Re: Radio vs Wireless

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:08:05 +0000, "Peter Duncanson (BrE)"
<mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:50:59 +0000, Chuck Riggs <chriggs@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:20:26 +0000, "Peter Duncanson (BrE)"
<mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:36:24 +0000, Chuck Riggs <chriggs@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:29:57 -0500, John Varela <OLDlamps@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:28:51 -0500, James Silverton wrote
(in article <gfnbe0$g4a$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

Again, whatever the texts indicate, I was brought up in Britain and
always used the term "wireless" for a table broadcast receiver and I
don't remember anyone else being different.

Who named RADAR? Wasn't it the Brits? If so, then why is it RADAR and
not WIDAR?

"The term [RADAR] coined by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commanders Samuel M. Tucker
and F. R. Furth as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging and adopted by
their service in 1940, was not accepted by the British until June 1943."

Brits have been known to rave on about having invented RADAR, with two
Rs and no British W, but the effect it is based on was discovered
accidently at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), by physicists
who noted how radio, not wireless, waves bounced off ships coming up
the Potomac River.

See below.

BTW, Americans pronounce Potomac as Potomic, not Potomack, as the
British and the Irish often do.
This is the lab's web site:

http://www.nrl.navy.mil/

A crucial British contribution was to develop a useable Cavity Magnetron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron

Absolutely. IINM, the American and British Allies worked together, in
secret, of course, to develop Radar during WWII.

My information about the development of Radar comes mainly from a book by
Robert Buderi published in 1996 (USA) and 1997 (UK).

In the preface he describes how he first saw the Radiation Laboratory building
at MIT. He was intrigued and decided to find out more:

Even before I knew its history, Building 20 fascinated me. What is it
doing there? Why was it ever built?

The result of his investigations was the book _The Invention that Changed the
World, The Story of Radar from War to Peace_.

This book describes the development of radar during WWII by British and
American scientists working with a free flow of information and ideas between
them.

Following the preface there are photographs including one with the caption:

Outside the "glass house" of financier and amateur scientist Alfred
Loomis in Tuxedo Park, New York, on October 12, 1940. British and American
scientists gathered there to lay plans for creating what became the MIT
Radiation Laboratory.

From left to right Carroll Wilson, Frank Lewis, Edward Bowles, Edward G.
"Taffy" Bowen [Br], E. O. Lawrence, Loomis. The photograph was taken by
Bowen's fellow Tizard Mission member John Cockcroft [Br].

Eight years previously John Cockcroft, along with Ernest Walton, had been the
first to "split the atom" by artificial means.

Bowen and Cockcroft were just visiting the US and returned to Britain to
continue working on radar there.

It can be sometimes be difficult to allocate credit for an invention.
For example, should Arthur C. Clarke be credited for the invention of the
communications satellite in geostationary orbit? I would say "No". He can
certainly be credited with recognising the possibility of such a device, but
this did not lead to the construction and use of one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C_Clarke

In the case of radar it seems to have been Robert Watson-Watt who was able to
turn idea into practice in Britain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Watson-Watt

Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, FRS FRAeS (13 April 1892 ? 5 December
1973), is considered by many to be the "inventor of radar". Radar
development was first started elsewhere (see History of radar), but
Watson-Watt worked on some of the first workable radar systems, turning
the theory into one of the most important war-winning weapons.

However, to progress from where Watson-Watt started in 1935 to the radar
systems in use later in WWII required many more inventions and improvements,
small and large, by many more people.

A gallop through the History of Radar, by John Schneider of Lockheed Martin is
at:
http://math.la.asu.edu/~kuang/LM/030902-Radar_History10.pdf

The first "practical" application of radio waves for RADAR was invented
by Christian Huelsmeyer [Dusseldorf] in 1904 for ship detection (Range =
3km)

The detection by radio of a steamer on the Potomac by the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory was 18 years later, 1922. The NRL researchers were presumably
unaware of Huelsmeyer's work.

I'm not surprised. Security considerations are disruptive enough to
Interdepartmental information flow in the USN, so I can only imagine
what happens on the international level.
--

Regards,

Chuck Riggs
Near Dublin, Ireland
.