Tizard Mission The Tizard Mission officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission was a British delegation that visited the United States during the Second World War in order to obtain the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of the research and development ( R & D ) work completed by the UK up to the beginning of World War II , but that Britain itself could not exploit due to the immediate requirements of war - related production . It received its popular name from the program ' s instigator , Henry Tizard . Tizard was a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee , which had propelled the development of radar . The mission travelled to the United States in late September 1940 during the Battle of Britain . They intended to convey a number of technical innovations to the U . S . in order to secure assistance in maintaining the war effort . Objectives . The objective of the mission was to cooperate in science and technology with the U . S . , which was neutral and , in many quarters , unwilling to become involved in the war . The U . S . had greater resources for development and production which Britain desperately wanted to use . The information provided by the British delegation was subject to carefully vetted security procedures , and contained some of the greatest scientific advances made during the war : Radar ( in particular the greatly improved cavity magnetron and design for the VT fuse ) , details of Frank Whittle ' s jet engine and the Frisch - Peierls memorandum , which described the feasibility of an atomic bomb . Though these may be considered the most significant , many other items were also transported , including designs for rockets , superchargers , gyroscopic gunsights , submarine detection devices , self - sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosive s . Although Britain was interested in the Norden bombsight , when President Roosevelt apologised and said that it was not available to Britain unless it could be shown that the Germans had something similar ( Tizard was not unduly dismayed as he thought there were other US technologies more useful to Britain than the bombsight ) , Tizard asked if he could have the external dimensions of the unit , so that British bombers could be modified to take it , if it became available at some future date . The American Congress had many proponents of neutrality for the USA and so there were further barriers to co - operation . Tizard decided that the most productive approach would be simply to give the information and use America ' s productive capacity . Neither Winston Churchill nor the radar pioneer , Robert Watson - Watt , were initially in agreement with these tactics for the mission . Nevertheless , Tizard first arranged for Archibald Hill , another scientific member of the committee , to go to Washington to explore the possibilities . Hill ' s report to Tizard was optimistic . Moving the secrets . After Churchill ' s approval for the project , the team began gathering all technical secrets which might have military use . At the end of August , Tizard went to the U . S . by air to make preliminary arrangements . The rest of the mission would follow by ship . They were : All the documents were gathered in a small trunk : a lockable metal deed box , used for holding important valuable documents such as property deeds . Bowen was allowed to take ' Magnetron Number 12 ' with him . After spending the night under Bowen ' s hotel bed , the case was strapped to the roof of a taxi to the station . An over - eager railway porter whisked it from Bowen at Euston Station to take it to the train to Liverpool and Bowen almost lost sight of it . Inconsistently , in Liverpool the magnetron was given a full Army escort . According to James Phinney Baxter III , Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development : " When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in 1940 , they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores " . The British magnetron was a thousand times more powerful than the best American transmitter at the time and produced accurate pulses . The team arrived in Halifax in Canada on 6 September and went on to Washington a few days later . The team of six assembled in Washington on 12 September 1940 . Meetings . Tizard had met Vannevar Bush the chairman of National Defense Research Committee on 31 August 1940 , and arranged a series of meetings with each division of the NDRC . When the American and British teams met , there was initially some cautious probing by each side to avoid giving away too much without getting anything back in exchange . At a meeting hosted by NDRC ' s two - month - old " Microwave Committee " chairman Dr Alfred Loomis at the Wardman Park Hotel on 19 September 1940 the British disclosed the technical details of the Chain Home early warning radar stations . The British thought the Americans did not have anything like this , but found it was virtually identical to the US Navy ' s longwave CXAM radar . The Americans then described their microwave research done by Loomis and Karl Compton earlier in 1940 . The British realised that Bell Telephone Laboratories and General Electric both could contribute a lot to receiver technology . The Americans had shown a Navy experimental shortwave 10 - centimetre wavelength radar but had to admit that it had not enough transmitter power and they were at a dead - end . Bowen and Cockcroft then revealed the cavity magnetron , with an amazing power output of about ten kilowatts at 10 centimetres . This disclosure dispelled any tension left between the delegations and things then went smoothly . The magnetron would enable the production radar units small enough to be installed in night - fighter s , allow aircraft to locate U - boat s and would provide great navigational assistance to bombers . It is considered to be a significant factor in the Allied victory in the Second World War . Bowen stayed in America and a few days later , at the General Electric labs in New Jersey , he showed the Americans that the magnetron worked . The Bell Telephone Company was given the job of making magnetrons , producing the first thirty in October 1940 , and over a million by the end of the war . The Tizard mission caused the foundation of the MIT Radiation Lab , which became one of the largest wartime projects , employing nearly 4 , 000 people at its peak . The Tizard delegation also visited Enrico Fermi at Columbia University and told Fermi of the Frisch - Peierls concept for an atomic bomb . Fermi was highly sceptical , mainly because his research was geared towards using nuclear power to produce steam , not atomic bombs . In Ottawa , the delegation also met a Canadian , George Laurence , who had secretly built his own slow neutron experiment . Laurence had anticipated Fermi ' s work by several months . When they returned to the UK in November 1940 , the delegation reported that the slow neutron researches being conducted by French exiles in Cambridge , Columbia ( by Fermi ) and Canada ( by Laurence ) , were probably irrelevant to the war effort . But since nuclear boilers could have some post - war value , they arranged for some financial support for the Canadian fission experiments . George Laurence later became involved in the secret exchanges of nuclear information between the British and the Americans . The British did not realise the atomic bomb was a serious possibility until Franz Simon reported in December 1940 to the MAUD Committee that it was feasible to separate the isotope uranium - 235 . Tizard met with both Vannevar Bush and George W . Lewis and told them about jet propulsion , but he revealed very little except the seriousness of British efforts . Bush later recalled : " The interesting parts of the subject , namely the explicit way in which the investigation was being carried out , were apparently not known to Tizard , and at least he did not give me any indication that he knew such details " . Later Bush realised that the development of the Whittle engine was far ahead of the NACA project . In July 1941 he wrote to General " Hap " Arnold , commander of the USAAF , " It becomes evident that the Whittle engine is a satisfactory development and that it is approaching production , although we yet do not know just how satisfactory it is . Certainly if it is now in such state that the British plans call for large production in five months , it is extraordinarily advanced and no time should be lost on the matter " . Bush recommended that arrangements should be made to produce the British engine in the United States by finding a suitable company . Outcome . Although the Tizard mission was hailed as a success , especially in radar , it is possibly significant that on his return to London on the 8 October 1940 , Tizard found that his job no longer existed . Although the German bombing of the UK was largely over by the time that the new radar systems were in production , the technology such as aircraft radar and LORAN navigation greatly helped the Allied war effort in Europe and the Pacific , for example almost eliminating the threat from German submarines . The main success of the mission had been the transfer of radar technology , but the mission also opened up channels of communication for jet engine and atomic - bomb development and is seen as one of the key events in forging the Anglo - American alliance . However , the UK was in a desperate situation and was compelled to release technology that had immense commercial value after the war .