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~Fnife)~ January 17, 1997 Date: COPYRIGHT @) 1997 the BOARD of REGENTS of the UNIVERSITY of NORTH TEXAS in the CITY of DENTON All Rights Reserved .. ) Un IV. ER SIT y· 0 F N 0 RT H TEXAS OR AL H I S T O R Y C O L L E C T I 0 N NUMBER 1 1 6 6 I n t e r v i e w w i t h R A L P H o. ROBINSON J a n u a r y 1 7, l 9 9 7 Tierra Li nda, Texas Place of Interview: William J . Alexander Interviewer: Open Terms of Use: Approved: ~fnife)~ January 17, 1997 Date: COPYRIGHT @) 1997 THE BOARD OF REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS IN THE CITY OF DENTON All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Director of the oral History Program or the University Archivist, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas 76203. oral History Collection Ralph Robinson Interviewer: William J. Alexander January 17, 1997 Place of Interview: Tierra Linda Ranch (near Kerrville] Texas Mr. Alexander: This is Bill Alexander interviewing Mr. Ralph Robinson for the University of North Texas Oral History Program. The interview is taking place on January 1 7, 1997, on Tierra Linda Ranch, in Gillespie County, Texas. I am interviewing Mr. Robinson in order to obtain his experiences as one of the developers the highly lethal, highly secret proximity fuze that was used throughout the European and Pacific Theaters of World War II. I am also obtaining his recollections of the use of the fuze during World War II in the Pacific Theater. I'm going to start out, Ralph, and ask you where you were born. Mr. Robinson: I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 1, 19].9. Mr. Alexander: Were your parents native-born Americans? Mr. Robinson: Oh, yes. My father was b9rn in Ohio, and my mother was born in Arkansas. Alexander: Where did you go to school? Grade school? High school? Robinson: Well, after I got to Houston [Texas), where I started in the third grade, I went to elementary school in Houston at Taylor, Jeff Davis, and Eugene Field [Schools], then Hogg Junior High School, Sidney Lanier Junior High School. I went to John H. Reagan High School, and then Sam Houston High School. I graduated from Sam Houston High School in 1937. Alexander: After graduation, did you go on to college? Robinson: Yes, I went to the University of Houston evening sessions, starting in the fall of 1937. I attended there in 1938, 1939, 1940 and 1941. At that time I dropped out of school to go fight the war. For several years I attended USDA, the graduate school of the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington [D.C.J in agriculture. Alexander: What was your major? Robinson: Well, I started out in engineering with a physics major. That's really what I started out in more than anything else. My working specialty was in electronics and radio frequencies. Alexander: In 1940 did you join the service? Robinson: No, I was in the military for two-and-a-half enlistments in the Texas National Guard. I once 2 .. aspired to go to [the United States Military Academy at] West Point [New York] one time, but all of those appointments were dried up. They were not available. I considered going to West Point Preparatory School. I was prepared to do that as one of the choice appointees of the 133rd Field Artillery of which I was a member. People there were ready and willing to endorse me for that job--for the prep school. That was supposed to be a completely competitive opportunity to get into West Point, but politics being what they were, they had already decided who was going to be selected. Alexander: Before you got there. Robinson: Before I even started. They said, "Ralph, you're wasting your time!" Then I applied for a commission in the Navy Reserve in 1940. I aspired to become an ensign CVS (communication volunteer specialist], which is working with radar. I was non-degreed at that point, which was the objection they had, although I was technically qualified. They kept "bouncing" [rejecting) it back, and the interviewer kept saying, "Yes, but he's qualified." Alexander: He just doesn't have the paper [degree] in his hand. Robinson: I didn't have the degree. So, Bert Moritz, the man who had hired me initially at the laboratory in Houston, came through recruiting _laboratory personnel 3 and asked me if I would put in an application with the Carnegie Institution of Washington [D.C.J, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Alexander: That's a "jaw-breaker. 11 I want to be sure our transcriber gets it. Robinson: All right. Alexander: Now let me ask you this. You went to this guy who recruited you, all of a sudden ... Robinson: No, he came to Houston, Texas, and got in touch with me. Alexander: He was coming through town getting bright, young engineering-type people. Robinson: [He was recruiting) PhDs and everybody else. He selected me. Alexander: He knew you from your college background and so forth. Robinson: Bert Moritz had hired me as a laboratory technician several years earlier. I was his last official act before he left the General Geophysical Company, and he hired me to go work in their laboratory. Alexander: Oh, he was with the General Geophysical Company, which is an oil well development-type or prospecting-type company. Robinson: The General Geophysical Company was headed up by a man named Earl Winston Johnston. He was one of the original pioneers in reflection seismography. We were doing all the reflection seismography work for 4 Standard (Oil of] Ohio. They were not a "fly-by- night" (second-rate] place. Alexander: Oh, no, no. Standard oil of Ohio was a very biq company. If you're in the oilfield, you know very much that they were very big and a very important company. He recruited you for the Carnegie position. Robinson: Yes. Alexander: To do what? Robinson: Well, to do what I had been doing. I was a project engineer designing specialized radios for the Geophysical Company, and that had worked out quite well. It was a pioneering-type of radio development that operated at 35-megacycles, which in those days was hiqh frequency--very high frequency. The set that I designed was a transceiver which was used to transmit the firing pulses, signifying the explosion the dynamite, as well as the seismograph signals. No other company was yet doing that. But we "scooped" [did it before] everybody on that. so, this was quite a technical breakthrough. Alexander: So, it was down in the "hole" [where the charge was placed]. Robinson: Yes. Well, not quite down in, but near the hole. Alexander: Let's go the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Robinson: Okay. Well, the laboratory was at 5241 Broad Branch Road Northwest in Washington, o.c. 5 Alexander: Date? Robinson: It was May s, 1942. Alexander: And this gentleman in Houston didn't have anything with you going to Carnegie, though, did he or not? Robinson: Yes, he did. Alexander: He came through and got you to leave Houston and go to Washington, o.c. Now I've got it straight. Robinson: What had happened in the chronology of the development of the proximity fuze was that they had just completed some successful tests. They had, with a small group of basically hand-made fuzes, achieved a level of operability of 52 percent. That was the benchmark that had been set by the Navy Bureau of Ordnance at which we would go into production on those hand-made­ type units. Alexander: But they were proximity-type. Robinson: They were proximity fuzes. Then they were going to have to expand the program significantly beyond the geographical space at available at the Carnegie Institution Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and they were going to get many thousands of square feet, plus they were going to have to increase the number of personnel involved. I was a part of that--the initial part--of that enlargement. I was the twenty-seventh person hired once they had decided to expand their personnel. 6 Alexander: Okay. When that happened, how long had the proximity fuze design been in the "cooker" (planning stages]? Robinson: About a year. About a year or more. Alexander: So, probably from back in 1941 or early 1942. Robinson: One of the initial concepts for the proximity fuze came from the Briti sh . From the very beginning, they wer e full-time partners in the development of the proximity fuze. The initial phase of the program used proximity devices. We were toying with devices on l i nes attached to a irplanes, pulling them through by airplanes. We thought perhaps we could have a flying bomb that would be proximity-sensitive. We had other approaches, like, auto-gyros (helicopter-type airc raft] that would take off and fly straight up and have a proximity d evice. The reason for all these different approaches was that we weren't sure that we could, in fact, build this radar-like device into a shell that would withstand the tremendous impact of firing and of spin. Keep in mind that a shell experiences (the force of] about 20, 000 Gs, that is, the [ amount of] G-forces acting upon it in being fired. Alexander: As it spins. That's what causes the Gs . Robinson: We ll, it spins at s omething less than a quarter-of-a­ million revolution s per minute.
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