MIT Radiation Laboratory
Established | October 1940 (84 years ago) |
---|---|
Dissolved | 31 December 1945 |
Country | United States |
Coordinates | 42°21′43″N 71°05′24″W / 42.362°N 71.09°W |
Affiliations | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Defense Research Committee |
The Radiation Laboratory, commonly called the Rad Lab, was a microwave and radar research laboratory located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was first created in October 1940 and operated until 31 December 1945 when its functions were dispersed to industry, other departments within MIT, and in 1951, the newly formed MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
The use of microwaves for various radio and radar uses was highly desired before the war, but existing microwave devices like the klystron were far too low powered to be useful. Alfred Lee Loomis, a millionaire and physicist who headed his own private laboratory, organized the Microwave Committee to consider these devices and look for improvements. In early 1940, Winston Churchill organized what became the Tizard Mission to introduce U.S. researchers to several new technologies the UK had been developing.
Among these was the cavity magnetron, a leap forward in the creation of microwaves that made them practical for use in aircraft for the first time. GEC made 12 prototype cavity magnetrons at Wembley in August 1940, and No 12 was sent to America with Bowen via the Tizard Mission, where it was shown on 19 September 1940 in Alfred Loomis’ apartment. The American NDRC Microwave Committee was stunned at the power level produced. However Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly was upset when it was X-rayed and had eight holes rather than the six holes shown on the GEC plans. After contacting (via the transatlantic cable) Dr Eric Megaw, GEC’s vacuum tube expert, Megaw recalled that when he had asked for 12 prototypes he said make 10 with 6 holes, one with 7 and one with 8; and there was no time to amend the drawings. No 12 with 8 holes was chosen for the Tizard Mission. So Bell Labs chose to copy the sample; and while early British magnetrons had six cavities American ones had eight cavities. [1]
Loomis arranged for funding under the
By the end of the war, the U.S. held a leadership position in a number of microwave-related fields. Among their notable products were the
Formation
During the mid- and late-1930s, radio systems for the detection and location of distant targets had been developed under great secrecy in the
The potential advantages of operating such systems in the
Shortly after this breakthrough, Britain's Prime Minister
American researchers and officials were amazed at the magnetron, and the NDRC immediately started plans for manufacturing and incorporating the devices. Alfred Lee Loomis, who headed the NDRC Microwave Committee, led in establishing the Radiation Laboratory at MIT as a joint Anglo-American effort for microwave research and system development using the new magnetron.
The name 'Radiation Laboratory', selected by Loomis when he selected the building for it on the MIT campus, was intentionally deceptive,
Ernest Lawrence was an active participant in forming the Rad Lab and personally recruited many key members of the initial staff. Most of the senior staff were Ph.D. physicists who came from university positions. They usually had no more than an academic knowledge of microwaves, and almost no background involving electronic hardware development. Their capability, however, to tackle complex problems of almost any type was outstanding. Later in life, nine members of the staff were recipients of the Nobel Prize for other accomplishments.
In June 1941, the NDRC became part of the new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), also administered by Vannevar Bush, who reported directly to President Roosevelt. The OSRD was given almost unlimited access to funding and resources, with the Rad Lab receiving a large share for radar research and development.
Starting in 1942, the Manhattan Project absorbed a number of the Rad Lab physicists into Los Alamos and Lawrence's facility at Berkeley. This was made simpler by Lawrence and Loomis being involved in all of these projects.[6]
Operations
The Radiation Laboratory officially opened in November 1940, using 4,000 square feet (370 m2) of space in MIT's Building 4, and under $500,000 initial funding from the NDRC. In addition to the Director, Lee DuBridge,
Even before opening, the founders identified the first three projects for the Rad Lab. In the order of priority, these were (1) a 10-cm detection system (called Airborne Intercept or AI) for
To initiate the first two of these projects, the magnetron from Great Britain was used to build a 10-cm "breadboard" set; this was tested successfully from the rooftop of Building 4 in early January 1941. All members of the initial staff were involved in this endeavor.
Under Project 1 led by
For the final system, the Rad Lab staff combined features from their own and the British set. It eventually became the SCR-720, used extensively by both the
For Project 2, a 4-foot- and later 6-foot-wide (1.2 then 1.8 m)
Project 3, a long-range navigation system, was of particular interest to Great Britain. They had an existing hyperbolic navigation system, called GEE, but it was inadequate, in both range and accuracy, to support aircraft during bombing runs on distant targets in Europe. When briefed by the Tizard Mission about GEE, Alfred Loomis personally conceptualized a new type of system that would overcome the deficiencies of GEE, and the development of his LORAN (an acronym for Long Range Navigation) was adopted as an initial project.[8] The LORAN Division was established for the project and headed by Donald G. Fink. Operating in the Low Frequency (LF) portion of the radio spectrum, LORAN was the only non-microwave project of the Rad Lab. Incorporating major elements of GEE, LORAN was highly successful and beneficial to the war effort. By the end of hostilities, about 30 percent of the Earth's surface was covered by LORAN stations and used by 75,000 aircraft and surface vessels.[9]
Following the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into World War II, work at the Rad Lab greatly expanded. At the height of its activities, the Rad Lab employed nearly 4,000 people working in several countries. The Rad Lab had constructed, and was the initial occupant of, MIT's famous Building 20. Costing just over $1 million, this was one of the longest-surviving World War II temporary structures.
Activities eventually encompassed physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles, and the Rad Lab made fundamental advances in all of these fields. Half of the radars deployed by the U.S. military during World War II were designed at the Rad Lab, including over 100 different microwave systems costing $1.5
Although the Rad Lab was initiated as a joint Anglo-American operation and many of its products were adopted by the British military, researchers in Great Britain* continued with the development of microwave radar and, particularly with cooperation from Canada, produced many types of new systems. For the exchange of information, the Rad Lab established a branch operation in England, and a number of British scientists and engineers worked on assignments at the Rad Lab. *At the T. R. E., Telecommunications Research Establishment
The resonant-cavity magnetron continued to evolve at the Rad Lab. A team led by I.I. Rabi first extended the operation of the magnetron from 10-cm (called S-band), to 6-cm (C-band), then to 3-cm (X-band), and eventually to 1-cm (K-band). To keep pace, all of the other radar sub-systems also were evolving continuously. The Transmitter Division, under Albert G. Hill, eventually involved a staff of 800 persons in these efforts.
A radically different type of antenna for X-band systems was invented by
The most ambitious Rad Lab effort with long-term significance was Project Cadillac. Led by
As the Rad Lab started, a laboratory was set up to develop
Closure
When the Radiation Laboratory closed, the OSRD agreed to continue funding for the Basic Research Division, which officially became part of MIT on July 1, 1946, as the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE). Other wartime research was taken up by the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science, which was founded at the same time. Both laboratories principally occupied Building 20 until 1957.
Most of the important research results of the Rad Lab were documented in a 28-volume compilation entitled the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series, edited by
Postwar declassification of the work at the MIT Rad Lab made available, via the Series, a quite-large body of knowledge about advanced electronics. A reference (identity long forgotten) credited the Series with the development of the post-World War II electronics industry.
With the
See also
- Allied technological cooperation during World War II
- Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE)
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in Tennessee
- Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT
- Smith chart
- Industrial laboratory
References
- ^ Fine 2019, pp. 56–60.
- ISBN 0-684-81021-2.
- ^ "How the Tizard Mission paved the way for research at MIT". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ^ "An Early History of LBNL by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg". Archived from the original on 2008-09-22. Retrieved 2008-09-24.
- ^ "The MIT Radiation Laboratory - RLE's Microwave Heritage", RLE Currents, v.2 no. 4, Spring 1991 in 18.4MB PDFArchived February 25, 1999, at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 0-684-87287-0.
- ^ Conant, Jennet (2002). pp. 271–272.
- ^ "The Tizard Mission". histru.bournemouth.ac.uk. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ^ Conant, Jennet (2002). pp. 265-267.
- ISBN 0-88318-486-9
- ^ Buderi, Robert (1996). pp. 135-137, 186-189.
- ISBN 0-7503-0659-9.
- ^ "MIT Radiation Laboratory Series". Jefferson Labs Library: Information Resources. Retrieved March 4, 2017.
- ^ "Milestones:MIT Radiation Laboratory, 1940-1945". IEEE Global History Network. IEEE. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
Further reading
- Baxter, James Phinney, III; Scientists Against Time, MIT Press, 1968
- Bowen, E. G.; Radar Days, Inst. of Physics Publishing, 1987
- Brittain, James E.; "The Magnetron and the Beginning of the Microwave Age," Physics Today, vol. 73, p. 68, 1985
- Fine, Norman (2019). Blind Bombing: How Microwave Radar brought the Allies to D-Day and Victory in World War II. Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-1640-12279-6.
- Guerlac, Henry E.; Radar in World War II, American Inst. of Physics, 1987
- Page, Robert Moris; The Origin of Radar, Anchor Books, 1962
- Stewart, Irvin; Organizing Scientific Research for War; Administrative History of the OSRD, Little, Brown, 1948
- Watson, Raymond C. Jr.; Radar Origins Worldwide, Trafford Publishing, 2009
- Willoughy, Malcom Francis; The Story of LORAN in the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, Arno Pro, 1980
- Zimmerman, David; Top Secret Exchange: the Tizard Mission and the Scientific War, McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1996
- Historical MIT Radiation Laboratory Book Series (archive)
- Volume 1 - Radar System Engineering; Louis Ridenour; 1947
- Volume 2 - Radar Aids to Navigation; John Hall; 1947
- Volume 3 - Radar Beacons; Arthur Roberts; 1947
- Volume 4 - LORAN, Long Range Navigation; J.A. Pierce, A.A. McKenzie, R.H. Woodward; 1948
- Volume 5 - Pulse Generators; G.N. Glasoe, J.V. Lebacqz; 1948
- Volume 6 - Microwave Magnetrons; George Collins; 1948
- Volume 7 - Klystrons and Microwave Triodes; Donald Hamilton, Julian Knipp, J.B. Horner Kuper; 1948
- Volume 8 - Principles of Microwave Circuits; C.G. Montgomery, R.H. Dicke, E.M. Purcell; 1948
- Volume 9 - Microwave Transmission Circuits; George Ragan; 1948
- Volume 10 - Waveguide Handbook; N. Marcuvitz; 1951
- Volume 11 - Technique of Microwave Measurements; Carol Montgomery; 1947
- Volume 12 - Microwave Antenna Theory and Design; Samuel Silver; 1949
- Volume 13 - Propagation of Short Radio Waves; Donald Kerr; 1951
- Volume 14 - Microwave Duplexers; Louis Smullin, Carol Montgomery; 1948
- Volume 15 - Crystal Rectifiers; Henry Torrey, Charles Whitmer; 1948
- Volume 16 - Microwave Mixers; Robert Pound; 1948
- Volume 17 - Components Handbook; John Blackburn; 1949
- Volume 18 - Vacuum Tube Amplifiers; George Valley Jr, Henry Wallman; 1948
- Volume 19 - Waveforms; Britton Chance, Vernon Hughes, Edward MacNichol Jr, David Sayre, Frederic Williams; 1949
- Volume 20 - Electronic Time Measurements; Britton Chance, Robert Hulsizer, Edward MacNichol Jr, Frederic Williams; 1949
- Volume 21 - Electronic Instruments; Ivan Greenwood Jr, J. Vance Holdam Jr, Duncan MacRae Jr; 1948
- Volume 22 - Cathode Ray Tube Displays; Theodore Soller, Merle Star, George Valley Jr; 1948
- Volume 23 - Microwave Receivers; S.N. Van Voorhis; 1948
- Volume 24 - Threshold Signals; James Lawson, George Uhlenbeck; 1950
- Volume 25 - Theory of Servomechanisms; Hubert James, Nathaniel Nichols, Ralph Phillips; 1947
- Volume 26 - Radar Scanners and Radomes; W.M. Cady, M.B. Karelitz, Louis Turner; 1948
- Volume 27 - Computing Mechanisms and Linkages; Antonin Svoboda; 1948
- Volume 28 - Index; Keith Henney; 1953