.

64. Abelson interview, January 28, 1997.

65. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York:

Touchstone, 1986), p. 552.

66. Ibid., pp. 552-553.

67. Bowen, Mossbacks, op. cit., p. 187.

370 ♦ references and notes
68. Arnold Kramish, “Hiroshima’s First Victims,” Rocky Mountain

News, 8/6/95, p. 93A.

69. Ibid.

70. Kramish, personal communication, February 1997.

71. Statements of Ross Gunn to the Special Committee on Atomic

Energy of the U.S. Senate; see also Memorandum for Files (1 May

1946) on the subject, “Early History of Uranium Power for

Submarines,” prepared by Ross Gunn.

Chapter 7

1. Harold Bowen, Ships, Machinery and Mossbacks: The

Autobiography of a Naval Engineer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1954), p. 230.

2. Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: History of the Office

of Naval Research (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), p.

13.

3. Ibid., p. 12.

4. Bowen, op. cit., p. 137.

5. Albert Hoyt Taylor, The First 25 Years of the Naval Research

Laboratory (Washington, DC: The Navy Department, 1948), p. 61.

6. Sapolsky, op. cit., p. 23.

7. Ibid., pp. 17-19.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 14.

10. Harold Bowen, memorandum, December 13, 1940, NRL

Historian’s office.

11. Sapolsky, op. cit., p. 10.

12. Ibid.

13. Bowen, memorandum, January 26, 1947.

14. Ibid.

15. Sapolsky, op. cit.

16. Ibid.

17. File, “Steering Committee, 1946” HONRL, minutes of meeting

Feb. 18, 1925.

18. Ross Gunn, memo dated June 14, 1945, NRL Historian’s office.

19. New Scientist, Sept. 22, 1960, p. 781.

Chapter 8

1. David DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance: How the Military

Created the US Space Sciences After World War II (New York: Springer

Verlag, 1992).

references and notes ♦ 371
2. William Corliss, NASA Sounding Rockets 1958-1968: A Historical

Summary (Washington, DC: NASA, 1971 ), pp. 11-15.

3. Milton Rosen and Richard Snodgrass, “The High Altitude

Sounding Rocket,” in Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research, p.47, NRL

Historian’s office.

4. Biographical information on Ernst Krause was derived largely

from an oral history of Ernst Krause conducted as part of the Space

Astronomy Oral History Project, National Air and Space Museum and

from a 1987 dissertation by Bruce Hevley: Basic Research Within a

Military Context: The Naval Research Laboratory and the Foundations of

Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Astronomy, 1923-1960, pp. 99-100.

5. DeVorkin, op. cit., p. 48.

6. Hevley, op. cit., p. 63, referencing Marvin Lasky, “Historical

Review of Undersea Warfare Planning and Organization with emphasis

on the Role of the Office of Naval Research,” ONR, 1975.

7. Hevley, op. cit., p. 102.

8. Laboratory Order No. 46-45, Navy Department, Office of

Research and Inventions, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC,

December 1945.

9. Hevley, op. cit., p.111.

10. John Hagen, “The Laboratory Ventures Into Space,” Report on

NRL Progress (Washington, DC: NRL, 1973), p. 32.

11. Corliss, op. cit., p. 12.

12. Krause, Rocket Sonde Research Section report, NRL Historian’s

office.

13. Hevley, op. cit., p. 122.

14. Ibid., p. 134.

15. Herbert Friedman, 1992 NRL Review (Washington, DC: NRL,

1992), p. 24.

16. Rosen and Snodgrass, op. cit., p. 48.

17. Friedman, op. cit, p. 24.

18. Hevley, op. cit., pp. 137-138.

19. Ibid., p.159.

20. Ibid., p. 161.

21. Press release,“RADIO FADE-OUTS LINKED TO X-RAYS FROM

SUN,” National Military Establishment, Department of the Navy,

Washington, DC, March 24, 1949.

22. Hevley, op. cit., pp. 168-171.

23. Ibid., p. 186.

24. Biographical information on Friedman was derived from oral

histories and other materials in the NRL History Office as well as from

an interview with Friedman on Feb. 12, 1997.

372 ♦ references and notes
25. Hevley, op. cit., p. 192. Also, see Friedman’s biographical file

at NRL.

26. Herbert Friedman, “Reminiscences of 30 Years of Space

Research,” NRL Report 8113, (Washington, DC: NRL, 1977), p. 5.

27. Ibid., p. 4.

28. Ibid., p. 5.

29. Ibid., p. 7.

30. Ibid., p. 8.

31. Corliss, op. cit., pp. 21-23.

32. Summaries of the Viking launches appear in a July 7, 1958

reply by acting Chief of Naval Research A. B. Metzger to Senator Olin

Johnston, who had requested information about the Vanguard Project

under which the Viking rockets were designed. Another summary of

Viking flights 5 through 12 appears in a different form in Space Frontiers,

2(2) (May-June, 1986), pp. 3-20.

33. Vanguard, A History, NASA; (Homer Newell, Artificial Earth

Satellite Program for the IGY, 4/15/56. (NRL File)).

34. Vanguard, op. cit., p 37.

35. Ibid., p. 43.

36. John Hagen, “The Viking and the Vanguard,” in Technology and

Culture, 4(4), (Wayne State University Press, Fall 1963), p. 438.

37. That the U.S. satellite program was part of a hidden agenda to

develop spy satellites was part of the program of the conference,

“Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite,” which

was held at the Smithsonian Institution from September 30 to October

1, 1997. The papers that focused on this topic are Dwayne A. Day’s,

“Cover Stories and Hidden Agendas: Early American Space and

National Security Policy,” and Kenneth A. Osgood’s, “Before Sputnik:

National Security and the Formation of U.S. Outer Space Policy, 1953-

1957.”

38. Hagen, op. cit., pp. 439-440.

39. Hugh Sidey, “The Man Who Took the Beating for Vanguard,”

Life Magazine, March 31, 1958 p. 35.

40. John Hagen, “Vanguard—The Laboratory Ventures Into Space,”

in NRL Progress (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1973),

p. 31.

41. Ibid.

42. Hugh Sidey, op. cit., p. 35.

43. Friedman, Reminiscences, p.16.

44. Hagen, “The Viking and the Vanguard,” p. 447.

45. Ibid., p. 448.

46. Friedman, Reminiscences, p. 16.

references and notes ♦ 373
47. Easton, personal discussion, September 25, 1997.

48. Friedman, Reminiscences, p. 16.

49. Sidey, op. cit., p. 36.

50. Hagen, “The Viking and the Vanguard,” pp. 449-450.

51. Ibid., p. 451.

52. Corliss, op. cit.

53. Ibid., p. 36.

54. Peter Wilhelm, interview, 1997.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Jim Tugman, personal communication, 1997.

59. George Carruthers, personal interview, March 17, 1997.

60. Herbert Gursky, superintendent of the Space Sciences Division

relays the story that Bartoe’s parents could not decide between the

names John and David so he became known as John-David as a

compromise.

61. Diane Prinz, personal interview, July 7, 1997.

62. Material on Clementine came largely from two collections of

papers—one technical and the other consisting of newspaper and

magazine reports on the project—supplied to me by Paul Regeon. I

also relied on a special issue of Science magazine (December 16, 1994)

in which much of the mission’s scientific results was reported. In June

1994, NRL also published a beautiful small volume, A Clementine

Collection, that includes useful information and anecdotes.

63. William J. Clinton, “Report on Aeronautics and Space of Fiscal

Year 1994,” Congressional Record, pp. S7388, May 24, 1995.

64. Material on NRL’s role in the Global Positioning System was

derived from discussions with Roger Easton (September 24, 1997)

and Thomas McCaskill (August 27, 1997); on documents supplied to

me by Roger Easton and McCaskill; and on a review article by Ronald

Beard and coauthors—“A History of Satellite Navigation,” Navigation:

A Journal of the Institute of Navigation, 42(1), Special Issue, 1995, as

well as on secondary sources, including “The Global Positioning

System,” which is part of National Academy of Sciences project

entitled, “Beyond Discovery: The Path From Research to Discovery.”

65. Roger Easton, oral history, NRL files.

66. “The Global Positioning System,” an article by Daniel Kleppner

that Gary Taubes adapted for the National Academy of Sciences.

67. NAA Citation for the 1992 Collier Award reprinted in the

trophy case of Building 43, NRL.

374 ♦ references and notes
68. WWW homepage (as of late 1997) of the Naval Center for

Space Technology.

Chapter 9

1. Alfred Price, History of U.S. Electronic Warfare, Vol. 2 (USA:

Association of Old Crows, 1989), p. 1.

2. Gunn, R.; Abelson, P.H.; Ruskin, R.E.; Raseman, C.J.; Schade,

H.A., “Atomic Energy Submarine”, NRL 221054, March 28, 1946.

3. W.A. Shurcliff, Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation

Crossroads (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc., 1947).

4. John Sanderson, Applied Optics, 6(12), December 1967.

5. Lou Drummeter interview, 1997.

6. Ibid.

7. Jack Brown interview, 1997.

8. Drummeter interview, 1997.

9. Ibid.

10. Herbert Friedman, Luther Lockhart, and Irving H. Blifford,

“Detecting the Soviet Bomb: Joe-1 in a Rain Barrel,” in Physics Today,

November 1996, pp. 38-41.

11. Ibid., p. 38.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 41.

14. Washington Post, February 13, 1951.

15. J.E. Sees, NRL Progress, January 1958.

16. Reprint from Paris Symposium on Radio Astronomy, IAU

Symposium No., and URSI Symposium No. 1, R.N. Bracewell, ed.,

Stanford, 1959).

17. Edward McLain, preprint for a Scientific American article, in

NRL files on Sugar Grove, dated Nov. 9, 1958.

18. Edward F. McLain, NRL Progress, 1958 issue.

19. David van Keuren, Project Moon Bounce, unpublished, 1997.

20. Ibid.

21. Letter cited in van Keuren, op. cit.

22. Van Keuren, op. cit.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. David Nagel interview, 1997.

26. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most

Secret Agency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982), p. 167-

172.

27. Ibid., p. 168.

references and notes ♦ 375
28. Ibid., p. 169.

29. Ibid., p. 156.

30. Captain Frank A. Andrews, USN (RET), “Search Operations in

the Thresher Area—1964 Section II, Naval Engineers Journal, October,

1965, p. 777.

31. James, H. Wakelin, Jr., National Geographic, June 1964, p. 761.

32. Ibid.

33. Captain Frank A. Andrews, USN (RET), “Search Operations in

the Thresher Area—1964 Section I, Naval Engineers Journal, August

1965, p. 553.

34. Ibid.

35. NRL FACT SHEET: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Participation in THRESHER and H-Bomb Searches. NRL Historian’s

office.

36. Andrews, August 1965, op. cit., p. 558.

37. Much of what follows is derived from NRL Memorandum

Report 6208, “NRL’s Deep Sea Floor Search Era—A Brief History of

the NRL/MIZAR Search System and its Major Achievements,” Nov.

29, 1988. This report contains several accounts by different authors

and some commentary by Walter Brundage.

38. John G. Norris, The Washington Post, March 27, 1966.

39. NRL Memorandum Report 6208, pp. 48-49.

40. Much of the material for this section derives from an article

by Homer Carhart, “Submarine Atmospheric Habitability,” in Report

of NRL Progress, July 1973. Additional sources included an oral history

of Homer Carhart by David van Keuren, several in-person interviews

in March 1997, and technical papers authored by Carhart and

colleagues.

41. Carhart, Report of NRL Progress, p. 68.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Much of the material for this section was derived from G.R.

Irwin, “Fracture Mechanics,” Report of NRL Progress, July 1973, pp. 35-

37; and the accounts of Irwin in the division history prepared by the

Materials Science and Technology Division, published in May 1993.

47. Irwin, NRL Progress, p. 35.

48. Bhakta Rath, in his “Inaugural Lecture” of the G.R. Irwin

symposium at the ASM-TMS Materials Week conference held

September 15-18.

49. Irwin, NRL Progress, page 36.

376 ♦ references and notes
50. Rath, op. cit.

51. Most of the material and quotes in this section focusing on

David Nagel is derived from a 1997 interview with David Nagel on

January 30, 1997.

52. Most of the material in this section centered on Tim Coffey is

based on March 3, 1997 interview with him as well as several shorter

subsequent discussions.

53. This account of NRL’s role in the Vela satellite incident derives

largely from an oral history of Alan Berman conducted soon after he

retired as well as from several interviews I did with Alan Berman and

Jack Brown, both of whom were directly involved in the investigation.

Additional reports available on the Web served as background.

54. Most of the material for this subsection is derived from NRL

Report 535235, “NRL Investigations of East Coast Acoustic Events 2

December 1977—15 February 1978,” published March 1978. Jack

Brown also recounted the events in an interview in February 1998.

55. Dinman letter appears in NRL Report 535235, p. 31.

56. NRL Report 535235, op. cit.

57. Final Report on Investigation of Galileo Spacecraft Failure by

panel chaired by Timothy Coffey.

58. Press release prepared by NASA.

59. NRL Report 221054, op. cit.

60. Much of the information for NRL’s early accelerator work is

derived from in-house materials and external articles, brochures,

reports, etc., in the NRL Historian’s office labeled “nuclear devices,”

“cyclotron,” “Van de Graaff,” and the like.

61. Krause interview on file as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s

oral history archives.

62. Speech in the NRL Historian’s files.

Chapter 10

1. Organizational charts, NRL Historian’s office.

2. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: the Birth

of the Information Age (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), p.

63.

3. Background Report No. 1, “A History of Science Policy in the

United States, 1940-1985,” a report prepared for the Task Force on

Science Policy, Committee on Science and Technology, House of

Representatives, Ninety-Ninth Congress, U.S. Government Printing

Office (Washington, DC: 1986), p. 34.

4. Homer Carhart interview, March 6, 1997.

references and notes ♦ 377
5. Background Report No. 8, “Science Support by the Department

of Defense,” a report prepared for the Task Force on Science Policy,

Committee on Science and Technology, House of Representatives,

Ninety-Ninth Congress, U.S. Government Printing Office

(Washington, DC: 1986), p. 35.

6. Alan Berman interview, April 2, 1997. Most of the material

on Berman was derived from this and several subsequent interviews.

7. Alan Berman, oral history interview in 1982 with Dr. Pitts,

NRL Historian’s office; Alan Berman interview, April 3, 1997.

8. James Murday interview, February 13, 1997.

9. Jack Brown interview, January 29, 1998.

10. Alan Berman interview, 1982.

11. Ibid.

12. Skip Lackie interviews on several occasions in 1997; file folders

on the NORDA/NOARL episodes, NRL Historian’s office.

13. Numbers derived from budget data in annual NRL Fact Books.

14. David van Keuren, “The Defense Budget, 1900-1990, An

Historical Overview,” internal NRL document.

15. Tom Giallorenzi interview, March 13, 1997.

16. Jack Brown interviews, January 27 and 29, 1998.

17. Louis Pecora interview, January 1997.

18. Tim Coffey, “Challenges and Opportunities in Naval

Oceanography in the Post Cold War World,” address at the Fifth

International Congress on the history of oceanography, San Diego,

CA, July 8, 1993, p. 15.

19. Ibid., p. 16,

20. Ibid.

21. William Mosely interview, July 9, 1997.

22. Eric Hartwig interview, March 4, 1997.

23. Tim Coffey interview, December 5, 1996. Most material

centered on Coffey derives from this interview as well as several shorter

ones conducted in 1997 and 1998.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Jack Brown, op. cit.

27. Ibid.

28. 1997 NRL Review, p. v.

Chapter 11

1. Jack Brown interview, January 27 and 29, 1998.

2. Joel Schnur interview, January 22, 1997.

378 ♦ references and notes
3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. NRL Website (www.nrl.navy.mil).

6. Tom Giallorenzi interview, March 13, 1997: Joseph Bucaro

interview, July 28, 1997.

7. Giallorenzi, op. cit.

8. FOSS: A Glance at the Past, July 18, 1980, an interview by

David Allison with Mickey Davis).

9. Giallorenzi, op. cit.

10. Ibid.

11. Patent titled “Fiber Optic Acoustic Sensor” (patent 4,162,397:

July 24, 1979).

12. Giallorenzi, op. cit.

13. Ibid.

14. Donald Gubser interview, January 8, 1997; Materials Science

and Technology Division, History, Naval Research Laboratory

(Washington, DC: May, 1993), pp. 56-63.

15. Gubser interview.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Labstracts, January 20, 1998, p. 1; NRL Press Release, “Navy

Scientists Demonstrate the World’s Highest Power Superconductive

Motor,” December 19, 1997.

21. Homer W. Carhart, “FIRE! (Fire Suppression Research at NRL),

NRL Review 1984, Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, 1984),

p. 67; Homer Carhart, interview March 6, 1997; Carhart file, NRL

Historian’s office.

22. Carhart, “FIRE!,” p. 68.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., p. 75.

25. “Welcome Aboard: NRL’s Advanced Fire Research Vessel, exShadwell (LSD-15), NRL (Washington, DC: October, 1986).

26. Carhart interview.

27. LASCO Website within www.nrl.navy.mil.

28. Aviation Week and Space Technology, May 6, 1996.

29. Kenneth Lang, “SOHO,” Scientific American, March 1997.

30. Guenter Brueckner quoted in Aviation Week, op. cit.

31. Guenter Brueckner interview, February 1998.

32. Ibid.

references and notes ♦ 379
33. Louis Pecora interview, December 6, 1996.

34. T.L Carroll, L. M. Pecora, and F.J. Rachford, “Chaotic Transients

and Multiple Attractors in Spin-Wave Experiments,” Physical Review

Letters 59(25), pp. 2891-2894.

35. Pecora interview.

36. Ibid.

37. PR packet of chaos section of Materials Physics Branch.

38. Pecora interview.

39. Thomas Carroll, personal communication, February 1998.

40. Pecora interview.

41. Randall Shumaker interview, June 21, 1997.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Shumaker interview; NRL Brochure, “RF Decoys and

Multimission Payload Delivery Platforms,” May 1997.

49. Shumaker interview.

50. Lee Hammarstrom interview, July 9, 1997.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Booklet on Global Grid provided to me by Lee Hammarstrom.

54. Hammarstrom interview, op. cit.

55. Ibid.

56. Beth Berselli, “Cutting Communications Data Down to Size,”

Washington Post, Business Section (pp. 5-6), August 11, 1997.

57. Hammarstrom interview, op. cit.

58. John Montgomery interview, February 10, 1997.

59. Ibid.

60. Bill Howell interview, February 1998.

61. Ibid.

62. Montgomery interview.

63. Allen Duckworth, “Tactical Electronic Warfare Division” history.

64. Ibid.

65. Montgomery interview.

66. Much of the material for this section was derived from a writeup of the history of structural analysis at NRL provided by Jerome Karle.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

380 ♦ references and notes
69. Ibid.

70. Herbert Hauptman in Proceedings of Natural Sciences Symposium:

In Celebration of the 75th Birthday of Dr. Jerome Karle, 1985 Nobel Laureate

in Chemistry, NRL (Washington: July 1994) p. 29; see also Bruce Hevley,

“A New Phase in Molecular-Structure Determination: The Basis of the

Research for the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” in 1985 NRL Review

(Washington, DC, 1985), pp. 3-11.

71. Jerome Karle write-up, op. cit.

72. Dudley Herschbach, “The Impossible Takes a Little Longer,”

in Proceedings of Natural Sciences Symposium: In Celebration of the 75th

Birthday of Dr. Jerome Karle, 1985 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, NRL

(Washington, DC: July 1994) p. 54.

73. Jerome Karle interview, February 3, 1997; oral history, NRL

Historian’s office.

74. Bruce Hevley, “A New Phase in Molecular-Structure

Determination: The Basis of the Research for the 1985 Nobel Prize in

Chemistry,” in 1985 NRL Review (Washington, DC, 1985), pp. 3-11.

75. Jerome Karle write-up, op. cit.

76. Wayne Hendrickson, Science, January 24, 1996, pp. 362-364.

77. Jerome Karle write-up, op. cit.

78. Hendrickson, op. cit.

79. Jerome Karle write-up, op. cit.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Gary Prinz interview, February 1998.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid.

88. P. Etienne et al., Applied Physics Letters 53(162); F. Saurenbach,

et al., Applied Physics, 63(3473).

89. Prinz interview, op. cit.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid.

92. C. Chris Herndon interview, February 1998; package of

program handouts, “NRL Code 8100 Programs Overview,” prepared

for Dr. Fred Saalfeld, January 6, 1998.

93. Herndon interview.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid.

references and notes ♦ 381
382 ♦ references and notes

Chapter 12

1. The data is from a large study conducted for the National

Science Foundation by the bibliometric research firm CHI Research

Inc., Haddon Heights, NJ.

2. Data appears in Science, October 20, 1995, p. 379.
B i b l i o g r a p h y

383

The single most important source in the preparation of this story

of the Naval Research Laboratory was the NRL’s Historian’s Office. In

addition to the human warehouse of historical information in the

form of David van Keuren, the office harbors bookcases and file cabinets filled with biographical information, oral histories, Laboratory

anniversary addresses, award citations, press releases, internal Laboratory and division communications, copies of memos and memoranda, archives of newsletters, photographs, countless files on the great

and minute topics that comprise an institutional history, and many

other types of documents whose influence has made its way into this

book overtly or more subtly.

I also relied heavily on a small but extremely valuable scholarly

literature centered on NRL. Long and short works both by professional historians and NRL researchers fall under this category. In addition to these sources, I have consulted many official NRL reports

and memoranda available at the NRL library as well as the annual

NRL Reviews, which provide year-at-a-time snapshots of NRL’s research

portfolio. Moreover, NRL has published many booklets, pamphlets,

press releases, and other special publications that have come in handy.

To these, I have added several dozen of my own interviews, and many

additional documents, letters, and other items harvested from these

contacts via phone, e-mail, and other means.

This is not the place to provide a full catalog of these sources.

Specific footnotes in specific chapters refer readers to specific documentation. Below, therefore, is a selected list merely representative of

the much larger reservoir of resources consulted for this book.
384 ♦ bibliography

Writings that focus on NRL History

Allison, David Kite, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the

Naval Research Laboratory, NRL Report 8466 (Washington, DC: Naval

Research Laboratory, September 29, 1981).

Drury, A.T., A War History of the Naval Research Laboratory, unpublished,

1954.

Gebhard, Louis A., Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and Contributions of the Naval Research Laboratory, NRL Report 8300 (Washington,

DC: NRL, 1979).

Gibbs, Betty C., A History of the Chemistry Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, 1927-1982. NRL-MR-5064 (Washington, DC:

NRL, April 22, 1983).

Gimpel, Herbert, History of N.R.L., two volumes (first 50 years), unpublished, 1975.

Hevley, Bruce, Basic Research Within a Military Context: The Naval Research Laboratory and the Foundations of Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray

Astronomy, 1923-1960 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University,

1987).

Materials Science and Technology Division, History, NRL/PU-6300—93-

240 (Washington, DC: NRL, May 1993).

Taylor, A. Hoyt, The First Twenty Five Years of NRL (Washington, DC:

Navy Department, 1948).

van Keuren, David, “Science, Progressivism, and Military Preparedness:

The Case of the Naval Research Laboratory, 1915-1923” in Technology and

Culture (Chicago, IL: Society for the History of Technology, 1992).

van Keuren, David, “Moon In Their Eyes: Communication Moon Relay (CMR) at the Naval Research Laboratory, 1951-1962,” unpublished,

1997.
bibliography ♦ 385

NRL Publications

A Clementine Collection (companion book to the exhibit by the same

name) (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, June 1994).

“A Scientific Satellite Proposal,” by the Rocket Development Branch

of the Atmospheric & Astrophysics Division of the Naval Research

Laboratory, April 13, 1955.

Brundage, Walter, “NRL’s Deep Sea Floor Search Era—A Brief History

of the NRL/MIZAR Search System and Its Major Achievements,” NRL

Memorandum Report 6208 (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, November 29, 1988).

FOSS: A Glance at the Past, July 18, 1980, selections from an interview

with Mickey Davis by David Allison.

Friedman, Herbert, “Reminiscences of 30 Years of Space Research”

(Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, August 1977).

Friedman, Herbert, “From the Challenges of World War II to the Frontier of Space,” in NRL Review 1992 (Washington, DC: Naval Research

Laboratory, 1992).

“ . . . From the Sea: Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century”

(Department of the Navy, 1992).

Lorenzen, Harold, Short History of Countermeasures, NRL Historian’s

office.

NRL Investigations of East Coast Acoustics Events 2 December 1977—15

February 1978 and Executive Summary of NRL Investigations of East

Coast Acoustics Events 2 December 1977–15 February 1978.

Proceedings of Natural Science Symposium at NRL on June 14, 1993 in

honor of Jerome Karle. NRL Publication NRL/PU/6000-94-252.

Report of NRL Progress 1946 (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, July, 1946).

Report of NRL Progress (Special 50th Anniversary Edition with historical essays) (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1973).

Skolnik, Merrill, “Radar Research and Development at NRL” (Publication No. 0073-2630) (Washington, DC, July 1986).

Taylor, A. Hoyt, Radio Reminiscences: A Half Century (Washington, DC:

NRL, 1948).
386 ♦ bibliography

Oral Histories

Alan Berman

Homer Carhart

Roger Easton

Herbert Friedman

Louis Gebhard

James Griffith

E.O. Hulburt

Jerome Karle

Isabella Karle

Ernst Krause

Harold Lorenzen

Robert Morris Page

Richard Tousey

Interviews

Philip Abelson

Alan Berman

Stephen Bodner

Gerald Borsuk

Robert Brady

Guenter Brueckner

Jack Brown

Joseph Bucaro

Bruce Buckley

George Carruthers

Timothy Coffey

Henry Dardy

Louis Drummeter

Roger Easton

Edward Franchi

Herbert Friedman

Thomas Giallorenzi

John Gilfrich

Donald Gubser

Herbert Gursky

Eric Hartwig

Lee Hammarstrom

Jerry Hannan

Charles C. Herndon

William Howell

Burton Hurdle

Isabella Karle

Jerome Karle

Tom Kawecki

Arnold Kramish

Skip Lackie

Robert LeFande

Philip Mange

Christie Marrion

Fred McCaskill

Alan Meyerowitz

John Montgomery

William Mosely

James Murday

David Nagel

Sue Numrich

Sidney Ossakow

Louis Pecora

Diane Prinz

Gary Prinz

Bhakta Rath

Fred Saalfeld

Randall Shumaker

Merrill Skolnik

Joel Schnur

David Venezky

Peter Wilhelm

Bob Whitlock
Books, Journal Articles, and other Primary and Secondary Sources

Andrews, Captain Frank A., USN (Retired), “Search Operations in the

Thresher Area, 1964,” Section II, Naval Engineers Journal, October 1965.

Applied Optics (Special Issue devoted to the Naval Research Laboratory), 6(12), December 1967.

Bamford, James, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret

Agency (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1982).

Beard, Ronald and coauthors—“A History of Satellite Navigation,” in

Navigation: A Journal of the Institute of Navigation, 42(1), Special Issue,

1995.

Blumtritt, Oskar, et al. (editors), Tracking the History of Radar (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc.: NJ, 1994).

Bowen, Harold, Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks; the Autobiography of a

Naval Engineer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).

Buderi, Robert, The Invention that Changed the World : How a Small

Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

Butrica, Andrew J., (ed.), Beyond the Ionosphere (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1997).

Clementine issue, many authors, Science, December 16, 1994.

Clinton, William J., “Report on Aeronautics and Space of Fiscal Year

1994,” Congressional Record (Senate), p. S7388, May 24, 1995.

Coffey, Timothy, “Challenges and Opportunities in Naval Oceanography in the Post Cold War World,” address to the Fifth International

Congress on the History of Oceanography, San Diego, CA, July 8,

1993.

Corliss, William, NASA Sounding Rockets 1958-1968: A Historical Summary (Washington, DC: NASA, 1971).

Day, Dwayne A., “Cover Stories and Hidden Agendas: Early American

Space and National Security Policy,” paper presented at the meeting

Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite, Washington,

DC, September 30-November 1, 1997.

bibliography ♦ 387
DeVorkin, David H., Science with A Vengeance: How the Military Created

the U.S. Space Sciences after World War II (New York: Springer-Verlag,

1992).

Friedman, Herbert, The Astronomer’s Universe: Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmos (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990).

Friedman, Herbert and Luther Lockhart and Irving Blifford, “Detecting the Soviet Bomb: Joe-1 In A Rain Barrel,” in Physics Today, November 1996.

Green, Constance and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC: NASA, 1970).

Hagen, John, “The Viking and the Vanguard,” in Technology and Culture, Volume IV, no. 4 (Wayne State University Press, Fall 1963).

Hendrickson, Wayne, “The 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” Science,

January 24, 1986, pp. 362-364.

Hessel, F., et al., Chemistry in Warfare: Its Strategic Importance (New

York: Hastings House, 1942).

Howeth, L.S., History of Communications-Electronics in the United States

Navy (Washington, DC: Bureau of Ships and Office of Naval History,

1963).

Klein, Elias, “Some Background History of Ultrasonics,” Journal of the

Acoustical Society of America, 20(5), 601-604, September, 1948.

Kleppner, Daniel (with Gary Taubes), “The Global Positioning System,” in series titled Beyond Discovery : The Path From Research to Human Benefit (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, August

1996).

Kramish, Arnold, “Hiroshima’s First Victims,” Rocky Mountain News,

August 6, 1995.

“Naval Research Laboratory,” in Product Engineering, June 1946.

Norris, John G., Washington Post, Sunday March 27, 1966.

NRL Web Site (http://www.nrl.navy.mil).

Osgood, Kenneth, A., “Before Sputnik: National Security and the Formation of U.S. Outer Space Policy, 1953-1957),” paper presented at

388 ♦ bibliography
the meeting Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite,

Washington, DC, September 30-November 1, 1997.

Page, Robert M., The Origin of Radar (New York: Anchor Books, 1962).

Pechura, Constance, M., and David P. Rall (editors), Veterans at Risk:

The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1993).

Price, Alfred, The History of US Electronic Warfare, Volume 1 (Association of Old Crows: Arlington, VA, 1984).

Price, Alfred, The History of US Electronic Warfare, Volume 2 (Association of Old Crows: Arlington, VA, 1989).

Rath, Bhakta, “George R. Irwin,” presented at G.R. Irwin Symposium

at the ASM-TMS Materials Week, Indianapolis, September 15-18, 1997.

Regeon, Paul ,et al., Paper No. 96-e-40V, the Twentieth International

Symposium on Space Technology and Science and Eleventh IAS conference, 1996.

Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon &

Schuster, Inc., 1986).

Rosen, Milton and Richard Snodgrass, “The High Altitude Sounding

Rocket,” in Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research, p.47. NRL History Office, Code 5204.

Sapolsky, Harvey, M., Science and the Navy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Scott, Lloyd, Naval Consulting Board of the United States (Washington,

DC: Government Printing Office, 1920).

Skolnik, Merrill, “Fifty Years of Radar,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 73(2),

February 1985.

Sidey, Hugh, “The Man Who Took the Beating for Vanguard,” Life

Magazine, March 31, 1958, New York, p. 35.

“SONAR . . . Detector,” (OPNAV P413-104) Navy Department, Office

of Chief Naval Operations, Washington, DC, April 6, 1946.

Sternhell, Charles and Alan Thorndike, Antisubmarine Warfare in

World War II, OEG Report No. 51 (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1946).

bibliography ♦ 389
Sweeney, John, J., Elias Klein: The First Eighty Years (short biography in

booklet form), published January 1968.

van Keuren, David, “Science and the Federal Patron: Post-World War

II Government Support of American Science,” introduction to Science

and the Federal Patron: Post-World War II Government Support of American Science edited by David van Keuren and Nathan Reingold.

390 ♦ bibliography
A c r o n y m G l o s s a r y

391

ABM—Antiballistic Missile

ACG—Airborne Coordinating Group

AFFF—Aqueous Film Forming Foam

AFOSR—Air Force Office of Scientific Research

APL—Applied Physics Laboratory

ARO—Army Research Office

ARPA—Advanced Research Projects Agency

ASW—Antisubmarine Warfare

ATM—Asynchronous Transfer Mode

BMDO—Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

BuAir—Bureau of Aeronautics

BuEng—Bureau of Engineering

BuOrd—Bureau of Ordnance

Calsphere—Calibration Sphere satellite

Cal Tech—California Institute of Technology

CAMS—Central Atmosphere Measurement System

CFCs—Chlorofluorocarbons

CIA—Central Intelligence Agency

CIW—Carnegie Institution of Washington

CMR—Communication Moon Relay

CNN—Cable News Network

CNO—Chief of Naval Operations

CRADA—Cooperative Research And Development Agreement

CRD—Coordinator of Research and Development

CRG—Combined Research Group

C4

I—Command, Control, Communications, Computers,

and Intelligence

DARPA—Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

DF—Direction Finding

DNA—Defense Nuclear Agency

DoD—Department of Defense

DoE—Department of Energy

DoT—Department of Transportation

ELINT—Electronic Intelligence

EW—Electronic Warfare

FAA—Federal Aviation Administration

FOSS—Fiber Optic Sensor System
GeV—Giga electron volts

GMR—Giant Magnetoresistance

GPS—Global Positioning System

HANE—High Altitude Nuclear Effects

HRTS—High Resolution Telescope and Spectrograph

HTSC—High Transition-temperature Superconductor

IDM—Improved Data Modem

IFF—Identification: Friend or Foe

IGY—International Geophysical Year

IOM—Institute of Medicine

JHU—Johns Hopkins University

JPL—Jet Propulsion Laboratory

km—kilometer

kHz—kilohertz

LASCO—Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph

Laser—Light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation

LEO—Low-Earth Orbiting Satellite

LIPS—Livly Plume Shield

LLNL—Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

LOFTI—Low Frequency Trans-Ionospheric satellite

MAD—Multiple-Wavelength Anomalous Dispersion - also Mutually

Assured Destruction

MATT—Multi-mission Advanced Tactical Terminal

MBE—Molecular Beam Epitaxy

Mc—Megacycles

MeV—Mega Electron Volts

MHz—megahertz

MIT—Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NAA—National Aeronautics Association

NACA—National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics

NAREC—Naval Research Computer

NASA—National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NAVSPASUR—Naval Space Surveillance System

NBS—National Bureau of Standards

NCARAI—Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial

Intelligence

NCB—Naval Consulting Board

NCST—Naval Center for Space Technology

NDRC—National Defense Research Committee

NOARL—Naval Oceanographic and Atmospheric Research

Laboratory

NORAD—North American Aerospace Defense Command

392 ♦ acronym glossary
NORDA—Naval Ocean Research and Development Activity

NRL—Naval Research Laboratory

NRO—National Reconnaissance Office

NSA—National Security Agency

NSWC—Naval Surface Warfare Center

NSF—National Science Foundation

ONR—Office of Naval Research

ORI—Office of Research and Inventions

OSRD—Office of Scientific Research and Development

PAMOR—Passive Moon Relay

PPI—Plan Position Indicator

R&D—Research and Development

RAC—Research Advisory Council

Radar—Radio Detecting and Ranging

RBOC—Rapid-Blooming Offboard Chaff

RRL—Radiation Research Laboratory

SDI—Strategic Defense Initiative

Solrad—Solar Radiation

SOHO—Solar Heliospheric Observatory

SPASUR—Space Surveillance

SUSIM—Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor

TEWD—Tactical Electronic Warfare Division

TRAP—Tactical Recovery of Aircraft Personnel

TRE—Tactical Receiver Equipment

UHF—Ultrahigh Frequency

US—United States

UTE—Underwater Tracking Equipment

UV—Ultraviolet

USNC—United States National Committee

U235—Uranium 235 (an isotope of the element)

U238—Uranium 238 (an isotope of the element)

VHF—Very High Frequency

WAVES—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service

WWI—World War I

WWII—World War II

acronym glossary ♦ 393
Military Directors and Commanding Officers

RADM William S. Smith September 13, 1921 September 15, 1921

CAPT Edward L. Bennett December 21, 1921 August 24, 1924

CAPT Paul Foley September 2, 1924 July 15, 1926

CAPT David E. Theleen July 15, 1926 July 22, 1930

CAPT Edward J. Marquart July 22, 1930 November 17, 1930

CAPT Edgar G. Oberlin February 18, 1931 March 2, 1932

CDR Edmund D. Almy March 2, 1932 May 15, 1933

LCDR Wilbur J. Ruble (Acting) May 15, 1933 June 30, 1933

CDR James B. Will (Acting) June 30, 1933 September 5, 1933

CAPT Halford R. Greenlee September 5, 1933 May 14, 1935

CDR James B. Will (Acting) May 14, 1935 June 17, 1935

CAPT Hollis M. Cooley June 17, 1935 September 12, 1939

RADM Harold G. Bowen October 9, 1939 November 5, 1942

RADM Alexander H. Van Keuren November 23, 1942 November 1, 1945

CAPT Henry A. Schade November 1, 1945 January 31, 1949

CAPT Frederick R. Furth February 1, 1949 June 9, 1952

CAPT Willis H. Beltz June 9, 1952 March 29, 1955

CAPT Samuel M. Tucker March 29, 1955 May 15, 1956

CAPT Peter H. Horn May 15, 1956 July 1, 1959

CAPT Arthur E. Krapf July 1, 1959 May 29, 1963

CAPT Bradley F. Bennett May 29, 1963 January 29, 1965

CAPT Thomas B. Owen January 29, 1965 May 29, 1967

CAPT James C. Matheson May 29, 1967 June 30, 1970

CAPT Earl W. Sapp June 30, 1970 July 16, 1973

A p p e n d i x

395
396 ♦ appendix

CAPT John T. Geary July 16, 1973 June 30, 1976

CAPT Lionel M. Noel June 30, 1976 July 31, 1978

CAPT Edward E. Henifin July 31, 1978 September 4, 1981

CAPT John A. McMorris, II September 4, 1981 October 26, 1984

CAPT James P. O’ Donovan October 26, 1984 October 30, 1986

CAPT William C. Miller October 30, 1986 August 26, 1987

CAPT William G. Clautice August 26, 1987 June 2, 1989

CAPT John J. Donegan, Jr. June 2, 1989 February 22, 1991

CAPT Paul G. Gaffney, II February 22, 1991 April 28, 1994

CAPT Richard Cassidy April 28, 1994 January 26, 1996

CAPT Bruce W. Buckley January 26, 1996 Present

Civilian Directors of Research

Edward O. Hulburt 1949 to 1955

Oscar T. Marzke 1956 to 1957

Robert M. Page 1957 to 1966

Alan Berman 1967 to 1982

Timothy Coffey 1982 to present
I n d e x

A

Abelson, Philip, 10, 143–148, 154, 217

Acoustic Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): research in, 312–317

Acronym glossary, 391–393

Advanced Research Projects Agency, 286

Advisory Committee on Undersea

Warfare (NAS), 233

Aerobee rockets, 184, 188

Aero-Jet Corporation, 251

Aerojet-General Company, 191–192

Aeronautics Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 78

Aerospace Corporation, 214

Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, 197

Air Force Office of Scientific Research

(AFOSR), 160, 286

Air Force (U.S.): Clementine program

and, 206; GPS project and, 212, 214

Airborne Coordinating Group (ACG),

108

Aircraft camouflage, 99

Aircraft Radio Laboratory (Anacostia

Naval Air Station), 22, 26

Allison, David K., 22, 28, 92

Almy, E. D., 69–70

Aluminaut, 240, 242

Alvin, 240–243

American Superconductor, 321

Andrews, Frank A., 237, 238

ANGUS (Acoustically Navigated

Geophysical Underwater Survey), 244

Annapolis, Maryland, 19–21

Antennae wire alloys, 55–56

Anti-fouling paint, 98

Anti-reflective coatings, 99

Antisubmarine warfare (ASW), 114,

125–130

Apollo 16, 201

Applications Research Division (Naval

Research Laboratory), 282

Applied Physics Laboratory (Johns

Hopkins University), 171, 210

Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF),

323

Army, U.S.: machinery and equipment

donations from, 31, 33

Army Ballistic Missile Agency, 196, 197

Army Research Office, 286

Army Signal Corps Laboratory, 171

Artificial blood, 310–311

Artificial intelligence, 276, 331

ASB radar system, 114, 115

ASM-TMS Materials Week, 252

Astronauts, 203

Atlas rocket, 189

ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)

technology, 335–336

Atomic clocks, 212

Atomic energy research: Bowen and,

158–159; developments in, 10,

140–151; origins of, 101–102

AT&T Bell Laboratories, 360

Augusta, 57

B

B.F. Goodrich Company, 48, 127

Baciocco, A.J., 331

Baekeland, Leo H., 18

Bain, J. G., 170, 171

Bakelite, 18

Ballistic Missile Defense Initiative

(Star Wars). See also Strategic

Defense Initiative (SDI): cost of,

292; funding of Clementine

program by, 205; NCST and, 299;

NRL and, 307; superconductivity

funding by, 320

Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

(BMDO), 12, 205, 206

Ballistics Section (Mechanics and

Electricity Division), 101

Bamford, James, 235

Barassinolide, 345

Barret, C.S., 56–57

Bartoe, John-David, 203

Battery explosives, 62–63

Battle of Britain, 140

Battle of the Atlantic, 126, 128, 129

Battlefield, digitized, 354–356

Baus, Richard, 225

Bell Laboratories, 94, 282, 349, 350

Bellcore, 360

Bellevue Magazine site (Washington,

D.C.), 23–25

397
398 ♦ index

Bennett, Bradley F., 236

Bennett, E. L., 25, 66–67

Berman, Alan, 212; background of,

288–289; investigation of blasts in

New Jersey, 267–268; investigation

of suspected nuclear testing,

265–267; as research director,

286–292, 331

Betatron, 274, 275

Bichowsky, Francis Russell, 60–63

Big Dish, 226–227

Biotechnology research: developments

in, 308–310; funding for, 309

Bird Dogs, 159

Birks, LaVerne, 255–256, 258

Bittinger, Charles, 99

Blackouts: on-board lighting system

for, 99

Blifford, Irving H., 222–223

Borgstrom, Parry, 61, 132, 133

Bowen, Harold G.: atomic energy

research and, 140–142, 145, 146,

148, 158–161; background of, 104,

154; at Bureau of Engineering,

78–79, 86, 154; following NRL

assignment, 156–157; Manhattan

Project and, 217; as NRL director,

154–156; Office of Naval Research

and, 160–161; personnel rating of,

153; as Technical Aide to Secretary

to Navy, 155

Bragg, Braxton, 150

Bragg, Peter N., Jr., 149, 150

Breit, Gregory, 42, 43

Brown, Jack: background of, 303–304;

reflections of NRL by, 304, 307

Brueckner, Guenter, 326

Brundage, Walter, 244

Bucaro, Joseph, 313–315

Buchanan, Chester: H-bomb search

and, 240; Thrasher search and, 236,

237, 239

Buderi, Robert, 115

Bureau of Aeronautics (U.S. Navy), 99,

100

Bureau of Construction and Repair

(U.S. Navy), 112

Bureau of Engineering (U.S. Navy):

effect of Great Depression on, 68;

merger involving, 112; NRL control

and, 71, 72, 75, 76, 93, 94, 102; NRL

funding by, 6, 25–26, 32, 63, 67;

Physical Metallurgy Division

research for, 55–59; radar research

and, 40, 89; radio research by, 33;

storage battery for submarines and,

20

Bureau of Ordnance (U.S. Navy), 23;

atomic energy research and, 148;

Chemistry Division and, 54, 59, 60,

67

Bureau of Ships (U.S. Navy): NRL

control by, 112, 156; NRL funding

by, 32; nuclear propulsion and, 161;

sonar research and, 127

Bureau of Steam Engineering (U.S.

Navy), 23

Burke, Arleigh, 232

Bush, George, 149

Bush, Vannevar, 126, 157–158, 217

Business Operations Directorate

(Naval Research Laboratory), 284

Byrd, Richard E., 53

C

Calsphere I satellite, 201

Camouflage developments, 99–100

Carhart, Homer: chemical warfare and,

131–139; fire suppression research

and, 322–325; on research funding,

286; submarine submersion and

habitability and, 245–248

Carome, Edward, 313

Carroll, Thomas, 328, 329

Carruthers, George, 201, 203

Center for Biomolecular Science and

Engineering, 309, 311, 317

Central Atmosphere Measurement

System (CAMS), 248

Chaff technology, 123–125

Challenger, 203

Chaos research, 294–295, 327–330

Chemical Protection Section

(Chemistry Section), 98, 131

Chemical warfare, 21, 131, 132,

136–139

Chemical warfare research: human costs

of, 138–139; development of sensors

for, 311; human subjects for,

134–136, 138, 139; during World

War II, 130–138

Chemical Warfare Service (U.S. Army),

98, 132

Chemistry Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): early research by,

60–63; establishment of, 54, 59, 67;

pre-World War II, 97–98; Victron
index ♦ 399

and, 97; during World War II,

130–139

Chesapeake Bay Detachment, 109–110

Chester, 57–59

Churchill, Winston, 115, 215–216

C4I, 354–356

Cleeton, Claud, 167, 168

Clementine program: developments in,

12, 205–207, 307; purpose of, 205;

success of, 207, 214, 299

Clinton, Bill, 207

Cochrane, Edward L., 146

Coffey, Timothy: background of,

260–261, 284–285; career advancement of, 263–265; on end of Cold

War era, 295; laser fusion and,

263–264; Mars Observer spacecraft

and, 271–272; in Plasma Physics

Division, 261–264, 292–294; as

research director, 292, 295–303,

308–310, 319, 328, 329

Cold War era: background of, 215–216;

detection techniques and, 220–225;

equipment used for intelligence

gathering during, 225–235; fracture

mechanics research during, 248–252;

impact of end of, 295; nuclear submarine habitability and, 244–248;

plasma physics and, 295; scientific

advances stemming from, 273–280;

surveillance developments during,

265–272; Thresher search during,

236–244; U.S. nuclear testing during, 216–220; underground testing

during, 252–260; weapons simulation developments during, 259–265

Colley, Hollis, 141–142

Collier Trophy, 214

Combined Research Group (CRG),

108–110

Commanding Officer (Naval Research

Laboratory), 284

Commanding Officers, list of, 395–396

Committee on Medical Research, 132,

134

Committee on Naval Affairs (House of

Representatives), 18, 19

Communication Moon Relay (CMR),

229, 231

Compton, Karl, 157

Conant, James Bryant, 148–149, 157

Condensed Matter and Radiation

Sciences Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 259–260

Congress, U.S.: NRL funding and, 19,

25, 32, 78, 155; Sputnik and R&D

funding by, 286

Cooley, Hollis M., 86

Cooper, Samuel, 72

Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs), 9

Corning Glass Works, 312

Corrosion Section (Chemistry Division), 97–98, 130

Countermeasures Branch (Naval

Research Laboratory), 117, 338

Countermeasures development:

electronic, 118–125, 337–339;

German, 129; for submarine

warfare, 129

Cryopreservation techniques, 311

Curie, Jacques, 45, 48

Curie, Pierre, 45, 48

Cushing, 13

CXZ, 89

Cyclotron, 276, 277

D

Daniels, Josephus, 13–18, 21, 23–24,

362

Dardy, Henry (Hank), 335, 336

David Taylor Model Basin, 54

Davis, C. M. (Mickey), 313, 314

Davis, Leo, 184

Deep Space Program Science Experiment. See Clementine program

Deep Tow, 244

Deep-sea searches, 236–244

Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA), 309, 310, 313–314,

320, 331, 332, 351–352

Defense Atomic Support Agency, 256,

260

Defense Nuclear Agency, 256, 294

Defense Special Weapons Agency, 256

Delta booster, 196

Denby, Edwin, 25

Department of Defense (DoD): information technology research and, 331;

R&D funding by, 285

Department of Energy (DoE): laser

research funding by, 11; plasma

research funding by, 285, 294

Department of Transportation (DoT), 9

Depth finders, 95–96

Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for

Special Weapons (OP-06), 160–161
400 ♦ index

Design and Drafting Section (Naval

Research Laboratory), 111

Detection technology, 221–225

Developmental Engineering Corporation, 232

DeVorkin, David, 277

Dinman, Gerald P., 268

Direction finding (DF), 117–118

Director of Research (Naval Research

Laboratory): Commanding Officer

and, 284; description of first three,

283; establishment and function of,

282–284

Doenitz, Karl, 129–130

Dome shield, 95

Donovan, Jack, 314

Dorchester, 28, 37, 40

Drummeter, Louis Franklin, Jr.: background of, 218; nuclear testing and,

218–220; on research funding, 286

Duckworth, Allen, 338

Dudley, O.E., 44, 45

Dueppel, 123, 125

Duplexer, 87, 115

DuPont, 94, 136

Dynetics, Inc., 330

E

E. O. Hulburt Center for Space

Research, 164

Easton, Roger, 189, 192, 208, 211, 212

Edison, Charles, 155; Bureau of Ships

and, 112; NRL status and, 102–103

Edison, Thomas Alva, 362; dissatisfaction and disaffiliation with NRL

by, 24, 28, 65; NRL establishment

and, 14–18, 20; site location and,

19–23

Effectiveness of Naval Electronic

Warfare Systems (ENEWS), 338

Efratom, 211

Einstein, Albert, 142–143

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 190, 193, 194,

197

Electrochemistry Section (Chemistry

Division), 97

Electron Optics Branch (Chemistry

Division), 183

Electronic Field Service Group, 108

Electronic warfare, 336–339

Electronic Warfare Division (Naval

Research Laboratory), 117, 338.

See also Tactical Electronic Warfare

Division (TEWD)

Emmet, John, 264

Engineering Experiment Laboratory

(Naval Academy), 20, 22, 26

Engineering research, 53–54

Ethyl perchlorate, 61

Eurydice, 243

Executive Directorate (Naval Research

Laboratory), 284

Explorer I satellite, 196

F

Falaba, 13

Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph,

201, 203, 204

Farmer, Martha, 311

Fathometers, 10, 95–96

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA),

9

Fermi, Enrico, 140, 141

Fiber Optic Sensor System (FOSS)

program, 314–316

Fiber optic sensors, 313–316

Fire I (Chesapeake Bay Detachment)

(NRL), 323–324

Fire suppression research, 322–325

Fire-control systems, 116

Flippen-Anderson, Judith, 348

Flocculation, 223

Fore Systems, 336

Forrestal, James, 140, 156, 159, 221

Fracture mechanics research, 249–252

Friedman, Herbert, 298; background

of, 181; detection techniques and,

221–223, 225; on Project Vanguard,

194–195; quartz crystal research of,

182; rocket research of, 164, 165,

171, 173, 182, 199; solar flare

research and, 182–185; on Sputnik 1,

193

Fuel Section (Naval Research Laboratory), 130

Fuel tank corrosion, 98

Furer, Julius, 119, 159

Furth, Frederick, 230

G

G.R. Irwin Symposium, 252

Gaber, Bruce, 310, 311

Gaffney, Paul, II, 150

Gamble II, 262, 263

Gamma ray detectors, 222, 223

Gas masks, 136
index ♦ 401

Gebhard, Louis, 231; ionosphere

research by, 42, 43, 80; on Mark III,

109; radio research by, 35, 36, 38

Geiger counters, 182, 222, 223

General Electric Company, 18, 171, 191

George, Clifford, 348

Germany: use of chemical warfare by,

21; World War I and, 13, 14, 21,

131

Giallorenzi, Tom, 292–293, 313–317

Giant magnetoresistance (GMR),

352–353

Gilardi, Richard, 347

Gilfrich, John, 258

Glenn L. Martin Company, 186, 187,

191

Global Grid, 334–336, 354

Global Positioning System (GPS):

applications of, 213–214; developments in, 212–213, 307; forerunners

to, 11, 208; Minitrack system and,

192

Goddard, William, 43

Goddard Space Flight Center, 198

Goldin, Daniel, 205

Great Britain: countermeasures

developed by, 123–124; radar

systems development and, 113–115;

radio telescope developments in, 228

Greenlee, Halford R., 84

Groves, Leslie R., 145, 148

Guadalcanal, 140

Gubser, Donald, 317–322

Guided missile research. See also Rocket

program: developments in, 170–179;

early organization of, 169–170;

Germany and, 168–169

Guided weaponry, 120, 121

Gulflight, 13

Gunn, Ross: background of, 54; on NRL,

163; nuclear research and, 140–145,

150, 158, 217; research projects of,

101–102

Guthrie, Robert, 84–86

H

Hagen, John: accomplishments of,

169–170; intelligence gathering

techniques and, 225–226; on NRL

history, 170; Project Vanguard and,

190–191, 193–198

Hagerty, James, 188, 194

Hahn, Otto, 140

Hall, Dave, 257

Hall, Wayne, 255–256

Hammarstrom, Lee, 334–336

“Handbook of Camouflage,” 99

Harmon, Milton, 60

Hartwig, Eric, 297

Hauptman, Herbert: background of,

341; Nobel Prize and, 307, 340,

346; research of, 163, 164, 234,

342, 346

Hayes, Harvey C.: on antisubmarine

program, 128; efforts regarding

appropriations by, 84; recruitment

efforts of, 55; research projects of,

10, 44–49, 81, 95

Heat and Light Division (Naval

Research Laboratory). See also

Optics Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): early research in, 42,

51–54; engineering research in,

53–54; establishment of, 50–51,

67; pre-World War II, 98–100

Hendrickson, Wayne, 346

Henschel 293 (German bomb),

121-121

Heraclitus, 357

Herndon, Charles, 355–356

Herschbach, Dudley, 342

Hertz, Heinrich, 34

Hevley, Bruce, 177–178

High Altitude Nuclear Effects (HANE),

261

High Resolution Telescope and

Spectrograph (HRTS), 203

High transition-temperature superconductors (HTSC), 319

High-altitude nuclear explosion

program, 260–263

High-frequency technology: developments in, 41; focus on, 37–39;

ionosphere research and, 53

Historian’s Office (NRL), 383

Hollins, Tony, 236

Honeywell, 352

Honig, Barry, 345

Hooper, Stanford C., 26, 72, 73, 78

Hoover, Herbert, 25

Hoover, John, 144

Hopcalite, 246–247

House of Representatives, U.S., 18–19

Howell, Bill, 337–338

Huang, Lulu, 348

Hulburt, Edward O., 98, 164; background of, 50–51; camouflage

research and, 99, 100; ionospheric
Hulburt, Edward O., (continued)

reflection research of, 42, 43;

nuclear weapons testing and, 217;

as research director, 283, 298;

rocket research and, 173, 181,

182; work with Taylor, 51–53

Huntress, Wesley, Jr., 272

Hurdle, Burton, 236, 313

Huskins, Rupert, 118

Hutchinson, Miller Reese, 18, 75

Hydrophones, 44–45

Hyland, Lawrence, 68, 69, 79, 80

I

IBM Corporation, 352, 360

IBM Federal Systems Company, 214

IDM (Improved Data Modem), 356

IFF (Identification: Friend or Foe)

system, 108, 109

Information Technology Division

(Naval Research Laboratory), 282

Information technology research,

330–334. See also Internet

Institute of Medicine (IOM), 134, 138,

139

Institute of Scientific Information, 360

Intelligence-gathering devices,

225–235

Interferometry, 314–315

Interior Communications Division

(Naval Research Laboratory), 93

International Geophysical Year (IGY),

186, 188–191

International Scientific Radio Union,

188

Internet, 334–336. See also Information technology research

The Invention that Changed the World

(Buderi), 115

Ionosphere research: early developments in, 42–43; Hulburt-Taylor

paper on, 53

Iran-Iraq War, 337

Irwin, George R., 249–252

J

J.M. Gillis, 236

Jammers, 117, 119, 121, 123

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 170,

197; Clementine program and, 206

Jewett, Frank, 157

JK equipment, 49, 127

Joe-1, 225

Johnson, A.W., 87, 90–91

Johnson, Montgomery, 221, 222

Jorefsburg, Anne, 336

K

Kane, Jack, 224

Karle, Isabella, 163–165, 234, 298,

340, 343–347

Karle, Jerome: background of, 340;

Nobel Prize and, 307, 340, 346;

research of, 163–165, 234, 298,

342–348

Karplus, Martin, 345

Kennedy, John F., 235

Key clicks, 81

King, Peter: detection techniques and,

223–225; solar flare research and,

182–183

Klein, Elias, 48, 96, 127

Knox, Frank, 153, 155, 156

Kolb, Alan, 260, 261

Konnert, John, 348

Koon, Norman, 351

Kramish, Arnold, 148–150

Krause, Ernst: detection techniques,

221; nuclear weapons testing and,

182, 217; Nucleonics Division and,

273, 277; Rocket Sonde Research

Section and, 180; V-2 program and,

167–172

Kreplin, Robert, 184, 185

Kruschev, Nikita, 196

Kupperian, James, Jr., 184

Kurie, Franz, 232

Kuwait, 337

L

Lachrymotors, 248

Lang, Kenneth, 326

Langevin, Paul, 46

Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronograph (LASCO), 325–327

Larmor, Sir Joseph, 42

Laser research, 11, 263–264, 294

Laser-plasma-based X-ray lithography

process, 260

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL): Clementine program

and, 206; laser research at, 11, 264,

294; weapons research at, 256

LeBaron Russel Briggs, 243, 244

LEO (low earth orbiting satellite), 355

Ligler, Frances, 311, 317

Linac, 275–276

Liquid crystals, 307, 308

402 ♦ index
Living Plume Shield 2 (LIPS2), 355,

356

Lockhart, Luther, 222–225

Lorenzen, Howard: countermeasures

developments and, 119–122, 125;

direction finding and, 117–118;

Operation Moon Bounce and,

230–231

Lucent Technologies, 360

Lunn, E.G., 62, 63

Lusitania, 13–15

Lyman, Theodore, 174

Lyman-alpha emission, 174–175, 178,

199

M

MAD (Multiple-Wavelength Anomalous

Dispersion), 347

MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction),

225, 252

Magnetic memories, 352

Magnetism, 349–354

Magnetism Branch (Naval Research

Laboratory), 349

Magnetostructive materials, 49–50

Man-break test, 135

Manhattan Project, 7, 8, 143, 340;

developments of, 145–148; forerunners of, 101, 102; Navy’s role in,

157, 159, 217; nuclear testing by,

216, 217

Mansfield Amendment of 1970, 287

Marconi, Guglielmo, 34, 37, 40, 41

Mark I Analyzer, 248

Mark III, 109

Mark-V IFF, 109

Mars Observer spacecraft, 272

Marshall, Edward, 14, 18

Marzke, Oscar, 283

Massa, Lou, 348

Maxwell, James Clerk, 34

Mayer, C.H., 227

MBE machines, 350–351

Mechanics and Electricity Division

(Naval Research Laboratory): atomic

energy research in, 101–102; establishment of, 78; functions of, 101

Mechanics Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 78. See also Mechanics

and Electricity Division (Naval

Research Laboratory)

Mehl, Robert F., 55–59, 249, 274, 282,

283

Meigs, Douglas P., 149, 150

Meininger, Albert E., 111–112

Meitner, Lise, 140

Mengel, John T., 189, 192

Menzel, Donald, 229

Metal castings inspection, 56–59

Metallurgy Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 181

Methyl chloroform, 247–248

Microtubes, 310

Microwave radar, 114

Miller, Carl, 121

Miller, Roman, 142

Minitrack System, 189, 192, 196,

208–209

Minneapolis Honeywell Company, 192

Minuteman Missile program, 251

MITE MAV, 333

Mizar: end of deep-sea searches by,

244; H-bomb search by, 240–241;

LeBaron Russel Briggs and, 243, 244;

Scorpion search and, 241–242;

Thresher search and, 237–239

Molecular Beam Epitaxy, 350

Montgomery, John, 336–339

Moon: Clementine observation of,

205–207; presence of water on, 208;

as reflector for radio signals,

229-234

Mosely, William, 296

Motorola, 351

Multicavity magnetron, 114, 115

Multi-Mission Advanced Tactical

Terminal (MATT), 354–356

N

Nagel, David: background of,

252–253; as head of Condensed

Matter and Radiation Sciences

Division, 259–260; NAVSPASUR

and, 253–254; nuclear weapons

testing and, 255–258; plasma

physics work of, 258–259

NAREC (Naval Research Computer),

234, 253

National Academy of Sciences, 191,

232–233

National Advisory Committee for

Aeronautics (NACA), 157

National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA): background

of, 8, 11; budget for, 205; Clementine

program and, 206; establishment of,

197, 286; funding of Naval Research

Lab by, 9; NRL exodus to, 197–198

index ♦ 403
National Aeronautics Association

(NAA), 214

National Bureau of Standards (NBS),

22, 171

National Defense Education Act of

1958, 286

National Defense Research Committee,

126, 132, 151, 157

National Reconnaissance Office

(NRO), 8, 9, 299, 334

National Science Foundation (NSF),

160, 285–286

National Security Act of 1947, 285

National Security Agency (NSA), 9

Naugatuck Chemical Company, 97

Naval Academy, 20

Naval Appropriations Subcommittee

(House of Representatives), 75, 76,

79

Naval Center for Applied Research in

Artificial Intelligence (NCARAI),

276, 331

Naval Center for Space Technology

(NCST): description of, 284;

directors of, 199; function for, 292,

299, 300

Naval Center for Space Technology

(NRL), 12, 205, 214

Naval Consulting Board (NCB): Edison

resignation from, 24; establishment

of, 17–18; members of, 18; NRL

funding and, 19; NRL planning and,

23, 25, 65

Naval Electronics Laboratory (NEL),

192

Naval Ocean Research and Development Activity (NORDA), 291, 296

Naval Oceanographic and Atmospheric

Research Laboratory (NOARL), 296,

297

Naval Radio Research Laboratory

(National Bureau of Standards), 26

Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):

accomplishments of, 360–362;

biotechnology pixels and, 307–312;

buildings on main campus of, 4,

26–27, 300–301, 358; chaotic pixels

and, 327–330; classified and unclassified research at, 8–9; commissioning ceremony of, 27–29; control

over, 71–77, 93, 102, 104, 112; current

projects of, 358–360; digitized

battlefield and, 354–356; effect of

Great Depression on, 64, 67, 78;

electronic warfare pixels and,

337–339; expansion of, 3, 54, 288;

fire suppression pixels and, 322–325;

funding issues and, 6, 9, 19, 25–26,

32, 63, 78, 155, 287–288, 291–292,

361; historical background of, 2, 5,

14–16, 19–29; information technology pixels and, 330–334; Internet

pixels and, 334–336; liaison groups

within, 108–109; magnetic pixels and,

349–354; management of, 65–67;

military directors and commanding

officers of, 25, 395–396; mission of,

19, 302; Nobel prize research and,

307, 339–349; under office of

Secretary of Navy, 102; optical fiber

pixels and, 312–317; patents granted

for, 360; physical description and

setting of, 1–4, 24, 25–27; post

World War II organizational

changes within, 281–286; research

budget of, 293; research culture of,

297–300; research directions of, 5–

12, 162–164, 305, 357; rondelle of,

305–306; site selection for, 19–20;

solar pixels and, 325–327; staff of,

4–5, 8–9, 31–33, 93, 105–107, 130,

301, 358; superconducting pixels

and, 317–322; 20th anniversary of,

139–140; during World War II,

105–152. See also specific divisions;

World War II

Naval Sea Systems Command

(NAVSEA), 323

Naval Space Surveillance System

(NAVSPASUR), 208, 253–254

Naval Surface Warfare Center, 320–321

Navigation Technology Satellite One,

211–212

Navstar satellites, 212, 213

Navy, U.S.: early research labs and, 22;

laser technology funding by, 11;

NRL place within, 64, 71–77; radio

research and, 34–36; research

interests of, 5, 6, 67

Navy Department Research Council, 103

Navy General Order 223, 72

Navy Navigation Satellite System, 210

NDRC (National Defense Research

Committee): Bowen and, 158;

chemical warfare and, 134; dismantling of, 152; establishment of, 113,

157; function of, 113, 126; undersea

warfare and, 126, 127

404 ♦ index
Neher, H. Victor, 222

Newell, Homer, Jr., 180, 186, 189, 198

Nichols, Bill, 185

NIKE laser, 264, 294

Nobel Price in Chemistry (1985), 307,

340, 346

Nondestructive testing, 56–59

Normandie, 84–85

North American Aerospace Defense

Command (NORAD), 208

Nova laser, 264

NRL Pilot, 106, 107, 111

NRL Reviews, 383

Nuclear fusion, 11

Nuclear reactors, 276–279

Nuclear technology, 273–279

Nuclear testing: cost of, 259; developments in, 217–220; goals of,

216–217; investigation of suspected

South African, 265–267; scientists

involved in, 217, 218; underground,

255–260, 272

Nucleonics Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): establishment of, 282;

research projects in, 273–278

O

Oberlin, Edgar G.: as assistant director,

55, 66, 67; Chemistry Division and,

59; NRL control and, 71–76, 93, 94,

102; quartz crystal and, 47–48

O’Brien, T.D., 142

Ocean and Atmospheric Science and

Technology Directorate, 285

Ocean Sciences and Engineering

Division (Naval Research Laboratory), 285

Office of Army Research (ARO), 160

Office of Naval Research (ONR): Bowen

and, 160–161; establishment and

function of, 8, 103, 159, 160, 162;

funding by, 9, 166, 235; nuclear

testing and, 221

Office of Patents and Inventions, 159

Office of Research and Inventions

(ORI), 159–160. See also Office of

Naval Research (ONR)

Office of Scientific Research and

Development (OSRD), 113, 119, 126,

151, 152, 156, 217

Office of the Chief of Naval Operations,

127

Office of the Coordinator of Research

and Development (CRD), 159

O’Grady, Scott F., 213

Oliver, William, 75–76

Operation Buster-Jangle, 219

Operation Crossroads, 159, 216, 217

Operation Greenhouse, 219

Operation Moon Bounce, 229

Oppenheimer, Robert, 147–148

Optical fibers, 312–317

Optical Sciences Division (Naval

Research Laboratory): research in,

307–317; SDI funding for, 292–293

Optical wavelengths, 51–52

Optics Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 172, 173, 180–181

Orbiter, 189

Ordnance Section (Naval Research

Laboratory), 54

Owen, Tom, 288–289

P

Page, Robert Morris: background of,

81–82; PAMOR project and, 232;

radar project and, 83–87, 89, 90,

115; as research director, 283

PAMOR (Passive Moon Relay), 230, 232

Parsons, Deke, 148

Patents Section (Naval Research

Laboratory), 111

Patterson, A. Lindo, 345

Pearl Harbor attack, 105, 125

Peckerar, Martin, 259–260

Pecora, Louis, 295, 328–330

Perchlorates, 60–62

Persian Gulf War, 213, 338

Philadelphia Navy Yard, 10

Photoelastic methods, 53–54

Photon counters, 182, 184

Physical and Organic Section (Chemistry Division), 97, 130

Physical Metallurgy Division (Naval

Research Laboratory): early research

by, 55–59; establishment of, 54–55,

67; pre-World War II, 100–101

Pierce, G. W., 49

Piezoelectric crystals, 45–49

Plasma Physics Branch (Naval Research

Laboratory): Coffey and, 260–264,

292–294; funding for, 294

Plutonium, 225

Polaris missiles, 250–251

Poloskov, Sergei, 193

PPI (Plan Position Indicator), 116

Prinz, Diane, 203

index ♦ 405
Prinz, Gary, 349–354

Project Rainbarrel, 224–225

Project Sandstone, 221

Project Sierra, 292

Project Vanguard, 190–198, 208

Protective garments, 135–137

Purple-K-Powder (PKP), 323

Q

QB underwater detection system, 49,

95, 127

Quantum crystallography, 348

Quarles, Donald A., 189, 232

Quartz crystals: research using, 46–47;

sources for, 47–49

R

Rabi, Isaac, 212

Rabin, Herbert, 307

Rachford, Fred, 329

Radar Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 94

Radar technology: developments in,

6–7, 10, 28, 29, 79; events leading to

discovery of, 40, 69–71, 79–87;

installation and operation of, 91–92;

testing of, 87–91; World War II and,

113–116

Radiation detectors, 183

Radiation Laboratory (Massachusetts

Institute of Technology), 92, 113–115,

119, 177

Radiation Research Laboratory (RRL)

(Harvard University), 119

Radio Corporation of America (RCA),

41, 89, 91

Radio Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): function of, 50, 94–95,

97; during Great Depression,

78; IFF system and, 109; in 1920s,

41; original employees of, 28, 31,

32, 36, 40; radar technology and,

94–95; radio detection group in,

79–80; split up of, 281; during

World War II, 115–117

Radio Materiel School, 93–94, 105

Radio research: developments in, 5; in

early years, 33–35; high-frequency

technology and, 37–42; ionosphere

and, 42, 43; Navy communications

needs and, 36; World War II and, 117

Radio Research Laboratory, 22

Radio telescopes: Big Dish, 226–227;

developments in, 227–228

Radio wave reflection, 41, 42

Radiography, 57–58

Radium, 57, 58

Rado, George, 349, 351

Rath, Bahkta, 252

Reaction Motors, Inc., 186

Reagan, Ronald, 292

Regeon, Paul, 207

Research Advisory Council (RAC),

283–284

Research for Oceanology Directorate

(Naval Research Laboratory), 285

Reserpine, 345

Resuscitative fluid, 311

Reynold’s Aluminum Company, 240

Rho-c, 48

Rhodes, Richard, 148

Rickover, Hyman G., 161, 255, 273

Robert J. Collier Trophy, 214

Robertson, Trafton, 139

Robey, Kermit, 112

Robinson, J. K., 25–26

Robinson, Samuel M., 72–73, 78, 84

Rochelle-salt crystals, 48–49, 96

Rocket program. See also Guided

missile research: background of, 8,

10–11, 164–165; developments in,

43, 170–179; early organization of,

169–170; following NASA exodus,

198–205; launches from 1960 to

late 1990s, 202; Viking project and,

186–188

Rocket sonde, 169

Rocket Sonde Research Section (Naval

Research Laboratory): function of,

169–170; upper atmosphere research

by, 171; Viking and, 186–188

Rockoon, 184, 185

Rockville, 236

Rockwell International Corporation,

212, 214

Rogers, Matthew, 356

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 139, 142–143

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 27–28

Rosen, Milton, 172, 180, 186, 189, 198

Rosett, Walter, 61, 62

Ruble, Wilber J., 87

Rudolph, Alan, 311

Rustan, P., 205

Ruth, Mildred K., 111

S

Saalfeld, Fred, 248

Safeguard system, 260

406 ♦ index
Salisbury, Bernard, 282

Sanders, W.H., 140

Sanderson, John, 217, 218

Sandy Hook, New Jersey, 19–22

Sapolsky, Harvey, 156–159

Satellite program: background of, 8;

following NASA exodus, 198–203;

IGY and, 188–191; launches from

1960 to late 1990s, 202; Project

Vanguard, 190–198; slowdown in,

204–205

Satellite Techniques Branch (Naval

Research Laboratory), 198

Saunders, William, 25

Schade, H.A., 162

Schindler, Al, 308

Schnorchel, 129, 130

Schnur, Joel, 307–310

Schwarzkopf, H. Norman, 213

Scripps Institution of Oceanography,

126–127, 244

Scrugham, James, 84, 155

Sea Marker, 130–131

Secretary of Navy, 102

Shapiro, Maurice, 225

Shark Chaser, 130, 131

Shiva laser, 263–264

Shoen, Paul, 309–310

Shumaker, Randall, 331–333

Singing propeller problem, 96

621B project, 211–212

Sklodowska, Marie, 45

Smith, Janet, 347

Smith, William Strother, 23, 25, 26

Snodgrass, Richard, 172

Solar flare research, 182–185

Solar Heliospheric Observatory

(SOHO), 325

Solar physics research, 325–327

Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance

Monitor (SUSIM), 203

Solid State Division (Naval Research

Laboratory), 282

Solrad I, 199

Sonar systems: development of, 45–46,

50; equipment for, 127; radar and, 81

Sonic Depth Finder, 10

Sound Division (Naval Research

Laboratory): function of, 50, 81;

during Great Depression, 78; magnetostructive materials research in,

49–50; piezoelectric crystal research

in, 46–49; pre-World War II research

projects of, 95–96; submarine research in, 44, 95; during World War

II, 125–128

South Pole, 1929 flight over, 53

Soviet Union. See also Cold War era

Sputnik program and, 193, 194,

217; weapon testing and, 220, 224,

225

Space Shuttle Program (NASA), 203

Space Systems Development Department, 354

SPASUR (Space Surveillance System),

196, 201

Special Developments Section (Naval

Research Laboratory), 119, 120

Special Projects Section (Naval

Research Laboratory), 120–122

Special Research Section (Chemistry

Division), 130–131

Sprague, Frank J., 22–23

Sputnik program, 193, 194, 217, 286

SS John Harvey, 137

Stanford University, 360

Star Wars. See Ballistic Missile Defense

Initiative (Star Wars)

Steel casting methods, 100–101

Stennis, John C., 291–292

Stewart, Harold S., 218, 219

Stewart Committee, 189–190

Strassman, Fritz, 140

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). See

also Ballistic Missile Defense

Initiative (Star Wars): cost of, 292;

funding of Clementine program by,

205; NCST and, 299; superconductivity funding by, 320

Strauss, Louis, 221

Stump, Felix B., 232

Submarine Signal Company, 50, 127

Submarines: countermeasure development and, 129; deep-sea searches to

recover, 237–244; detection and

tracking devices for, 44–48, 95;

development of nuclear propulsion

for, 10; direction finding equipment

and, 118; fiber array and, 316–317;

habitability problems of, 244–248;

navigational tools for, 209–212; in

World War I, 21

Sugar Grove project, 235, 236

Sulfur mustard, 131, 137–138

Sun-follower, 177–178

Superconductivity research, 317–322

Superheterodyne, 39

Suski, Henry M., 108–109

index ♦ 407
Swanson, Claude, 72

Symbolic Addition Procedure, 343–344

T

Tactical Electronic Warfare Division

(Naval Research Laboratory), 125,

336–339

Tate, John, 222

Taylor, Albert Hoyt: on control of NRL,

76, 77, 112, 156; on countermeasures, 121, 123; on effects of Great

Depression, 67, 76; high-frequency

technology and, 37–40; ionospheric

reflection research of, 42, 51; as

member of original staff, 28, 29, 31,

36; radar research and, 69, 84–87;

on sonar systems, 50; on steel casting, 100; on torpedo-propulsion

research, 59; on Uni-Control System,

95; work with Hulburt, 51–53; on

World War II entry, 105

Taylor, Bill, 135

Technical directorates, 284–285

Teller, Edward, 148, 277

Teller Light, 219–220

Thermal liquid diffraction, 10

Thermodynamics and Physical

Metallurgy Division (Naval

Research Laboratory), 78

Thermodynamics Division (Naval

Research Laboratory), 78

Thermodynamics Section (Mechanics

and Electricity Division), 101

Thermoluminescence, 178–180

Thomas, Charles S., 278

Thor Abel rocket, 199

Thrasher, Leon C., 13

Thresher: analysis of remains of, 239:

search for, 236–239; sinking of, 236

Thrift, Sterling, 118

Timation satellites, 11, 210–212

Tizard, Sir Henry, 113

Tizard mission, 113–115

Torpedo-propulsion research, 59–61

Total Hydrocarbon Analyzer, 248

Tousey, Richard, 165, 172–175, 177,

178, 180–183, 185, 298

Towed array technology, 315–317

Townes, Charles, 227

Townsend, John, Jr., 198

Transistors, 282

Transit satellites, 199, 210

TRE (tactical receiver equipment), 355

Trexler, James H., 228–232

Trieste I, 237

Trieste II, 238, 239

Truman, Harry S., 161, 221, 225

Tucker Sam, 79, 190

Tuve, Merle A.: atomic energy research

and, 143–144; ionosphere research

by, 42, 43, 80; 200 MHz radar

equipment, 87

U

U.S. National Committee, 188

U.S. Special Operations Command

(USSOCOM), 355

U-Boats, 126, 128–130

Ultraviolet signaling, 61

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation, 173–175,

177, 178

Ultraviolet (UV) spectrograph, 175,

177

Underground nuclear testing, 252–260

Underwater sound, 10

Uni-Control System, 95

Uranium Committee, 144, 158

Uranium isotopes, 10

USS Colonial, 184

USS Hancock, 233

USS Leary, 87

USS Nautilus, 245–246

USS New York, 87–88, 90

USS Norton Sound, 186

USS Scorpion, 241

USS Shadwell, 324

USS Stewart, 10

UUNet, 336

V

V-2 bomb: capture of, 168, 170, 171;

description of, 167; launches

involving, 172–179, 183–184; NRL

and, 167–178; research developments

and, 8, 10

V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel,

171

Vacuum tubes, 62, 63

Van Allen, Jim, 184

Van de Graaff machine, 274–275

Van Keuren, Alexander H., 139, 156,

162

Van Keuren, David, 232, 234, 383

Vanguard Computing Center, 192

Varela, Art, 83

Vergeltungswaffe. See V-2 bomb

Veterans Administration (VA), 138, 139

408 ♦ index
Vietnam War, 338

Viking project, 186–188

Von Braun, Wernher, 189, 195–196,

215

Votaw, Marty, 198–199

W

W5-2, 70

Wac Corporal, 170, 171, 188

Wagner, Robert, 349

Wakelin, James H., Jr., 236, 237

Walsh, Tom, 309, 310

War Production Board, 146

Watson Laboratories, 171

WAVES, 106–107

Weapons simulation, 260–265

Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., 41, 60

Whitney, Willis R., 18

Wilhelm, Peter, 198–200, 205, 300

Williams, Bill, 131

Wilson, Woodrow, 14, 15

Window, 123–125

Winsor, Harry, 314

Wolf, Stuart, 318, 319

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute,

126–127, 240, 244

World War I: background of, 13–16;

chemical warfare during, 21, 131,

132; direction finding during,

117–118; U.S. entry into, 21, 105

World War II: antisubmarine warfare

and, 125–130; atomic warfare in,

150, 151; chemical research during,

130–139; electronic warfare and,

113–125; impact on NRL of,

151–152; Manhattan Project and,

139–151; Navy personnel in NRL

during, 106–107; NRL growth

during, 110–111; NRL research during,

112; radar use during, 91–92; sonar

equipment during, 50; technological

developments during, 6, 7, 10; U.S.

entry into, 105

X

XAF, 88, 89

XL equipment, 49

X-ray crystallography, 341–345, 348

X-ray diffraction, 11–12, 342, 344, 345

X-ray lithography, 259–260

Y

Yager, Paul, 309–310

Young, Leo C., 28; high-frequency

research and, 37–40; ionosphere

research and, 42, 43; radar research

and, 68, 69, 80, 81

Yurie Systems, 336

Z

Zisman, Bill, 245, 308

index ♦ 409
Ivan Amato is an award-winning science

writer whose articles have appeared in

many newspapers, including the

Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner,

Los Angeles Times, and Baltimore Sun, and

in many magazines including Fortune,

Time, Scientific American, Science, and

Science News. His work also has been

heard on National Public Radio. Amato’s

first book, Stuff: The Materials the World

is Made of, came out in 1997. He lives in

Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and

two sons.

Jacket design by Jan Morrow/NRL

Jacket water color by Rob Sprouse/RLS Illustration

Author photograph by Michael Savell/NRL
The Naval Research Laboratory in 1923

viewed from the Potomac River

and

the Laboratory in a more recent year

looking toward the Potomac River