Science: Peacetime Radar

With Army security relaxed, the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory, U.S. headquarters for radar research, announced more radar news:

¶ Most striking was a radar picture of Manhattan taken through heavy clouds at a low altitude by the latest microwave set (see cut). Plainly showing, in fairly sharp outline, are piers, Central Park, individual buildings.

¶ One microwave set uses radio waves so tiny that they put the finger on raindrops and dampish clouds. A system of such sets could give a precise, continuous map of the weather over the whole U.S., showing airplanes how to dodge dangerous storm clouds.

¶ The “seacoast fire-control radar” can detect individual vessels 25 miles out to sea through the soupiest nor’easter, with a five-yard margin of error at twelve miles.

In peacetime, it can guide radar-less vessels to safety with pinpoint accuracy.

Adapting radar to peacetime jobs was a tough reconversion problem. Chief obstacle: cost. A good ground-based set costs $75,000. Even a portable, airborne set ($4,000) has little future as a household gadget. Radar’s first peacetime jobs will probably be in ship navigation* and on the airways.

Meanwhile radar, like many another war worker, was temporarily unemployed, while the U.S. dismantled its $3 billion radar industry. Almost as fantastic as its products was the Radiation Laboratory at Cambridge, Mass. According to M.I.T.’s President Karl Compton, it was “the biggest research organization in the history of the world.” Beginning in the fall of 1940, when the nation’s top physicists began to gather in a few offices lent by M.I.T., the Laboratory quietly took over a milk plant, a shoe-polish factory, an airport. Eventually, it grew to a team of 3,800, including 700 physicists, twice as many as worked on the atomic bomb.

*First to announce a commercial radar was General Electric, which offered a ship’s set to detect other ships, rocks, buoys, etc, at night or in fog.