Today, devastation follows when we don't trust a
new technology. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the
people whose ingenuity created them.
Radar is almost as old in
concept as radio itself. Radio pioneers Marconi and
Tesla both saw that we could locate metal objects
by bouncing radio signals off them. As early as
1904 a German engineer named Hülsmeyer
patented a radio echo device meant to locate ships
at sea.
During the 1930s, all the major powers worked to
develop usable airplane and ship spotting systems
using radio waves. In 1942 the U.S. Navy began
using the acronym RADAR, which stands for
RAdio Detection And
Ranging.
As early as 1936, American army and navy engineers
discovered they could detect aircraft at distances
of more than a hundred miles when they used long
enough radio wavelengths. The army had mobile
detection units in production by 1940. They
field-tested the first of these units in Panama. By
late 1941 five units were being field-tested in
Hawaii.
One of those Hawaiian units was placed on the
northern tip of Oahu. Through the night of December
6, 1941, Private Joseph Lockard was training
Private George Elliott in its use. They were to go
off duty at 7:00 AM, but the truck that was to pick
them up and take them to breakfast was late. So
Lockard gave Elliot some extra time on the unit. At
7:02, Elliott saw a very large reflection, 136
miles due
north of their position.
They tracked the signal for eighteen minutes; then
Elliott called the private on duty at the Information
Center, his lieutenant dismissed the report -- said
it was nothing to get excited about. When the lieutenant
finally got on the phone, he told Lockard not to worry
about it. Lockard and Elliott
kept tracking the signal until 7:39 AM, when the
183 Japanese dive bombers and fighters that were
generating the signal were only twenty miles away.
Then the truck came to take them to breakfast. They
folded up their equipment and left. Sixteen minutes
later, the planes hit Pearl Harbor.
In the next moments we lost three thousand people,
dozens of large ships, and eighty percent of the
airplanes on Oahu. Still, it's too easy to
criticize shortsightedness. Radar was a new
invention, and if invention weren't alien, it
wouldn't be invention. We have to be introduced to
new technology -- gradually brought to understand
what it can do. Inventions have to be championed,
even when they appear just at the right moment.
The great revolutionary inventions have seldom been
recognized in their first incarnations. Light
bulbs, steamboats, and telegraphs had all been
invented and put to use long before Edison, Fulton
and Morse came on the scene to show us their full
potential.
And so we saw the Japanese airplanes coming and
didn't believe our eyes. Pearl Harbor had to go up
in flames before we could learn to take radar
seriously.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Wohlstetter, R., Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1962.
Worth, R. H., Jr., Pearl Harbor. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Pubs., 1943,
Section Three, Radar: The Great Missed Opportunity.
For more on Pearl Harbor, including the un-role of
the radar unit on northern Oahu, see:
http://www.execpc.com/~dschaaf/mainmenu.html
I am very grateful to listener George McDonald for
sending me an account by his father, who received
Lockard's phone call on the morning of December 7,
1941. To read that remarkable account, Click
Here. In 2005, the Army finally commended Joseph
McDonald posthumusly. The commendation was presented
to George McDonald by Senator Chris Dodd and Brig. General Thad Martin.
This is a considerably revised version of Episode 42.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1998 by John H.
Lienhard.
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