Tuve, a Hopkins graduate, approached the Hopkins trustees to ask them to sponsor what he called the Applied Physics Laboratory.īut Dr. It soon became clear that an independent group was needed to oversee development and manufacture of the new device. The Carnegie Institution was the center of fuse work only at the outset. By early 1943, about 5,000 fuses had been produced.īy the end of the war, five separate manufacturers and 80 subcontractors around the country were producing 40,000 fuses day - using the labor of 80,000 people. That summer, they tested proximity-fuse-tipped shells that hit their targets about half the time. The tubes were then dug out of the ground and analyzed.īy January 1942, researchers had their shock-proof vacuum tube - later patented by Dr. To test the tube designs, researchers took them to rural testing grounds - such as Stump Neck, Md., along the Potomac - and fired them vertically out of special guns. This enabled the structure supporting the filament to absorb the shock of firing, but kept the thin metal strip taut. The scientists then developed a device called a "mousetrap spring" that looked, naturally, like a mousetrap. Then researchers solved the trickier problem of keeping the fragile tungsten filaments inside the tubes from snapping when the projectiles were fired. Van Allen helped find new materials to cushion the glass where it was set on its base. Working with a Massachusetts firm that built miniature electronic tubes for hearing aids, Dr.
45 automatic to protect shipments of experimental fuses on their way to area proving grounds. Van Allen was made a Montgomery County deputy sheriff so that he could legally carry a. "It was an enormous challenge," he recalled in a recent telephone interview from his office in Iowa City. Van Allen, now a 78-year-old professor at the University of Iowa, worked on creating rugged tubes. And radio components - particularly glass vacuum tubes - were too fragile to survive being fired from guns.ĭr. Sifting through the slim possibilities, researchers concluded that the best bet was a miniature device that could bounce radio waves off nearby objects.īut radios had not been built small enough to fit in the tip of a projectile.
Tuve, chief physicist at Carnegie, persuaded federal officials to back an effort to develop the proximity fuse in August 1940, he picked up where many others had quit in frustration.Ī feasibility study produced "one fairly thick book of failures and one thin book of possibilities," said Elmore Chatham of Silver Spring, a radio engineer and retired Applied Physics Laboratory employee who worked on the top-secret project.
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