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Russell C. Coile
A German submarine sank the ship with all the sets and of course it took
some time to sort out that that was the reason the sets did not arrive in
England.
An interesting thing happened to me on that trip. Professor Arthur
Compton, University of Chicago (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 and brother
of Karl Compton, President of MIT) had visited the Huancayo Magnetic
Observatory in July 1940 in connection with his cosmic ray research to see
if his apparatus was working properly. Mrs. Compton had invited me to call
her if I ever got to Chicago. After visiting the Motorola factory to check on
the IFF production, I had telephoned her to say hello. She told me that it
was Arthur's birthday and invited me to his birthday dinner that very night.
When I arrived she asked me to sit next to an Italian lady, Mrs. Enrico Fermi
who didn't speak much English. She thought I might be able to converse
with her in Spanish. Everyone was in high spirits at the dinner. It was years
later that I found out that that they were actually celebrating the successful
beginning of the atomic age on December 2, 1942. Dr. Enrico Fermi (Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1938) had assembled thousands of graphite blocks and
uranium pellets into a reactor called Chicago Pile Number One. The world's
fi rst self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction took place on a squash court at
Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.
Speaking of Nobel Prize winners, I was the Signal Corps project offi cer
on identifi cation equipment so that I used to go to Cambridge to the
Radiation Laboratory at MIT in connection with their research for the Signal
Corps on IFF and beacons. The head of this section was Luis Alvarez who
won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. Dr. Alvarez was at the Radiation
Lab from 1940 to 1943. He went to England in 1943 with the fi rst Ground
Controlled Approach blind landing system. The RAF project offi cer was a
Flight Lieutenant Arthur C. Clarke, who later became famous for proposing
satellites for communications. Dr. Alvarez returned to the States after the
GCA system was installed, and was sent to the Manhattan Project at
Los Alamos where he designed the detonators for the plutonium bomb.
Actually, he fl ew in a special instrumentation B-29 on both the Hiroshima
and Nagasaki missions in order to measure the size of the explosions.
The British Telecommunications Research Establishment, Great Malvern
had already begun research on the next generation of IFF called the IFF
Mark V. A special British/American group called `Combined Research
Group' was established at the Naval Research Lab headed by Dr. Cleeton,
Summary :
Speaking of Nobel Prize winners, I was the Signal Corps project offi cer on identifi cation equipment so that I used to go to Cambridge to the Radiation Laboratory at MIT in connection with their research for the Signal Corps on IFF and beacons. The British Telecommunications Research Establishment, Great Malvern had already begun research on the next generation of IFF called the IFF Mark V. A special British/American group called `Combined Research Group' was established at the Naval Research Lab headed by Dr. Cleeton,
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