Under the Radar Physics, Engineering, and the Distortion of a World War Two Legacy A thesis presented by Raphael Chayim Rosen to The Department of the History of Science in partial fulfillment for an honors degree in History and Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts March 2006 Under the Radar Physics, Engineering, and the Distortion of a World War Two Legacy Raphael Chayim Rosen Abstract This thesis examines the historical legacy of microwave radar development during World War II. At the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory in 1940-1941, physicists attempted to construct a working microwave radar set. These physicists heavily relied upon engineering skills: focusing on enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of specific components of radar technology. In the postwar era, as a result of the new celebrity of physicists, their wartime inventions, including microwave radar, became associated with physics itself, not engineering. The community of engineers lacked the authority and recognition necessary to reclaim a share of the credit for their discipline. Physicists never emphasized engineering’s importance, because they did not see it as containing independent forms of knowledge or creativity and so did not believe it had played a key role in their inventiveness. This thesis concludes with a brief investigation of engineering’s endogenous forms of knowledge and their relation to the Radiation Laboratory. Keywords M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory Microwave Radar World War II Engineering History of Physics Public Opinion Epistemology Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..5 Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 7 One: Engineering Ascendant…………………………………………………….. 14 Irradiating the Heavens: Radar Physics in November 1940…………. 21 Targets Acquired: Radar Components in November 1940…………... 24 In “The Hour of Peril and Need”: Rad Lab Engineering…………….. 34 Physics Research at the Rad Lab: Complication and Resolution…..... 48 Two: Engineering Descendant…………………………………………………… 54 Withering Laurels: Engineering’s Immediate Postwar Reception…… 55 Popular Opinion and the Indomitable Postwar Physics……………… 66 The Dark Shadow: Engineering in Disrepute………………………... 71 The Adulterated Rad Lab Legacy……………………………………. 80 Three: Engineering Divergent……………………………………………………... 92 Physicist versus Engineer at the Rad Lab and Beyond………………. 94 Scientific Potentate, Engineering Vassal…………………………….. 100 Towards an Epistemology of Engineering…………………………… 108 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………. 118 Appendix: Key Radar Terms Explained…………………………………………… 120 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….. 121 Acknowledgements “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” -Winston Churchill Shawn Mullet, thank you for your invariable ebullience, your indefatigable support, and your ready willingness to assist. Your breadth of knowledge on the relevant history and guidance through it kept me on track, and, more importantly off innumerable fruitless and tortuous ones. Even brief discussions with you could transform inchoate ideas into concrete, cogent arguments. Thank you truly. Professor Sarah Jansen, for your robust confidence, your warmhearted excitement, and your insistence upon pinpointing the heart of the argument, I am deeply appreciative. Thank you for pressing me to always consider the consequential questions and to make them known. Most of all, thank you for stressing the importance of enjoying the process; you helped keep my head level. Professor Steven Shapin, thank you for helping me paddle through the unfamiliar bog of innovation studies and the literature on the epistemology of engineering. Professor Cathryn Carson and Professor David Henkin, your thoughtful recommendations were acutely helpful in clarifying my thoughts. To Professor Charles Rosenberg, Professor Daniel Kevles, Professor Robert Pound, Professor Gerald Holton, thank you all for sharing your insights and stories and advice with me. To Rebecca Press Schwartz, thank you for a copy of your intriguing study. Professor Steven Peter Rosen, I sincerely thank you for your open ear and candor. Our animated discussions of radar history, military secrecy, and the research process are some of my fondest memories of the thesis writing process. Thank you to the Olin foundation for your generous travel grant. Thank you to Matthew Lazen and the Harvard College Research Program for your financial support as well. Frederic Burchsted, for being superman and guiding me to terrific sources even while suffering from the flu, I am extremely grateful. Chapter two would simply not exist without your help. Your mind is the encyclopedia of encyclopedias, and my project would have perished many times over without your help. To all the archivists and librarians that assisted me, thank you for your patience and thought. Thank you Joan Gearin of the National Archives for your prompt assistance and cheerful recommendations. To Nora Murphy and Jeffrey Mifflin at M.I.T, to David Farrell and David Kessler at UC Berkeley, and to Margaret Kimball at Stanford, your assistance is also heartily appreciated. Jean-Francois Gauvin, thank you once again for your lucid criticism. This thesis was far less considered and careful without your assistance. Your tutelage over the past three years has been the brightest spot of my time studying the history of science. Peter Buck, Ben Rapoport, and especially Allie Belser, thank you for your many little recommendations. Stef Tung, many thanks for being my authority on postmodern “authors.” Sharrona Pearl, Jacob Aptekar, and Andrea Maxwell: without your help, this thesis, like the credit owed to its subject, would have been terribly muddled. My friends, thank you for your patience and understanding. Jeanette LGW, for your equanimity and compassion and love, I am and will forever be unspeakably grateful. To my family, the constancy of your love and support have been the greatest blessings I know. To the Rosen family, southwest region, thank you Michael and Debbie for your love and your humor. Eytan and Danya, thank you for being the stars of my computer desktop and bringing a smile to my face every morning. To Gavri and Jesse, thank you for your love and your concern. I simply could not have made the writing clean without your thorough vacuuming of it. To my Bubbie and Zaydie for always supporting me and believing in me, thank you. Zaydie, I’ve always loved your many radar and Navy stories; maybe one day we’ll find those old manuals after all. Bubbie, your tremendous love and zeal for your family have always inspired me. Ema and Abba, for awakening in me, more than anyone else, an appreciation of the infinite blessings this life has to offer; and for breeding within me an insatiable love of truth and a sedulous work ethic, I am extremely thankful. The help you all gave has brought this thesis to life. This thesis is dedicated with sempiternal gratitude to all the physicists and engineers (and the methods they used) who defeated the U-boat and assisted the landings at Normandy so that the Nazi tyranny might be put to rest. Introduction “And yet, through the gloom and the light The fate of a nation was riding that night.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Paul Revere’s Ride”1 On January 4, 1941, history repeated itself. Nearly two centuries earlier, Paul Revere had stood on the on bank of the Charles River, awaiting a signal from the opposite shore in Boston. Legend has it that when two lanterns flickered in Boston’s Old North Church, Revere sped through Middlesex County sounding the alert of a British advance. That night, the nation’s survival rested in the hands of a silversmith and his steed. Then, in 1941, atop building six of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team of physicists peered across the Charles River, also anticipating a signal. On the screen of the first operational American microwave radar system, a faint arc appeared.2 It represented the dome of Boston’s Christian Science Mother Church. Their radar set had seen across the river.3 In 1941, as in 1775, the United States faced a grave threat from 1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” in The Poetical Works of Longfellow, ed. George Monteiro (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), 208, lines 77-78. 2 Technically, a microwave radar system had been up and running in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the summer of 1940, but this system used the Doppler method of detection, not the pulse method which would predominate during the war. Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002): 177-178. 3 Coordination Committee Series 1, Box 49a, interview with Alvarez and Box 49b, interview with Van Voorhis. M.I.T. Rad Lab, RG 227. Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Archives and Records Administration Northeast Region (Boston). Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1998, a New York Times article would confuse this radar success with another one on February 7, 1941. Interviewing former Rad Lab physicists, the article identified the first building spotted on the radar as the Christian Science Temple, but then averred that the Rad Lab cabled the message, “We have seen Mary Baker Eddy with one eye.” Philip Hilts “Last Rites for a Plywood Palace That Was a Rock of Science,” New York Times, march 31, 1998, pg. F4. Mary Baker Eddy is the founder of Christian Science, but the expression ‘one eye’ refers to using a single antenna system, which the Rad Lab physicists did not achieve in crudest form until January formidable and militant forces.4 For America and her allies, a great hope lay in a system that could detect enemy planes. That hope was realized in microwave radar. Radar—Radio Detection And Ranging—bounces short radio waves off a plane or ship and detects the reflection of that signal; based on the time it takes to receive the reflection and the direction from which it returns, an object’s location can be pinpointed.5 Mist, haze, darkness, and fog do not impede the accuracy of these waves. Of the different kinds of radar, microwave radar, consisting of waves only ten centimeters in length, can detect planes and ships with much greater precision than longer-wave radar.