Customer Reviews

The INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: HOW A SMALL GROUP OF RADAR PIONEERS WON THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND LAUNCHED A TECH

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is really two books in one, the first being an outline of the development of radar immediately prior to and during World War II. This part takes up the first 245 pages of the book, is extremely well organized and plays out the complete development and deployment of radar during World War II. This early part takes you through the people and organizations that were behind radar's development, as well as a very top level view of the technology used to create the device. The author walks you through a very good description of radar's development on a global scale, outlining how the US and UK led the development, why Germany was only slightly further behind, and why Japan was so lagging. Mr. Buderi takes several major battles, including the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Midway, and outlines the significance of radar in those battles and how it truly was the winning weapon of the war. This part of the book clearly rates 5 stars, and makes the whole text worth purchasing.

The second part of the book, which takes up the final 233 pages, is less organized and much less linear in its thought development. While this lack of organization does reflect the decentralization of radar development following WWII, it does not make this section any easier to read. While the development or radar as an astronomical tool, its deployment and adoption at civilian airports and the use of its underlying technologies in the development of integrated circuit are all significant, their depiction as essential parts of the story is lacking. The second part ranks 2 stars, and is good reference material, but should be read on a chapter by chapter basis, as that appears to be how they were written.

In summary, the first part is great - 5 stars, the second part was less a book, but more a stringing together of engineering stories and earned only 2 stars. I gave it a weighted average of 4.

Favorite Excerpts:

"I never read books - they interfere with thinking." - Paul Dirac to Robert Oppenheimer (page 48)

"It didn't make me more enemies than I cared about, because the enemies that you have to worry about are smart enemies, and smart people didn't get mad at me unless they had a good reason to." - George Valley Jr. (page 183)

"Some of my friends seemed to know every year model of every car, that seemed to me so temporary and uninteresting. Nature is such a permanent aspect of our universe, and so obviously God-made." -Charles Townes (page 336)

"We had the authority and influence that came from being indispensable." - Jay Forrester (page 397)

After all these years (1942-1998) I see at last an account of the work we did at Sydney University Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Radiophysics Lab! I was a Navy 2nd Class Radarman assigned to develop electronic countermeasures items (electronic warfare). This book tells it like it was! It rang so true to me that I was carried back once again to my three years on that assignment under Gen Douglas MacArthur, as a member of the ECM group. If you want to know what we did, and many others around the world in this super-secret assignment, Buderi has captured it beautifully. No one person or group "won" the war, but the part played by those involved in radar most certainly changed its course toward the eventual outcome so little appreciated today. --wboyd@netdex.com

A superb piece of work. Anyone contemplating a career in physics or engineering should read this book. If Buderi's descriptions of the technical chase don't thrill and inspire you, strongly consider directing your efforts elsewhere.

An excellent book that combines the flavor of war with vivid and accessible technological descriptions. Buderi is to be congratulated on an outstanding accomplishment. I always knew the story of MIT's famous radiation laboratory would make great reading and now Buderi has come along to do the job.

Before I read this book, I (like most technically minded people) knew of Los Alamos and the development of the atomic bomb, and had a vague impression that MIT was working on radar during this same time. What I *didn't* know was that radar development was an equally urgent crash program, with a similarly brilliant scientific staff (11 future Nobel prizes), and lots more practical applications. Furthermore, compared to Los Alamos, they faced and overcame many additional challenges - among them starting mass production of brand new technology, and convincing the military to change their doctrines based on new technical capabilities.

Like Rhodes's "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", the story is told in chronological order, mixing the human and technical aspects and conveying the urgency and suspense of a desperate wartime situation. Unlike Rhodes's book, it follows the people and technology further, showing how the (then young) scientists went on to fame and fortune, and how the technology has changed our daily life. The book is engrossing even for non-specialists - my wife (a chiropractor) picked it up to see what I found so fascinating, and I couldn't get it back!

This is one of the most accessible books to explore this war-winning and world-changing technology and some of the principal people behind it. Which could be because much of it still is a military secret. The aluminum "chaff," for instance, first used to confuse enemy radar still is in use and has hardly changed in sixty-five years.

Buderi's almost entire focus on the Rad Lab at MIT is regrettable, however, not because it wasn't important, but because there were many more contributions. The Navy had good working surface radars in action well before MIT got around to improving them, a detail that has surfaced time and again in the war memoirs of the past fifty years, particularly those of Edward P. Stafford. Buderi also never really gets around to explaining why the Japanese and the Germans were so far behind. Particularly when the Germans had one of the longest leads of all, starting in 1904 with Duesseldorf engineer Christian Huelsmeyer.

Buderi dismisses Huelsmeyer's "Telemobiloscope" as merely preliminary. But the invention to prevent ships from colliding in bad weather had all the ingredients except the cathode ray tube, which hadn't been developed yet. Nevertheless, Buderi's book is a good read and worth your time and money. It's a murky subject well worth exploring and his effort is illuminating, if incomplete.

THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Robert Buderi is 575 pages, with 20 chapters, eight pages of black and white photographs (pages 18-26), and several diagrams and charts. The book does not much delve into the technical details of radar, and lack of an electronics background will not detract from the reading experience. In contrast, another book in the Sloan Series, CRYSTAL FIRE, requires some background in transistors for an adequate comprehension of that book. Although I never had any interest in reading World War II books, I do like WWII movies, and a reading of THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD will inspire any reader to have another viewing of movies that are directly relevant to this book. These movies include Battle of Britain (with the yummy Suzanna York), Sink the Bismark, Das Boot, U-571 (with actor Bon Jovi), and a Twilight Zone episode called Judgement Night.

My account of this book tracks the indicated people:

VANNEVAR BUSH. Vannevar Bush was president of Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. Bush created National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), established in 1938, in order to promote cooperation of civilian scientists with the military (page 34). He provided funding for the Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab) at M.I.T. (page 50) and he created the Office of Scientific Research and Development, a branch of the U.S. government (page 115). Most importantly, he convinced the stubborn Ernest J. King (Chief of Naval Operations and Commander in Chief of the U.S. fleet) to give up his out-moded and wrong-headed idea that anti-submarine airplanes should only be used for defensive purposes, and that instead the U.S. should adopt an aggressive search-and-destroy effort in using U.S. airplanes and radar to hunt down and destroy German U-boats (pages 158-161).

ALFRED LOOMIS. Loomis was a Harvard law school graduate with Wall Street experience in financing public utilities. He was also interested in gadgets, and setup his own radar lab in Tuxedo Park, New York. He decided to use NDRC money to set up a radar lab at M.I.T., rather than set it up at Carnegie or at Bell Labs (page 45). This M.I.T. lab was called, "Radiation Laboratory," and was founded in Nov. 1940. Eddie Bowen introduced the cavity magnetron transmitter to the Rad Lab. Rad Lab workers also included Luis Alvarez, Ernest Pollard, I.I. Rabi, Lee DuBridge, Edwin McMillin, and Jim Lawson. Their goal was to combine the transmitting aerial and receiving aerial into one aerial (page 101). The Rad Lab focused on air-to-air, air-to-ship, and air-to-sub detection. I.I. Rabi's goal was to reduce the wavelength from 10 centimeters down to 3 centimeters. Loomis provided the innovation of conical scanning (page 109).

RECONCILING BRITISH AND U.S. TECHNOLOGY. When first compared, British radar worked better than the U.S. radar designed at M.I.T. However, when the British receiver was used with a U.S. radar unit, and when the U.S. vacuum tube was replaced with crystals (the U.S. Rad Lab workers had initially rejected crystals, but they did not realize at this earlier time that their crystals had been "burned out"), the result was a radar device suitable for mass production (the year 1941) (pages 117-118).

ROBERT WATSON WATT. Watson Watt was an engineer from Scotland, and expert on radio static and ionosphere (page 55). Watson Watt proposed radar as follows: "at a wavelength of 50 meters a transmitter sending 15 amperes through an aerial should produce a detectable echo from planes 10 miles distant and flying at 20,000 feet." (page 56). Although it was widely known in the 1920s and 1930s that planes and ships interfered with radio waves, Watson Watt added the component of pulses. Pulses is one of the things that distinguishes radar from ordinary radio waves. While pulses had earlier been used for radar, Watson Watt was the first to propose that it be used for military defense.

HERMAN GORING. Goring started the Battle of Britain in July 10, 1940, with 2400 German airplanes. However, during the previous two years, the Germans had paid little attention to the chain of radar towers erected along the English coastline, and because of this oversight, the British were able to use radar to fend off the German air invasion, using Hurricanes, and Spitfires (pages 90-97).

J. RANDALL and H. BOOT at TRE. The cavity magnetron, which provided a better way to generate microwaves, was invented by British men J. Randall and H.Boot at Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in February 1940 (pages 82-83). Another goal of Randall and Boot was to use shorter wavelengths in radar, and this was solved by using the klystron (klystron was invented by Varian brothers at Stanford University).

EDDIE BOWEN. Eddie Bowen worked under Watson Watt while earning his Ph.D., then assigned to a secret radar laboratory in England at Orfordness, and worked on transmitter while others in the same lab worked on receiver and cathode ray (page 65), where they solved problems relating to pulse (they compressed it) and determining the height of invading airplanes (they used perpendicular antennas), and making radar system small enough to fit into airplanes (page 67). Based on these results, the British government built a chain of radar towers along the coast in 1935. In 1936, Eddie Bowen and Watson Watt moved the lab to Bawdsey Research Station. Eddie Bowen's first demonstration of airborn radar took place in Aug. 1937 (page 71), ordered radar to be installed in British airplanes (Blenheim nightfighters). We are told that, at this point in time, Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and had made a non-aggression pact with USSR (soon to be broken by Germany). In Sept, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland in he invaded USSR in June 1941 (page 119). The Bawdsey lab was also where engineers figured out how to coordinate the signals coming from a chain of radar towers into accurate information (filtering system) (page 90).

KARL DONITZ. Karl Donitz commanded German submarines (U-boats) which, by spring 1941, was sinking 100 per month. This period was called Die gluckliche Zeit (Happy Time). The British used ship-to-sub radar and air-to-sub radar to hunt for U-boats (page 121) and also to sink the Bismark (May 27, 1941). Denis Robinson (British) an electrical engineer was responsible for use of crystals in British receivers. Robinson collaborated with DuBridge and others at the Rad Lab at M.I.T. in designing air-to-sub radar (pages 119-125). In early 1942, Donitz started Paukenschlag (which means drum beat) which ushered in a second Happy Time, where German U-boats patrolled the east coast of the United States, singing 35 ships in three weeks, and 216 shps in three months (pages139-142). One reason Donitz was successful was that U.S. military brass (Ernst J. King) distrusted technology, was overly conservative, and also suffered from a character defect (he was overly competitive with top brass from other branches of the U.S. military) (pages 158-161). Donitz continued to sink ships in the Gulf of Mexico and Carribbean (page 151). At this time, the U.S. still did not have any program for systematically searching for and destroying U-boats.

A big advance against U-boats came from the use of the Leigh Light on British airplanes, which supplemented use of radar and was used at close range (page 154). Donitz started using devices (Metox devices) to detect British radar, within two months of initiation of the Leigh Light, allowing U-boats to escape airplanes. At this point, early 1943, it appeared that the Germans might win WWII. Eventually, Vannavar Bush, with the use of delicate diplomatic efforts, was able to convince stubborn Ernest J. King to use radar for aggressive hunt-and-destroy missions against U-boats. Thus, the combination of Vannavar Bush's policy of search-and-destroy missions using radar-equipped airplanes, Leigh Lights, and the use of phony noisemakers towed from Allied ships to trick German acoustic torpedoes, the tide was turned against Karl Donitz, and his packs of U-boats were defeated (pages 164-170).

Subsequent chapters in the book disclose warfare over German land, which included dropping "chaff" for the purpose of confusing German radar. After page 245, we learn of advances in radar through the 1980s and 1990s, for example, radio astronomy. FIVE STARS for Robert Buderi's book.

This kind of books is the one that is capable of make you stop and think of the world history and what happens behind our backs. It is a splendid book, with a great story and very good technical details. However, the author losts itself among complex scientific data (especially about quantum theory) that is not available to everyone, including myself (so I merelly skip those parts). It was very interesting.

This is a big book in many ways, not just physically. It will take a determined reader to start at page 1 and keep going to the end. It is obviously well researched and there is a huge bibliography which will be very useful to anyone wanting to know more about radar and the various spin-offs such as semi-conductor development. It would have been better with a few more illustrations. I for one was only able to follow the description of how the first transistor was made because I've seen pictures of it elsewhere.

In spite of its shortcomings as a technical book, which it is not, this is an excellent read, for the engineer as well as the historian. I enjoyed it and have reread it a couple of times. Towards the end it is a bit weak as the maser and microwave excitement pales alongside the war accomplishements, on both sides of the pond. I was dissapointed to visit MIT and find the Rad Lab building gone, but alas, time marches on. Read it and enjoy!