WEBVTT 00:00:00.100 --> 00:00:02.470 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.470 --> 00:00:03.880 Commons license. 00:00:03.880 --> 00:00:06.920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 00:00:06.920 --> 00:00:10.570 offer high-quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.570 --> 00:00:13.470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 00:00:13.470 --> 00:00:17.400 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 00:00:17.400 --> 00:00:18.650 ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:31.230 --> 00:00:33.600 PROFESSOR: But the topic for today is a big topic and an 00:00:33.600 --> 00:00:34.440 interesting one. 00:00:34.440 --> 00:00:35.710 So there's a lot to say about it. 00:00:35.710 --> 00:00:38.520 So I guess we're going to want to get started on that, which 00:00:38.520 --> 00:00:39.770 is MIT in World War II. 00:00:43.394 --> 00:00:49.915 I asked you to read I believe three pieces, the Hunter 00:00:49.915 --> 00:00:53.860 Dupree article, four, right, Hunter Dupree, Debbie Douglas 00:00:53.860 --> 00:00:57.200 piece, "Science Analysts Frontier," and 00:00:57.200 --> 00:00:58.460 the cybernetics piece. 00:00:58.460 --> 00:01:00.380 AUDIENCE: The Lily Kay too. 00:01:00.380 --> 00:01:01.720 It was on the copy I have. 00:01:01.720 --> 00:01:03.540 PROFESSOR: Was the Lily Kay article on there? 00:01:03.540 --> 00:01:06.710 AUDIENCE: There was no Lily Kay on there. 00:01:06.710 --> 00:01:09.700 PROFESSOR: Well, maybe last year's syllabus. 00:01:09.700 --> 00:01:11.600 I think we took that one off for this year. 00:01:11.600 --> 00:01:12.850 AUDIENCE: OK. 00:01:14.810 --> 00:01:16.750 I read more than you did this year. 00:01:16.750 --> 00:01:18.690 Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nah. 00:01:18.690 --> 00:01:20.420 PROFESSOR: But that's a good one to add, as 00:01:20.420 --> 00:01:21.940 well in some ways. 00:01:21.940 --> 00:01:27.270 And the reason that I picked those four is-- 00:01:27.270 --> 00:01:29.870 and actually, I think they're quite interrelated. 00:01:29.870 --> 00:01:32.060 And some people kind of picked that up in 00:01:32.060 --> 00:01:34.530 the response papers. 00:01:34.530 --> 00:01:37.390 And I'll sort of underscore that a little more. 00:01:37.390 --> 00:01:40.440 In that one of them is about the overall kind of national 00:01:40.440 --> 00:01:42.210 science policy sorts of stuff. 00:01:42.210 --> 00:01:44.930 That's the Dupree article. 00:01:44.930 --> 00:01:49.270 One of them is about how those changes affected life on 00:01:49.270 --> 00:01:53.100 campus here on a day-to-day basis. 00:01:53.100 --> 00:01:57.470 The Wiener one is about how those changes affected the 00:01:57.470 --> 00:02:00.280 core content of what people were doing on campus and the 00:02:00.280 --> 00:02:03.490 actual kinds of science and engineering that were going 00:02:03.490 --> 00:02:04.830 on, because cybernetics was very much a 00:02:04.830 --> 00:02:06.460 product of that time. 00:02:06.460 --> 00:02:08.960 And then "Science Analysts Frontier" is a sort of outcome 00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:11.310 of the end of the war, looking forward. 00:02:11.310 --> 00:02:14.730 And all of those things I think have a big impact on the 00:02:14.730 --> 00:02:20.520 MIT that you experience today and the landscape of how 00:02:20.520 --> 00:02:23.300 science is funded and organized in this country that 00:02:23.300 --> 00:02:26.890 you'll experience, probably regardless of whether you go 00:02:26.890 --> 00:02:30.010 into a research career or a career in industry, certainly 00:02:30.010 --> 00:02:33.520 if you go into a career in research, how 00:02:33.520 --> 00:02:34.770 technology gets generated. 00:02:37.290 --> 00:02:40.350 So I just wanted to say a little bit by way of review 00:02:40.350 --> 00:02:42.140 and then go into some other things. 00:02:42.140 --> 00:02:45.330 And I have lots of pictures to show, to give it a little bit 00:02:45.330 --> 00:02:46.580 of texture. 00:02:51.510 --> 00:02:56.610 So Hunter Dupree talks about what he calls the Great 00:02:56.610 --> 00:03:01.605 Instauration, which is actually 00:03:01.605 --> 00:03:04.060 was allusion to Bacon. 00:03:04.060 --> 00:03:07.020 And a few people comment on his distinction between the 00:03:07.020 --> 00:03:10.430 Baconian scientists who sort of engaged in the affairs of 00:03:10.430 --> 00:03:12.900 the world and the more Cartesian model of a 00:03:12.900 --> 00:03:15.940 scientist, who is sort of isolated in the laboratory in 00:03:15.940 --> 00:03:18.140 a purely intellectual space, and that's an interesting way 00:03:18.140 --> 00:03:24.510 to think about this whole thing, and how these things 00:03:24.510 --> 00:03:27.370 sort of formulated in the years leading up to the 00:03:27.370 --> 00:03:29.720 Second World War. 00:03:29.720 --> 00:03:32.840 What is the generally accepted start of the Second World War? 00:03:32.840 --> 00:03:34.090 Anybody know? 00:03:38.960 --> 00:03:40.210 Just date-wise? 00:03:42.290 --> 00:03:43.258 Yeah? 00:03:43.258 --> 00:03:45.680 AUDIENCE: Was it August 1939? 00:03:45.680 --> 00:03:47.180 PROFESSOR: Close. 00:03:47.180 --> 00:03:49.270 Within a month, September 1939. 00:03:49.270 --> 00:03:50.390 AUDIENCE: The first day of September. 00:03:50.390 --> 00:03:55.080 PROFESSOR: What happens in September 1939? 00:03:55.080 --> 00:03:56.430 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:03:56.430 --> 00:03:57.030 PROFESSOR: Sorry. 00:03:57.030 --> 00:03:57.710 AUDIENCE: Nazi invasion. 00:03:57.710 --> 00:03:58.030 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:03:58.030 --> 00:03:59.610 Nazi invasion of Poland. 00:03:59.610 --> 00:04:02.190 That's the sort of generally accepted moment, although 00:04:02.190 --> 00:04:04.770 there's the Spanish Civil War before that and what not. 00:04:04.770 --> 00:04:07.619 When does the US get into the war? 00:04:07.619 --> 00:04:09.010 AUDIENCE: December 7, 1941. 00:04:09.010 --> 00:04:13.560 PROFESSOR: December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor, more than two 00:04:13.560 --> 00:04:15.970 years later. 00:04:15.970 --> 00:04:20.529 A very long period, where Europe and most of Asia is at 00:04:20.529 --> 00:04:23.800 war and the US is not only not as the war-- it's not like 00:04:23.800 --> 00:04:26.000 when we get into it, there are a lot of people who really 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:28.805 don't want us too and think we should stay out, Charles 00:04:28.805 --> 00:04:32.090 Lindbergh among them. 00:04:32.090 --> 00:04:35.340 And so this is this kind of limbo period where-- 00:04:38.730 --> 00:04:40.720 and it's actually in a way the same as in 00:04:40.720 --> 00:04:41.830 the first world war. 00:04:41.830 --> 00:04:44.030 The US is very late getting into it and has a lot of time 00:04:44.030 --> 00:04:45.280 to prepare. 00:04:46.990 --> 00:04:50.920 If the US had gotten into the war in September 1939, we 00:04:50.920 --> 00:04:53.180 would have been a lot of trouble. 00:04:53.180 --> 00:04:54.470 There was nothing. 00:04:54.470 --> 00:04:57.410 There was no military to speak of in a sense. 00:04:57.410 --> 00:05:01.120 Whereas by December 1941, things had been 00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:02.800 gearing up for a while. 00:05:02.800 --> 00:05:06.810 And that's this period where not only does Bush get 00:05:06.810 --> 00:05:10.770 interested and involved, but also the predecessor is-- 00:05:10.770 --> 00:05:12.720 there's this very interesting, sort of curious committee 00:05:12.720 --> 00:05:16.010 called the Scientific Aids to Learning, that is done under 00:05:16.010 --> 00:05:18.690 the National Academy of Sciences, which includes 00:05:18.690 --> 00:05:21.810 Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant, who's is the president 00:05:21.810 --> 00:05:24.620 of Harvard, a chemist, and also Frank Jewett, who we've 00:05:24.620 --> 00:05:27.930 mentioned before, who is an MIT graduate. 00:05:27.930 --> 00:05:29.840 He taught here. 00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:35.070 He is then head of Bell Labs, head of research for AT&T, and 00:05:35.070 --> 00:05:37.350 actually president of the National Academy of Sciences 00:05:37.350 --> 00:05:39.910 in the 1930s. 00:05:39.910 --> 00:05:41.920 And these guys all get together on this sort of 00:05:41.920 --> 00:05:44.310 abstract study about-- 00:05:44.310 --> 00:05:45.480 anybody know what that refers to, 00:05:45.480 --> 00:05:48.600 Scientific Aids to Learning? 00:05:48.600 --> 00:05:52.260 It's a very modern topic in a way. 00:05:52.260 --> 00:05:55.210 How can we use new technology to help education? 00:05:55.210 --> 00:05:57.160 What are the new technologies they're talking about? 00:05:59.700 --> 00:06:04.000 LP records, 33 and 1/3 records-- 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:07.000 does anybody know what a record is? 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:13.450 LP records, 16 millimeter film, to some degree 35 00:06:13.450 --> 00:06:16.390 millimeter photography, these are all the cutting edge media 00:06:16.390 --> 00:06:18.400 technologies in 1939. 00:06:18.400 --> 00:06:21.490 And there are people saying, gee, there must be way to 00:06:21.490 --> 00:06:23.640 improve education using these things. 00:06:23.640 --> 00:06:25.510 And it's interesting when you think about-- 00:06:25.510 --> 00:06:26.950 we may have mentioned this before. 00:06:26.950 --> 00:06:28.290 We'll certainly mention it later-- 00:06:28.290 --> 00:06:31.230 Vannevar Bush's great paper, "As We May Think," where he 00:06:31.230 --> 00:06:33.780 introduces this idea of the memex, which is very much 00:06:33.780 --> 00:06:36.760 credited as being a kind of predecessor to the World Wide 00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:39.150 Web, so right about this time period. 00:06:39.150 --> 00:06:42.180 So he's got exposure to these sort of media film 00:06:42.180 --> 00:06:43.690 technologies at the time. 00:06:43.690 --> 00:06:45.950 And in the course of that committee, these guys get 00:06:45.950 --> 00:06:47.520 together and they think there's 00:06:47.520 --> 00:06:48.990 really something happening. 00:06:48.990 --> 00:06:51.940 The United States is generally mobilizing. 00:06:51.940 --> 00:06:54.390 Even though there's a lot of political debate, people 00:06:54.390 --> 00:06:58.210 really see that the US needs to build up the military 00:06:58.210 --> 00:07:00.110 during this period. 00:07:00.110 --> 00:07:04.340 And it's not at all clear that the scientific talent of the 00:07:04.340 --> 00:07:06.870 country is going to be utilized in the best way. 00:07:06.870 --> 00:07:08.720 And a lot of people, and we talked about this, during 00:07:08.720 --> 00:07:11.600 World War I felt that it really wasn't utilized in the 00:07:11.600 --> 00:07:13.790 most effective way. 00:07:13.790 --> 00:07:18.420 And Dupree talks about, there's a lot of different 00:07:18.420 --> 00:07:23.030 options for ways that you might bring either scientists, 00:07:23.030 --> 00:07:26.400 to use that term generally, or people like you, to bear on 00:07:26.400 --> 00:07:27.030 the war effort. 00:07:27.030 --> 00:07:28.310 What might those ways be? 00:07:28.310 --> 00:07:30.000 What are the different options you might have? 00:07:39.540 --> 00:07:42.170 Well, one option is to just draft you all, send you into 00:07:42.170 --> 00:07:45.270 the military, and then I've got lots of smart MIT people 00:07:45.270 --> 00:07:48.050 working in the army. 00:07:48.050 --> 00:07:50.460 Especially the army in 1940, you'd probably spent a lot of 00:07:50.460 --> 00:07:52.270 time peeling potatoes. 00:07:52.270 --> 00:07:54.370 You'd probably get handed a rifle and told to run into the 00:07:54.370 --> 00:07:55.640 machine gun fire. 00:07:55.640 --> 00:07:57.790 I'm going to draft you and rather than you being sent to 00:07:57.790 --> 00:08:05.940 the front, I'm going to send to the Watertown Arsenal to 00:08:05.940 --> 00:08:09.830 make guns or to help engineer the manufacture of guns. 00:08:09.830 --> 00:08:11.660 OK, you go work for the government, you work in a 00:08:11.660 --> 00:08:15.700 government facility, and you help with some important job. 00:08:15.700 --> 00:08:18.160 That's not a bad way to do it actually. 00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:22.130 But you end up working on things 00:08:22.130 --> 00:08:24.230 that are already existing. 00:08:24.230 --> 00:08:28.200 And so there are labs internal to the government. 00:08:28.200 --> 00:08:29.020 The Navy has them. 00:08:29.020 --> 00:08:31.180 The Army has them. 00:08:31.180 --> 00:08:33.409 Even the Army Air Force had some stuff like that. 00:08:37.380 --> 00:08:41.820 But they were generally seen as not the most cutting edge. 00:08:41.820 --> 00:08:43.620 And there's a lot of truth to be said to that. 00:08:43.620 --> 00:08:46.770 They were sort of concerned with building weapons that 00:08:46.770 --> 00:08:50.240 they had built for a long time, not really very good at 00:08:50.240 --> 00:08:53.100 dealing with things like electronics or other new 00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:55.880 things, and very, very hard for them to think about stuff 00:08:55.880 --> 00:08:57.260 that was outside the box. 00:08:57.260 --> 00:09:00.900 If you were in the Navy, the Navy had a great cadre of 00:09:00.900 --> 00:09:03.480 people who knew how to build warships because they built 00:09:03.480 --> 00:09:05.490 best warships and that's all they did. 00:09:05.490 --> 00:09:07.510 But outside of building warships, it was very hard to 00:09:07.510 --> 00:09:08.780 think about what you might do. 00:09:08.780 --> 00:09:11.170 Because that's what the Navy did, was they built warships, 00:09:11.170 --> 00:09:13.290 to some degree airplanes, mostly warships and 00:09:13.290 --> 00:09:14.940 submarines. 00:09:14.940 --> 00:09:16.780 You could send all the scientists and engineers into 00:09:16.780 --> 00:09:19.700 industrial labs and have them work in industry and close 00:09:19.700 --> 00:09:20.950 down the school. 00:09:23.630 --> 00:09:26.920 You could organize a separate corps, where you say-- 00:09:26.920 --> 00:09:28.800 actually there are some things like this today. 00:09:28.800 --> 00:09:31.270 There's the Public Health Service. 00:09:31.270 --> 00:09:35.360 There's the NOAH corps, which is the oceanographic corp. 00:09:35.360 --> 00:09:38.330 These are sort of little quasi-military organizations 00:09:38.330 --> 00:09:40.470 that are peppered around the government. 00:09:40.470 --> 00:09:42.420 You could say let's have a government-- 00:09:42.420 --> 00:09:43.850 well, there's a Peace Corps. 00:09:43.850 --> 00:09:45.180 I'm sure you've heard of that. 00:09:45.180 --> 00:09:48.730 You could have the War Corps. 00:09:48.730 --> 00:09:51.630 And a lot of different options there for organizing. 00:09:51.630 --> 00:09:53.460 And these guys started to become worried that they 00:09:53.460 --> 00:09:56.720 didn't think that left to its own devices, it was going to 00:09:56.720 --> 00:09:58.150 go the right way. 00:09:58.150 --> 00:10:02.320 And so Bush and his group, particularly Bush in using his 00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:05.530 political connections, gets them took to create this thing 00:10:05.530 --> 00:10:08.580 called the National Defense Research Committee. 00:10:08.580 --> 00:10:12.440 And he writes this famous memo that Dupree talks about, in 00:10:12.440 --> 00:10:15.930 June of 1940, which happens to be-- 00:10:15.930 --> 00:10:19.530 anybody know that picture is? 00:10:19.530 --> 00:10:23.988 What happens in June 1940? 00:10:23.988 --> 00:10:25.470 AUDIENCE: Germans take France. 00:10:25.470 --> 00:10:26.000 PROFESSOR: Right. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:29.070 France falls to the Nazis. 00:10:29.070 --> 00:10:31.480 So this is what, about less than a year 00:10:31.480 --> 00:10:33.000 after the war starts. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:35.270 And here you have Hitler walking down-- 00:10:35.270 --> 00:10:39.770 there's Hitler right there, Albert Speer, by the way, 00:10:39.770 --> 00:10:42.300 right there, touring Paris. 00:10:42.300 --> 00:10:46.990 And that's a pretty shocking image for the West to see. 00:10:46.990 --> 00:10:55.240 And it was a time of doom and gloom. 00:10:55.240 --> 00:10:59.112 A time of really the sense that if the US didn't get off 00:10:59.112 --> 00:11:02.990 its rear end and start doing things, bad things 00:11:02.990 --> 00:11:04.220 were going to happen. 00:11:04.220 --> 00:11:06.420 And you also have the Battle of Britain. 00:11:06.420 --> 00:11:09.960 And the Battle of Britain refers, of course, the Nazi-- 00:11:09.960 --> 00:11:12.380 they were next going to invade England. 00:11:12.380 --> 00:11:15.120 But Hitler wouldn't do it until Goering could give him 00:11:15.120 --> 00:11:16.520 air superiority. 00:11:16.520 --> 00:11:18.690 And so they started going over and bombing and 00:11:18.690 --> 00:11:20.050 preparing the ground. 00:11:20.050 --> 00:11:22.420 And they never quite got air superiority, because of the 00:11:22.420 --> 00:11:25.210 Spitfires and the Hurricanes and all this, not least of it 00:11:25.210 --> 00:11:26.500 aided by radar. 00:11:26.500 --> 00:11:30.440 And so in the spring of 1940, into the summer of 1940, is 00:11:30.440 --> 00:11:33.000 what they call the Blitz in London. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:34.140 I'm sure if you've been to London, 00:11:34.140 --> 00:11:36.170 you've seen that stuff. 00:11:36.170 --> 00:11:39.100 Not only is there this sense of military emergency, but 00:11:39.100 --> 00:11:41.390 there's this sense that a lot of the danger is 00:11:41.390 --> 00:11:42.770 coming from the sky. 00:11:42.770 --> 00:11:45.090 And we really don't know how to shoot down airplanes and we 00:11:45.090 --> 00:11:46.570 don't know how to combat airplanes. 00:11:46.570 --> 00:11:49.080 And there's this sense of defense that is 00:11:49.080 --> 00:11:50.330 not being taken up. 00:11:53.370 --> 00:11:55.640 And so these guys from the Scientific Aids to Learning, 00:11:55.640 --> 00:11:58.160 and this memo that Bush writes, particularly concerned 00:11:58.160 --> 00:12:02.460 about anti-aircraft defenses-- 00:12:02.460 --> 00:12:11.550 and Harry Hopkins, who is the chief of staff for the 00:12:11.550 --> 00:12:14.270 president, basically puts this memo in front of him. 00:12:14.270 --> 00:12:18.410 And he writes across it, OK, FDR. 00:12:18.410 --> 00:12:19.890 And that's the letter. 00:12:19.890 --> 00:12:22.470 And with that letter, in the government world, if you have 00:12:22.470 --> 00:12:25.360 that signature on your letter you can pretty much do 00:12:25.360 --> 00:12:26.060 anything you want. 00:12:26.060 --> 00:12:28.140 It's literally like a blank check. 00:12:28.140 --> 00:12:31.970 And Bush goes around in the summer of 1940 collecting all 00:12:31.970 --> 00:12:35.520 these people to work in this National 00:12:35.520 --> 00:12:39.000 Defense Research Committee. 00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:43.280 And they divided up initially-- 00:12:43.280 --> 00:12:44.950 it's later called the OSRD. 00:12:44.950 --> 00:12:46.570 And it's a little bit confusing the way the 00:12:46.570 --> 00:12:47.820 terminology works. 00:12:52.590 --> 00:12:55.060 But they divided up into different divisions. 00:12:55.060 --> 00:12:57.630 There's a division for transport and communication; 00:12:57.630 --> 00:13:01.140 aircraft, submarines, and mine defense; guns, projectiles, 00:13:01.140 --> 00:13:04.940 and armor; and bombs, fuels, gases, and chemistry. 00:13:04.940 --> 00:13:07.540 And these tend to be things that are not things that they 00:13:07.540 --> 00:13:09.380 feel are being addressed 00:13:09.380 --> 00:13:11.550 adequately through the services. 00:13:11.550 --> 00:13:14.540 What's the one thing they leave out, by the way? 00:13:14.540 --> 00:13:16.180 They don't go near, they don't touch it? 00:13:19.680 --> 00:13:21.410 Aviation. 00:13:21.410 --> 00:13:24.280 They feel that the NACA, which Bush has then been chair of, 00:13:24.280 --> 00:13:27.680 the predecessor to NASA has aviation sewed up. 00:13:27.680 --> 00:13:29.260 AUDIENCE: Is fire control listed there? 00:13:29.260 --> 00:13:31.430 PROFESSOR: Fire control is under guns, projectiles, 00:13:31.430 --> 00:13:34.670 armor, and materials. 00:13:34.670 --> 00:13:39.660 And so what they do in a sense is they grab onto all of the 00:13:39.660 --> 00:13:45.060 technologies that don't fit neatly into the services, the 00:13:45.060 --> 00:13:46.340 military services. 00:13:46.340 --> 00:13:49.420 And you'll see this again when we talk about DARPA. 00:13:49.420 --> 00:13:51.990 Because the Navy knows how to build ships. 00:13:51.990 --> 00:13:54.040 They're not going tell the Navy how to build ships. 00:13:54.040 --> 00:13:56.170 But the Navy doesn't know the first thing about radar, and 00:13:56.170 --> 00:13:58.730 they're not particularly good at radio, and they certainly 00:13:58.730 --> 00:14:03.320 don't think very much about other sorts of things. 00:14:03.320 --> 00:14:04.310 There's this great quote. 00:14:04.310 --> 00:14:06.700 I don't know if it's in that reading, from Bush, where he 00:14:06.700 --> 00:14:09.740 says, there were those who protested that the action of 00:14:09.740 --> 00:14:12.750 setting up the NDRC was an end run. 00:14:12.750 --> 00:14:15.080 A grab by which a small company of scientists and 00:14:15.080 --> 00:14:19.160 engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold 00:14:19.160 --> 00:14:21.240 of the authority and money for the program of 00:14:21.240 --> 00:14:23.340 developing new weapons. 00:14:23.340 --> 00:14:25.920 So they met a lot of resistance, particularly from 00:14:25.920 --> 00:14:28.980 the military itself, saying why are you guys doing this? 00:14:28.980 --> 00:14:32.170 And Bush says, that's in fact exactly what it was. 00:14:32.170 --> 00:14:33.030 It was an end run. 00:14:33.030 --> 00:14:34.940 They went around all the established people. 00:14:34.940 --> 00:14:37.750 There are millions and millions of dollars flowing 00:14:37.750 --> 00:14:40.590 into Navy laboratories, flowing into other things, but 00:14:40.590 --> 00:14:43.140 building very traditional weapons and things along the 00:14:43.140 --> 00:14:45.860 lines that they didn't feel were going to be really 00:14:45.860 --> 00:14:48.210 thinking differently. 00:14:48.210 --> 00:14:49.570 So they set this thing up. 00:14:49.570 --> 00:14:51.730 It's outside the Army. 00:14:51.730 --> 00:14:53.780 It's outside the Navy. 00:14:53.780 --> 00:14:57.350 And you have no idea what a bureaucracy is like until you 00:14:57.350 --> 00:15:00.640 look at the Army or the Navy in 1940. 00:15:00.640 --> 00:15:03.230 These are organizations that have existed for hundreds of 00:15:03.230 --> 00:15:06.690 years practically, or at least 150 years at that point. 00:15:09.270 --> 00:15:12.410 There was not a lot of rapid change going on, except maybe 00:15:12.410 --> 00:15:15.940 in the air arm in the Army. 00:15:15.940 --> 00:15:21.350 And they bring these people on who can actually understand, 00:15:21.350 --> 00:15:25.900 who can manage the research and pretty much write checks 00:15:25.900 --> 00:15:28.030 with government money, with a handshake. 00:15:28.030 --> 00:15:31.230 This is not the NSF, where you have to go through peer review 00:15:31.230 --> 00:15:33.230 and you have to get your program approved and all the 00:15:33.230 --> 00:15:35.070 sort of things that a lot of people here 00:15:35.070 --> 00:15:36.370 on campus do today. 00:15:36.370 --> 00:15:40.680 This is like, show up at somebody's lab, ask them if 00:15:40.680 --> 00:15:41.750 they'd like to be involved? 00:15:41.750 --> 00:15:45.330 And the next thing they know, they got a check for $250,000, 00:15:45.330 --> 00:15:47.735 which in 1940 is a lot of money for scientist. 00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:53.940 And one of the things they really get right early on is 00:15:53.940 --> 00:15:56.720 this whole business about electronics and what role 00:15:56.720 --> 00:16:00.930 electronics could potentially play in the war effort. 00:16:00.930 --> 00:16:02.280 There's radar. 00:16:02.280 --> 00:16:03.470 There's computing. 00:16:03.470 --> 00:16:05.980 There's different kinds of systems integration. 00:16:05.980 --> 00:16:08.080 I'll talk more and I'll show you some pictures about 00:16:08.080 --> 00:16:10.880 proximity fuses and fire control and 00:16:10.880 --> 00:16:12.410 I'll mention radar. 00:16:12.410 --> 00:16:14.940 And also of course, and Dupree mentions this, there's this 00:16:14.940 --> 00:16:15.920 uranium committee. 00:16:15.920 --> 00:16:18.350 Which is another one of these things that gee, it seems like 00:16:18.350 --> 00:16:19.270 it has potential. 00:16:19.270 --> 00:16:22.210 It's a bunch of pointy-headed scientists telling us some 00:16:22.210 --> 00:16:24.700 abstract thing that could be the greatest ever, but 00:16:24.700 --> 00:16:25.980 what do they know? 00:16:25.980 --> 00:16:29.350 These are like Hungarian physicists, who just have this 00:16:29.350 --> 00:16:31.520 idea on a blackboard. 00:16:31.520 --> 00:16:34.360 And this uranium committee had sort of existed. 00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:35.820 But the Army didn't really own it. 00:16:35.820 --> 00:16:37.180 The Navy didn't really own it. 00:16:37.180 --> 00:16:42.700 And of course it belongs then, it gets folded into the NDRC. 00:16:42.700 --> 00:16:45.060 What does it become? 00:16:45.060 --> 00:16:45.560 AUDIENCE: The Manhattan Project. 00:16:45.560 --> 00:16:47.730 PROFESSOR: The Manhattan Project. 00:16:47.730 --> 00:16:50.600 Then it actually branches out of NDRC. 00:16:50.600 --> 00:16:53.540 For a grant from the NSF. 00:16:53.540 --> 00:16:57.170 And say I want to get $100,000, how much do I need 00:16:57.170 --> 00:17:00.000 to get from the NSF? 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:01.710 Anybody know what the overhead rate is? 00:17:09.180 --> 00:17:11.930 It's like-- and I'll get this within 5% because I don't 00:17:11.930 --> 00:17:14.560 follow it every year-- it's like 63 and 1/2%. 00:17:14.560 --> 00:17:17.040 So if I want to get a grant, any faculty member you work 00:17:17.040 --> 00:17:20.280 with that goes to the NSF and needs $100,000 to do the work, 00:17:20.280 --> 00:17:23.359 I have to get $163,500. 00:17:23.359 --> 00:17:26.599 And that $63,500 from the top, just goes right off the top 00:17:26.599 --> 00:17:29.260 into MIT's bank account. 00:17:29.260 --> 00:17:31.743 And the reason I ask if you've heard about it, because a lot 00:17:31.743 --> 00:17:33.470 of faculty complain about it a lot because it 00:17:33.470 --> 00:17:35.050 feels kind of painful. 00:17:35.050 --> 00:17:37.200 And what does it do? 00:17:37.200 --> 00:17:39.830 Theoretically, it goes to pay for keeping the lights, on 00:17:39.830 --> 00:17:43.600 keeping the heat on, somebody to come in and sweep the lab 00:17:43.600 --> 00:17:46.500 out at night, all the different things, the 00:17:46.500 --> 00:17:49.610 paperwork, that it takes to actually run these grants. 00:17:49.610 --> 00:17:52.280 And it is expensive to do that. 00:17:52.280 --> 00:17:55.260 And most faculty see it as a big burden because gee, my 00:17:55.260 --> 00:18:00.560 $63,500 which the NSF gave me, suddenly gets taken as rent by 00:18:00.560 --> 00:18:02.480 my landlord. 00:18:02.480 --> 00:18:03.780 And what do I get in return? 00:18:03.780 --> 00:18:05.970 All I do is get somebody who comes in to sweep the floor 00:18:05.970 --> 00:18:09.100 and it sounds like a lot of money. 00:18:09.100 --> 00:18:11.770 And Dupree really tells you why that was so important. 00:18:11.770 --> 00:18:15.670 And it was invented in this month, pretty much. 00:18:15.670 --> 00:18:18.710 And it was one of the most critical ideas of getting all 00:18:18.710 --> 00:18:21.540 this stuff to work so impressively, which was-- 00:18:24.580 --> 00:18:29.070 MIT's total research budget in 1940, before this started, was 00:18:29.070 --> 00:18:33.340 on the order of $300,000, the entire research budget for the 00:18:33.340 --> 00:18:36.230 entire Institute. 00:18:36.230 --> 00:18:37.535 I wrote the number down here. 00:18:43.460 --> 00:19:01.550 Well, in total MIT got from the NDRC, $116 million. 00:19:04.870 --> 00:19:09.340 $116 million, even in today's world, is a lot of research. 00:19:09.340 --> 00:19:10.070 And what does that mean? 00:19:10.070 --> 00:19:12.400 It mostly means people and desks and laboratories and all 00:19:12.400 --> 00:19:13.530 that stuff. 00:19:13.530 --> 00:19:18.050 If MIT had to pay for building all those buildings and 00:19:18.050 --> 00:19:20.730 building all those desks and building all that heating and 00:19:20.730 --> 00:19:23.620 all that infrastructure, it have bankrupted the Institute 00:19:23.620 --> 00:19:26.630 by the time it got to $3 million. 00:19:26.630 --> 00:19:32.250 But they added this overhead charge on there so that any 00:19:32.250 --> 00:19:36.810 time money came for research to hire post-docs or research 00:19:36.810 --> 00:19:40.160 assistants or technicians or other people, it came with 00:19:40.160 --> 00:19:41.120 this overhead. 00:19:41.120 --> 00:19:46.160 That meant that the dollar figure could grow infinitely 00:19:46.160 --> 00:19:48.970 large, infinitely large. 00:19:48.970 --> 00:19:53.320 And again, think about that $300,000 to $116 million in 00:19:53.320 --> 00:19:55.040 under five years. 00:19:55.040 --> 00:19:58.690 We wish we saw that kind of growth now. 00:19:58.690 --> 00:20:01.360 And it was only able to happen because they built into this 00:20:01.360 --> 00:20:04.380 idea of the research contract, this notion of indirect costs. 00:20:04.380 --> 00:20:06.040 It was really a very fundamental thing that we 00:20:06.040 --> 00:20:07.390 still live with today. 00:20:07.390 --> 00:20:09.940 That means that if I as a faculty member went to DARPA 00:20:09.940 --> 00:20:13.340 and I got $100 million contract, MIT 00:20:13.340 --> 00:20:14.100 could support it. 00:20:14.100 --> 00:20:16.510 And they might have to build me a building, which happens 00:20:16.510 --> 00:20:18.700 all the time, you see these buildings around here. 00:20:18.700 --> 00:20:20.240 But they could actually do it. 00:20:25.040 --> 00:20:29.770 The other thing about it was all of the research contracts, 00:20:29.770 --> 00:20:32.100 the military, the only thing they knew how to do up until 00:20:32.100 --> 00:20:33.625 then was to buy stuff. 00:20:33.625 --> 00:20:34.560 It's called procurement. 00:20:34.560 --> 00:20:36.910 It's still something they do a lot of. 00:20:36.910 --> 00:20:39.450 So if I wanted to do an experimental radar set, the 00:20:39.450 --> 00:20:42.080 only way I had to do it was to come to MIT and go, we'd like 00:20:42.080 --> 00:20:44.030 to buy 10 radar sets. 00:20:44.030 --> 00:20:45.960 And we probably won't even use them and they may not even 00:20:45.960 --> 00:20:47.970 work, but at least we'll have a contract that has a 00:20:47.970 --> 00:20:49.460 procurement. 00:20:49.460 --> 00:20:52.280 And what they invented during this period also with this R&D 00:20:52.280 --> 00:20:56.380 contract, where MIT doesn't deliver anything other than 00:20:56.380 --> 00:20:59.240 promising to put out its best effort to do the research and 00:20:59.240 --> 00:21:01.850 hopefully publish some papers on it. 00:21:01.850 --> 00:21:03.700 That was also a pretty revolutionary 00:21:03.700 --> 00:21:04.780 idea in that point. 00:21:04.780 --> 00:21:06.330 Until that point, there was no way for the 00:21:06.330 --> 00:21:07.580 government to do that. 00:21:10.810 --> 00:21:15.520 So here's what Dupree says about it. 00:21:15.520 --> 00:21:18.240 It's a nice little sentence that captures it all. 00:21:18.240 --> 00:21:20.910 The contract was the device by which universities and 00:21:20.910 --> 00:21:24.550 industrial research labs were preserved as institutions, 00:21:24.550 --> 00:21:27.840 even while their social role was radically changed. 00:21:27.840 --> 00:21:29.985 I mean this was very much the vision that people like Bush 00:21:29.985 --> 00:21:33.330 and Conant had, was we want to keep MIT for what it is, keep 00:21:33.330 --> 00:21:35.400 it as the character that it has. 00:21:35.400 --> 00:21:38.300 Obviously, it changed during the war in some basic ways. 00:21:38.300 --> 00:21:41.640 But it didn't change permanently in some sense. 00:21:41.640 --> 00:21:43.650 Where there's a free flow of ideas, there's an 00:21:43.650 --> 00:21:46.390 open flow of ideas. 00:21:46.390 --> 00:21:50.510 But I haven't addressed all these other kinds of problems. 00:21:50.510 --> 00:21:54.070 Without becoming part of the Army, or without it becoming 00:21:54.070 --> 00:21:56.940 part of the Navy, or having just everybody drafted and 00:21:56.940 --> 00:21:58.250 closing the place down for five years. 00:22:01.970 --> 00:22:08.720 So the NDRC is created in June of 1940. 00:22:08.720 --> 00:22:09.780 It gets up and running. 00:22:09.780 --> 00:22:14.830 It starts to issue its first contracts in September, 00:22:14.830 --> 00:22:16.970 October of 1940. 00:22:16.970 --> 00:22:19.040 I'll talk about the radiation lab in a couple minutes when I 00:22:19.040 --> 00:22:19.990 show the slides. 00:22:19.990 --> 00:22:23.160 Well, it's worth knowing that they get started under the 00:22:23.160 --> 00:22:27.270 NDRC in October, I believe, of 1940. 00:22:27.270 --> 00:22:30.160 They deliver their first radar set in March of 00:22:30.160 --> 00:22:31.000 the following year. 00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:34.420 So think about the turnaround there, to take a completely 00:22:34.420 --> 00:22:37.650 new technology and to deliver something the military can use 00:22:37.650 --> 00:22:40.300 in the field in four months. 00:22:40.300 --> 00:22:42.480 It was a pretty remarkable turn-around. 00:22:42.480 --> 00:22:44.650 And in fact, some people in their response papers 00:22:44.650 --> 00:22:48.060 mentioned the intensity of the environment that sort of 00:22:48.060 --> 00:22:50.380 developed around here during that period. 00:22:52.900 --> 00:22:59.650 And commenting, a couple people, that it was hard to 00:22:59.650 --> 00:23:02.370 imagine it was any more intense than it is today. 00:23:02.370 --> 00:23:04.970 Although it probably was. 00:23:04.970 --> 00:23:07.230 And one thing that wasn't really captured in the 00:23:07.230 --> 00:23:11.850 readings is why it was so intense? 00:23:11.850 --> 00:23:16.060 What was it that was driving people to work such long hours 00:23:16.060 --> 00:23:17.940 and put such incredible time in? 00:23:17.940 --> 00:23:20.270 Again, most of the people doing this work are people 00:23:20.270 --> 00:23:20.890 just like you. 00:23:20.890 --> 00:23:24.870 They're either students or just recent graduates who are 00:23:24.870 --> 00:23:26.120 occupying these labs. 00:23:31.750 --> 00:23:36.320 Especially for the men, what happens to all your friends? 00:23:36.320 --> 00:23:38.120 AUDIENCE: Going and getting drafted. 00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:41.350 PROFESSOR: Well, what are all your friends doing? 00:23:41.350 --> 00:23:42.180 AUDIENCE: Getting drafted. 00:23:42.180 --> 00:23:43.915 PROFESSOR: Either getting drafted or signing up. 00:23:46.930 --> 00:23:49.310 It's not that the people who are working in the labs are 00:23:49.310 --> 00:23:51.420 trying to avoid getting drafted. 00:23:51.420 --> 00:23:54.870 That's more of a product of later wars. 00:23:54.870 --> 00:23:57.420 They're exempted from the draft because they're doing 00:23:57.420 --> 00:23:58.920 critical work. 00:23:58.920 --> 00:24:02.410 And there's a lot of social pressure about not shirking 00:24:02.410 --> 00:24:03.960 your service. 00:24:03.960 --> 00:24:07.370 So it can be seen as a kind of embarrassment to be exempted 00:24:07.370 --> 00:24:10.650 from the draft to do laboratory work. 00:24:10.650 --> 00:24:11.815 It's a sort of cushy assignment. 00:24:11.815 --> 00:24:15.200 It's the sort of thing that people like Dick Cheney and 00:24:15.200 --> 00:24:18.370 George Bush were criticized for during 00:24:18.370 --> 00:24:20.920 presidential campaigns. 00:24:20.920 --> 00:24:23.080 All your friends are going off to war and you're staying home 00:24:23.080 --> 00:24:26.770 in Cambridge, working at MIT. 00:24:26.770 --> 00:24:29.500 A lot of I think the motivation for people was they 00:24:29.500 --> 00:24:31.810 really wanted to prove they were doing something important 00:24:31.810 --> 00:24:34.880 and making a contribution to the war effort and not just 00:24:34.880 --> 00:24:36.150 avoiding the draft. 00:24:36.150 --> 00:24:39.230 Because they were exempted from the draft. 00:24:39.230 --> 00:24:43.850 And that they really were serving their country in the 00:24:43.850 --> 00:24:44.940 same kind of way. 00:24:44.940 --> 00:24:47.500 This was not the Vietnam War, which was very contentious 00:24:47.500 --> 00:24:49.260 about who went and who didn't go and who 00:24:49.260 --> 00:24:50.210 wanted to get drafted. 00:24:50.210 --> 00:24:53.160 This was where the entire country literally mobilized. 00:24:53.160 --> 00:24:56.430 And everybody's job, everybody's home life, 00:24:56.430 --> 00:24:57.530 everybody moved around. 00:24:57.530 --> 00:24:58.770 And it really fundamentally changed the 00:24:58.770 --> 00:25:00.160 country for that period. 00:25:00.160 --> 00:25:03.830 So you have this environment inside the laboratories which 00:25:03.830 --> 00:25:05.080 is very different. 00:25:07.090 --> 00:25:11.170 So a couple of statistics, as I mentioned MIT was the single 00:25:11.170 --> 00:25:14.790 largest recipient of OSRD already funds, I think by a 00:25:14.790 --> 00:25:19.200 factor of two or three, $116 million over five years. 00:25:19.200 --> 00:25:23.210 Again, that's a lot of money in today's world, much less in 00:25:23.210 --> 00:25:25.450 1940 dollars, where the total budget was 00:25:25.450 --> 00:25:29.250 $300,000 before then. 00:25:29.250 --> 00:25:33.120 There were about 2,300 contracts overall in the OSRD, 00:25:33.120 --> 00:25:34.750 totaling $500 million. 00:25:34.750 --> 00:25:38.850 So MIT got more than 20% of the total funds. 00:25:38.850 --> 00:25:42.700 It was a bit of an inside job, no doubt about it. 00:25:42.700 --> 00:25:46.110 The Radiation Laboratory by 1942, again it was only 00:25:46.110 --> 00:25:50.180 founded in the end of 1940, so within a year it was as large 00:25:50.180 --> 00:25:53.410 as the rest of MIT all together. 00:25:53.410 --> 00:25:55.390 And it was of course, right there. 00:25:59.330 --> 00:26:02.930 The overhead started out as 30% and got 00:26:02.930 --> 00:26:04.410 reduced down to 10%-- 00:26:04.410 --> 00:26:06.470 again today it's 63 and 1/2%-- 00:26:06.470 --> 00:26:09.670 because they didn't want to be seen as raking off all this 00:26:09.670 --> 00:26:10.920 cash that came in. 00:26:18.990 --> 00:26:20.580 And again, there was a lot of resistance. 00:26:20.580 --> 00:26:22.870 There's a great quote by Harold Bowen, who was the head 00:26:22.870 --> 00:26:24.120 of the Naval Research Laboratory. 00:26:24.120 --> 00:26:24.980 He was an MIT graduate. 00:26:24.980 --> 00:26:26.540 He said-- 00:26:26.540 --> 00:26:28.800 he's coming from within the Navy-- 00:26:28.800 --> 00:26:31.160 those of us who had been working in applied science for 00:26:31.160 --> 00:26:35.090 years cannot be blamed for not always enthusiastically 00:26:35.090 --> 00:26:37.800 endorsing all the efforts of the Johnny-come-latelys who 00:26:37.800 --> 00:26:39.540 inevitably steam into Washington at the 00:26:39.540 --> 00:26:40.830 beginning of the war. 00:26:40.830 --> 00:26:42.710 So that was how they viewed Vannevar Bush and all these 00:26:42.710 --> 00:26:44.450 scientists, was they were coming in. 00:26:44.450 --> 00:26:45.750 We've been working on radar. 00:26:45.750 --> 00:26:46.360 In fact, they did. 00:26:46.360 --> 00:26:49.750 The Naval Research Lab really invented radar. 00:26:49.750 --> 00:26:52.000 And here comes Vannevar Bush, saying we're going to do it 00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:53.280 all at MIT. 00:26:53.280 --> 00:26:55.410 And in a certain way, taking it away from the Naval 00:26:55.410 --> 00:26:56.200 Research Lab. 00:26:56.200 --> 00:27:00.930 Very contentious stuff, lots of power politics going on. 00:27:00.930 --> 00:27:03.470 Also with AT&T. I'll talk about that a 00:27:03.470 --> 00:27:04.720 little bit in a minute. 00:27:08.220 --> 00:27:10.580 Some of the other big benefactors, and I mention 00:27:10.580 --> 00:27:14.270 this because these places all still exist and may be places 00:27:14.270 --> 00:27:17.990 you'd come across, the Jet Propulsion 00:27:17.990 --> 00:27:20.150 Laboratory at Caltech-- 00:27:20.150 --> 00:27:21.880 anybody ever heard of that place? 00:27:21.880 --> 00:27:24.530 Founded right during this period. 00:27:24.530 --> 00:27:27.645 What do they do now? 00:27:27.645 --> 00:27:29.010 AUDIENCE: Stuff for NASA. 00:27:29.010 --> 00:27:30.560 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it's part of NASA. 00:27:30.560 --> 00:27:32.290 They do a lot of deep space probes. 00:27:32.290 --> 00:27:35.210 They did the Mars Rovers that you've read about. 00:27:35.210 --> 00:27:39.070 They do essentially nothing with jet propulsion. 00:27:39.070 --> 00:27:41.882 But they were founded, under the direction of Theodore von 00:27:41.882 --> 00:27:45.550 Karman, to do rocket research basically. 00:27:45.550 --> 00:27:48.010 There's a whole new institution out there created 00:27:48.010 --> 00:27:51.310 right about the same time, by the same thing. 00:27:51.310 --> 00:27:53.780 The Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. 00:27:53.780 --> 00:27:55.810 Anybody ever hear of that lab? 00:27:55.810 --> 00:27:58.050 Also a big government lab, associated with the 00:27:58.050 --> 00:27:59.790 university. 00:27:59.790 --> 00:28:02.560 They do all kinds of interesting secret stuff. 00:28:02.560 --> 00:28:05.915 They do submarine tracking and they do a lot of space design 00:28:05.915 --> 00:28:07.220 and they build satellites. 00:28:07.220 --> 00:28:10.925 And in fact, the former head of NASA, Mike 00:28:10.925 --> 00:28:13.710 Griffin came out of there. 00:28:13.710 --> 00:28:17.090 And they were founded in the same period to develop the 00:28:17.090 --> 00:28:19.530 proximity fuse, which was a little radar device. 00:28:19.530 --> 00:28:21.770 It was built into an artillery shell. 00:28:21.770 --> 00:28:24.280 It was designed to explode when it came near an airplane. 00:28:26.820 --> 00:28:30.980 So these are all places that still exist. 00:28:30.980 --> 00:28:34.320 A lot of these big government or quasi-government research 00:28:34.320 --> 00:28:35.570 labs exist. 00:28:38.710 --> 00:28:39.820 Let me maybe turn to the slides. 00:28:39.820 --> 00:28:41.270 Any questions on any of that? 00:28:45.860 --> 00:28:53.345 I have a few more numbers about the Rad Lab radar. 00:28:53.345 --> 00:28:57.720 AUDIENCE: I mean one of the things that comes out in the 00:28:57.720 --> 00:29:00.850 article by Debbie Douglas is that the significance of the 00:29:00.850 --> 00:29:05.210 microwave research here at MIT was it that allowed people to 00:29:05.210 --> 00:29:07.580 make radar units smaller. 00:29:07.580 --> 00:29:09.200 So what had existed before? 00:29:09.200 --> 00:29:10.890 You mentioned the Navy. 00:29:10.890 --> 00:29:11.990 PROFESSOR: I think I have pictures of that. 00:29:11.990 --> 00:29:13.440 AUDIENCE: OK, great. 00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:15.750 PROFESSOR: So here's one example. 00:29:15.750 --> 00:29:21.970 This will become relevant when we talk about Apollo actually. 00:29:21.970 --> 00:29:27.200 Again, one of the big concerns was about gunfire control. 00:29:27.200 --> 00:29:30.470 And this is a device-- 00:29:30.470 --> 00:29:31.860 I may have mentioned this before. 00:29:31.860 --> 00:29:34.790 Did I show this picture before so far? 00:29:34.790 --> 00:29:36.710 I actually have two of these things in my office. 00:29:36.710 --> 00:29:40.290 I bought them on eBay for about $25, still brand new in 00:29:40.290 --> 00:29:43.520 the box from 1945, when there were manufactured. 00:29:43.520 --> 00:29:47.080 And this is a gun site for a guy, an anti-aircraft gunner, 00:29:47.080 --> 00:29:48.330 aboard a Naval ship. 00:29:48.330 --> 00:29:51.960 And what it does is it's got two gyroscopes in it. 00:29:51.960 --> 00:29:55.510 And it has a little mirror and it automatically calculates 00:29:55.510 --> 00:29:57.230 the lead for the gunner. 00:29:57.230 --> 00:30:00.880 So if there's an airplane coming in and you've got to 00:30:00.880 --> 00:30:05.260 lead it by some amount in order to fire ahead of it, 00:30:05.260 --> 00:30:08.150 because it takes time for the bullets to get there, and it 00:30:08.150 --> 00:30:10.520 can be very hard to train people to do that, that's how 00:30:10.520 --> 00:30:12.640 you shoot skeet and stuff. 00:30:12.640 --> 00:30:15.060 And what this thing does, is it just says, if you just put 00:30:15.060 --> 00:30:19.980 the cross-hairs in your site, on the actual airplane, it 00:30:19.980 --> 00:30:22.400 will automatically calculate the lead and sort of force 00:30:22.400 --> 00:30:24.710 your hands to lead the gun. 00:30:24.710 --> 00:30:28.990 And this was built by, not only by Charles Stark Draper 00:30:28.990 --> 00:30:32.300 in the Instrumentation Lab here, but also by Bob Siemens, 00:30:32.300 --> 00:30:34.600 who was one of his students, who then became second in 00:30:34.600 --> 00:30:36.430 command at NASA during the Apollo program. 00:30:36.430 --> 00:30:37.920 We'll talk about that. 00:30:37.920 --> 00:30:43.040 And was one of their first forays into gyroscopes, which 00:30:43.040 --> 00:30:46.620 then became really important during the Cold War and later. 00:30:46.620 --> 00:30:49.560 I keep pushing the wrong side of the mouse. 00:30:49.560 --> 00:30:51.820 And this is actually how it worked. 00:30:51.820 --> 00:30:56.650 So you can see they can just see the site and it sort of 00:30:56.650 --> 00:30:59.790 forces the gunner, if he keep the cross-hair on the plane, 00:30:59.790 --> 00:31:01.620 to calculate the lead. 00:31:01.620 --> 00:31:05.190 And one of the reasons I show you this is that one of the 00:31:05.190 --> 00:31:09.240 real themes that runs through the work that gets done at MIT 00:31:09.240 --> 00:31:12.450 is not just the microwave physics itself, but the user 00:31:12.450 --> 00:31:14.130 interfaces for a lot of these things. 00:31:14.130 --> 00:31:16.690 And building on that work that we talked about with the 00:31:16.690 --> 00:31:20.110 differential analyzer, how you actually kind of match these 00:31:20.110 --> 00:31:23.300 systems to human performance is really one of the big 00:31:23.300 --> 00:31:24.360 themes in the research. 00:31:24.360 --> 00:31:27.400 And that sort of leads us obviously up through Weiner 00:31:27.400 --> 00:31:28.650 and cybernetics. 00:31:30.730 --> 00:31:35.370 This is one of the divisions of the NDRC, which was devoted 00:31:35.370 --> 00:31:39.320 to fire control, which is that's the same issue about 00:31:39.320 --> 00:31:42.130 how do you aim these different kinds of guns? 00:31:42.130 --> 00:31:45.620 And I give you this list because I want to show you the 00:31:45.620 --> 00:31:50.410 combination of people who were here and the representatives 00:31:50.410 --> 00:31:54.990 from both industry and the government and then also in 00:31:54.990 --> 00:31:56.630 the world of computing. 00:31:56.630 --> 00:31:59.560 So just to give you a couple examples. 00:31:59.560 --> 00:32:03.380 This guy here is Warren Weaver, who is one of the 00:32:03.380 --> 00:32:05.590 senior people at the Rockefeller Foundation, who 00:32:05.590 --> 00:32:08.300 funds Bush's differential analyzer. 00:32:08.300 --> 00:32:12.410 Also is the guy who invented the term "molecular biology." 00:32:12.410 --> 00:32:16.200 And so he comes from the kind of pre-World War II private 00:32:16.200 --> 00:32:18.980 foundation world of science funding. 00:32:18.980 --> 00:32:21.330 This is Preston Bassett, who is the president of the Sperry 00:32:21.330 --> 00:32:25.050 Gyroscope Company, which makes a lot of these kinds of 00:32:25.050 --> 00:32:27.060 control systems. 00:32:27.060 --> 00:32:30.580 Harold Hazen, who is a student of Bush, who writes the first 00:32:30.580 --> 00:32:34.610 paper on the theory of servomechanisms in 1934 and 00:32:34.610 --> 00:32:36.395 becomes dean of engineering at MIT. 00:32:39.620 --> 00:32:44.430 This guy here is George Stibitz. 00:32:44.430 --> 00:32:48.590 He invented the word "digital" and built all kinds of control 00:32:48.590 --> 00:32:51.840 computers out of telephone relays during the war. 00:32:51.840 --> 00:32:52.800 This guy is Ivan Getting. 00:32:52.800 --> 00:32:54.450 And I'll talk about him in a little bit. 00:32:54.450 --> 00:32:56.610 He did a lot of the early work on radar. 00:32:56.610 --> 00:32:59.480 And later on, was really the father of the GPS 00:32:59.480 --> 00:33:04.180 constellation, that we now use to navigate our cars. 00:33:04.180 --> 00:33:06.150 Karl Wildes, also a electrical engineering 00:33:06.150 --> 00:33:08.740 professor here at MIT. 00:33:08.740 --> 00:33:11.950 George Philbrick, who really kind of invented the analog 00:33:11.950 --> 00:33:14.140 computer, electrical analog computer. 00:33:14.140 --> 00:33:17.290 And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. 00:33:17.290 --> 00:33:19.330 So you have all these people sort of coming together on 00:33:19.330 --> 00:33:20.330 this problem. 00:33:20.330 --> 00:33:22.680 None of them had ever thought about this problem before in 00:33:22.680 --> 00:33:23.920 their entire careers. 00:33:23.920 --> 00:33:26.060 Which was sort of a benefit, right, because the Navy 00:33:26.060 --> 00:33:28.760 figured they knew how to do it and all these guys just sort 00:33:28.760 --> 00:33:31.930 of came in and did it in a different way, 00:33:31.930 --> 00:33:35.520 with some fresh ideas. 00:33:35.520 --> 00:33:38.130 This is an electronic, analog electronic 00:33:38.130 --> 00:33:39.380 computer that they built. 00:33:42.220 --> 00:33:44.530 You see these two guys here looking through these sites. 00:33:44.530 --> 00:33:47.470 The actual electronics for the computer is here. 00:33:47.470 --> 00:33:50.850 And they follow an airplane with these optical sites. 00:33:50.850 --> 00:33:54.050 And then it actually has giant servos on the gun that 00:33:54.050 --> 00:33:56.740 actually point the gun to aim it in the right place 00:33:56.740 --> 00:33:57.810 and then fire it. 00:33:57.810 --> 00:33:59.050 So it's the beginning of a kind of 00:33:59.050 --> 00:34:00.840 integrated control system. 00:34:00.840 --> 00:34:06.550 And anybody here ever hear the term "operational amplifier" 00:34:06.550 --> 00:34:08.580 or use an operational amplifier? 00:34:08.580 --> 00:34:11.530 It's one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. 00:34:11.530 --> 00:34:13.409 It's sort of the basic feedback loop. 00:34:13.409 --> 00:34:16.739 Any of you take, what is it 6002, I think they probably do 00:34:16.739 --> 00:34:18.595 op amps in that course. 00:34:18.595 --> 00:34:23.380 The first op amps are invented to go into this device. 00:34:23.380 --> 00:34:25.969 And the whole idea of a feedback amplifier being used 00:34:25.969 --> 00:34:29.560 to do addition and subtraction and multiplication and 00:34:29.560 --> 00:34:32.620 division and integration and differentiation, all comes out 00:34:32.620 --> 00:34:36.194 of this device, from again, from the telephone company. 00:34:39.480 --> 00:34:41.909 Again, we read about Wiener. 00:34:41.909 --> 00:34:44.400 Weiner is a sort of mathematical adviser to all 00:34:44.400 --> 00:34:45.949 these guys. 00:34:45.949 --> 00:34:51.860 The book that I assigned the intro for you is from 1948, 00:34:51.860 --> 00:34:52.810 Cybernetics. 00:34:52.810 --> 00:34:55.250 But as he talks about in there, really kind of the 00:34:55.250 --> 00:34:58.620 genesis of it was him thinking about anti-aircraft fire 00:34:58.620 --> 00:35:01.136 control during the Second World War. 00:35:01.136 --> 00:35:05.110 And of course, now we have the idea of cyberspace and cyber 00:35:05.110 --> 00:35:08.800 this, and my Sony Cyber-shot, and all this kind of stuff. 00:35:08.800 --> 00:35:13.680 The basic ideas of a lot of this came from people like 00:35:13.680 --> 00:35:16.700 Norbert Wiener, working out not only the basic 00:35:16.700 --> 00:35:18.746 mathematics-- 00:35:18.746 --> 00:35:21.550 in fact, you can see them on the board here. 00:35:21.550 --> 00:35:26.650 If you read the rest of that book of Cybernetics, which is 00:35:26.650 --> 00:35:31.540 a lot of mathematics, a lot of it is the basic equations for 00:35:31.540 --> 00:35:35.000 what today you call signal processing or digital signal 00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:35.460 processing. 00:35:35.460 --> 00:35:37.250 It wasn't digital when he did it. 00:35:37.250 --> 00:35:39.940 But the whole idea of correlation and convolution 00:35:39.940 --> 00:35:43.700 and different kinds of filters and stuff 00:35:43.700 --> 00:35:44.900 is came out of there. 00:35:44.900 --> 00:35:45.880 Yup? 00:35:45.880 --> 00:35:48.330 AUDIENCE: So actually I got curious and went onto 00:35:48.330 --> 00:35:49.800 Wikipedia and looked them up. 00:35:49.800 --> 00:35:52.500 Those equations are actually on Wikipedia under an article 00:35:52.500 --> 00:35:54.080 called the "Weiner filter." 00:35:54.080 --> 00:35:55.100 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:35:55.100 --> 00:35:58.760 The Weiner filter is a sort of classic optimal filter that is 00:35:58.760 --> 00:36:00.650 a predecessor to the common filter, which is something 00:36:00.650 --> 00:36:02.340 that people use all the time today in 00:36:02.340 --> 00:36:03.590 design and control systems. 00:36:09.350 --> 00:36:12.810 There's Building 20, which is the actual radiation lab. 00:36:12.810 --> 00:36:16.000 Let's see if we can orient ourselves to it. 00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:19.090 Well, I'll let you see if you can do it. 00:36:19.090 --> 00:36:20.340 What are you seeing there? 00:36:23.904 --> 00:36:25.370 AUDIENCE: Is that Vassar Street? 00:36:25.370 --> 00:36:25.650 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:36:25.650 --> 00:36:28.920 This is Vassar Street here. 00:36:28.920 --> 00:36:30.330 AUDIENCE: Oh, wow. 00:36:30.330 --> 00:36:32.210 It's really big. 00:36:32.210 --> 00:36:33.650 PROFESSOR: It's big. 00:36:33.650 --> 00:36:35.480 It was built in about four months. 00:36:35.480 --> 00:36:38.780 It lasted about 40 years, probably longer, 45 years. 00:36:41.450 --> 00:36:43.180 It was basically built like an army barracks. 00:36:46.530 --> 00:36:47.840 What's this right here? 00:36:53.090 --> 00:36:53.680 I think that's us. 00:36:53.680 --> 00:36:55.900 AUDIENCE: That's where we are now. 00:36:55.900 --> 00:36:58.110 PROFESSOR: Where we are right now. 00:36:58.110 --> 00:36:59.515 In fact, yeah. 00:36:59.515 --> 00:37:01.270 AUDIENCE: Almost exactly. 00:37:01.270 --> 00:37:02.280 PROFESSOR: What's this? 00:37:02.280 --> 00:37:02.990 AUDIENCE: Swimming pool. 00:37:02.990 --> 00:37:04.580 PROFESSOR: That's the alumni pool, which is right out the 00:37:04.580 --> 00:37:07.290 window, which was already built then. 00:37:07.290 --> 00:37:10.480 Everything that happened is built around that. 00:37:10.480 --> 00:37:11.740 And so here is the-- 00:37:15.890 --> 00:37:17.310 I'm not sure which building that is. 00:37:17.310 --> 00:37:21.070 That looks like one of the original main group buildings. 00:37:21.070 --> 00:37:22.700 So there's the Rad Lab. 00:37:22.700 --> 00:37:24.140 You can see this huge loading dock. 00:37:24.140 --> 00:37:27.020 Lots of stuff going in and going out. 00:37:27.020 --> 00:37:28.410 These different kind of fingers. 00:37:28.410 --> 00:37:30.960 And all these wacky radar antennas up on the roof for 00:37:30.960 --> 00:37:33.170 experimental testing. 00:37:33.170 --> 00:37:39.190 Does nobody know what was it-- 00:37:39.190 --> 00:37:40.960 it's still there today-- the Christian 00:37:40.960 --> 00:37:43.920 Science church downtown? 00:37:43.920 --> 00:37:46.100 If you go like to Boston Symphony Hall, there's a big 00:37:46.100 --> 00:37:48.560 plaza and there's a dome. 00:37:48.560 --> 00:37:51.390 Which before Boston was built up, that was one of the 00:37:51.390 --> 00:37:53.430 prominent features of the Boston skyline. 00:37:53.430 --> 00:37:56.680 That was the first microwave radar target in history, from 00:37:56.680 --> 00:37:59.810 a building at MIT, fired over and reflected off that dome. 00:38:05.010 --> 00:38:14.390 This is just an image of the various labs. 00:38:14.390 --> 00:38:18.950 There's many of these different labs in the Rad Lab. 00:38:18.950 --> 00:38:22.190 And it's considered a kind of prototype of what a modern R&D 00:38:22.190 --> 00:38:24.250 lab could be set up like. 00:38:24.250 --> 00:38:25.960 You can see here, it's divided up. 00:38:25.960 --> 00:38:31.000 There's a receiver lab, an indicator antenna lab, a 00:38:31.000 --> 00:38:32.280 shielded room, a darkroom. 00:38:36.130 --> 00:38:37.450 If you know the history of physics, 00:38:37.450 --> 00:38:38.840 you'll know a lot of-- 00:38:38.840 --> 00:38:40.890 Lee Dubridge was the head of it. 00:38:40.890 --> 00:38:44.410 I.I. Rabi is a famous Columbia physicist. 00:38:44.410 --> 00:38:47.280 Kenneth Bainbridge I think was a Nobel Prize winner. 00:38:47.280 --> 00:38:50.440 I'm not sure about that. 00:38:50.440 --> 00:38:52.030 Pollard later won the Nobel Prize. 00:38:55.740 --> 00:38:58.990 So lots of people, who later became very, very important, 00:38:58.990 --> 00:39:02.030 including people like Paul Samuelson, the Noble Prize 00:39:02.030 --> 00:39:09.860 winning economist here at MIT, that you might not expect. 00:39:09.860 --> 00:39:11.720 So the Rad Lab gets started around this 00:39:11.720 --> 00:39:13.580 device, the cavity magnetron. 00:39:13.580 --> 00:39:15.170 Anybody seen something like this before? 00:39:18.360 --> 00:39:20.556 There's two places you might have seen it. 00:39:20.556 --> 00:39:22.420 AUDIENCE: It's on the poster in Lab 7. 00:39:22.420 --> 00:39:22.930 PROFESSOR: So three. 00:39:22.930 --> 00:39:24.540 It is on the poster in Lab 7. 00:39:24.540 --> 00:39:25.370 Very good. 00:39:25.370 --> 00:39:27.550 I forgot about that one. 00:39:27.550 --> 00:39:28.160 Where else? 00:39:28.160 --> 00:39:28.680 AUDIENCE: The museum. 00:39:28.680 --> 00:39:31.800 PROFESSOR: So there's one in the museum. 00:39:31.800 --> 00:39:34.790 One other place you might have seen it, knowing what MIT 00:39:34.790 --> 00:39:37.560 students might be like. 00:39:37.560 --> 00:39:39.520 If you ever take apart a microwave oven, you'll see one 00:39:39.520 --> 00:39:42.200 of these things inside there. 00:39:42.200 --> 00:39:43.310 In fact, that's kind of the only place 00:39:43.310 --> 00:39:44.650 you'll still find them. 00:39:44.650 --> 00:39:48.910 So this device is only about this big. 00:39:48.910 --> 00:39:50.330 If you go to the museum, you'll see it. 00:39:50.330 --> 00:39:52.070 It's one of the 150 objects. 00:39:52.070 --> 00:39:57.480 And radar had been invented in the early '30s really. 00:39:57.480 --> 00:39:59.350 But it was pretty long-wave radar. 00:39:59.350 --> 00:40:01.750 I may have a picture of it. 00:40:01.750 --> 00:40:03.150 Yeah. 00:40:03.150 --> 00:40:06.590 So this is pre-World War II radar. 00:40:06.590 --> 00:40:08.500 This is built by Western Electric, which is 00:40:08.500 --> 00:40:09.930 part of Bell Labs. 00:40:09.930 --> 00:40:12.450 And there's a couple of key things to notice about it. 00:40:12.450 --> 00:40:13.790 What do you notice about it? 00:40:17.070 --> 00:40:18.250 It's really big. 00:40:18.250 --> 00:40:19.500 Why is it big? 00:40:22.758 --> 00:40:24.160 AUDIENCE: With long waves. 00:40:24.160 --> 00:40:27.360 AUDIENCE: It's using relatively long wavelengths, 00:40:27.360 --> 00:40:30.090 in the sort of hundreds of megahertz wavelengths. 00:40:30.090 --> 00:40:31.940 You can see the antenna and all the wires 00:40:31.940 --> 00:40:33.090 for it on the left. 00:40:33.090 --> 00:40:34.710 And this is pretty much state of the art when 00:40:34.710 --> 00:40:36.220 the Rad Lab is founded. 00:40:36.220 --> 00:40:38.530 And more or less, this is an American radar. 00:40:38.530 --> 00:40:40.840 But the British have a version of this that they used during 00:40:40.840 --> 00:40:43.740 the Battle of Britain, they call it Chain Home, that is 00:40:43.740 --> 00:40:45.880 able to detect attacking aircraft. 00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:48.694 And it does actually work in fact. 00:40:48.694 --> 00:40:52.680 In fact, the Pear Harbor attack was detected by one of 00:40:52.680 --> 00:40:56.380 these right radars, as SCR-268 268, before it happened, a 00:40:56.380 --> 00:40:57.670 couple hours before it happened. 00:40:57.670 --> 00:41:00.480 But nobody really had any faith in the technology. 00:41:00.480 --> 00:41:01.070 And it was new. 00:41:01.070 --> 00:41:02.350 And people didn't really understand it. 00:41:02.350 --> 00:41:04.220 And it was just a bunch of blips on the screen. 00:41:04.220 --> 00:41:09.120 And the warning that the radar station issued, was ignored. 00:41:09.120 --> 00:41:11.970 Tells you something about any technology needs to develop 00:41:11.970 --> 00:41:15.260 its own credibility and to have people believe in it. 00:41:15.260 --> 00:41:19.100 After that, they tended to believe in it, once it-- 00:41:19.100 --> 00:41:20.920 But it's a very big radar. 00:41:20.920 --> 00:41:22.850 It's pretty unwieldy. 00:41:22.850 --> 00:41:24.710 You can see, it probably didn't work very well in the 00:41:24.710 --> 00:41:28.720 rain, because the guys are all standing there outside, 00:41:28.720 --> 00:41:31.740 exposed, and the electronics are fairly exposed. 00:41:31.740 --> 00:41:34.800 He's just looking into an oscilloscope right there. 00:41:34.800 --> 00:41:36.760 That's a pre-World War II oscilloscope. 00:41:36.760 --> 00:41:38.685 It's the size of a Volkswagen practically. 00:41:38.685 --> 00:41:43.610 And you see he's looking in through just a darkened hood. 00:41:43.610 --> 00:41:45.840 And the British, the problem was that for higher 00:41:45.840 --> 00:41:48.750 frequencies, it was that very hard to generate enough power, 00:41:48.750 --> 00:41:51.310 at what they call microwave frequencies, which is sort of 00:41:51.310 --> 00:41:54.970 centimeters and below, in the kind of high hundreds of 00:41:54.970 --> 00:41:57.870 megahertz up to several gigahertz range. 00:41:57.870 --> 00:41:59.380 And the British come up with this thing 00:41:59.380 --> 00:42:01.440 called a cavity magnetron. 00:42:06.390 --> 00:42:09.420 There it is. 00:42:09.420 --> 00:42:12.310 And again, it's not a big device at all. 00:42:12.310 --> 00:42:17.080 But I'll show you the shape of it in a little bit. 00:42:17.080 --> 00:42:20.200 It's got a central hole and there's little resonators all 00:42:20.200 --> 00:42:21.720 around it, a very characteristic shape of what's 00:42:21.720 --> 00:42:22.610 inside there. 00:42:22.610 --> 00:42:24.780 You put that in a magnetic field and pump a very high 00:42:24.780 --> 00:42:27.960 voltage into it and it generates really large, very 00:42:27.960 --> 00:42:29.990 high-power microwaves. 00:42:29.990 --> 00:42:33.040 And this has all kinds of advantages. 00:42:33.040 --> 00:42:35.760 But the key one is that it's just small and the antennas 00:42:35.760 --> 00:42:38.250 are small and it allows you to do all kinds of different 00:42:38.250 --> 00:42:39.110 things with it. 00:42:39.110 --> 00:42:42.720 But it implies a whole new kind of electronics. 00:42:42.720 --> 00:42:46.070 For example, you may be familiar with this, but 00:42:46.070 --> 00:42:48.370 microwaves at high powers don't really like to go 00:42:48.370 --> 00:42:49.820 through wires. 00:42:49.820 --> 00:42:51.810 They need to go through pipes. 00:42:51.810 --> 00:42:52.670 What are those pipes called? 00:42:52.670 --> 00:42:54.090 Anybody know? 00:42:54.090 --> 00:42:54.560 AUDIENCE: Wave guides. 00:42:54.560 --> 00:42:55.730 PROFESSOR: They're called wave guides, right. 00:42:55.730 --> 00:42:57.150 So you have to invent a whole new kind 00:42:57.150 --> 00:42:58.440 of wiring or plumbing. 00:42:58.440 --> 00:43:01.750 You literally plumb this kind of stuff through. 00:43:01.750 --> 00:43:04.220 And all that stuff didn't exist. 00:43:04.220 --> 00:43:05.960 But what the British did was they built this. 00:43:05.960 --> 00:43:08.030 They figured out that it worked. 00:43:08.030 --> 00:43:11.530 And in September of 1940, they were being bombed to 00:43:11.530 --> 00:43:14.830 smithereens by the Nazis on a regular basis. 00:43:14.830 --> 00:43:16.780 They were barely surviving the war effort. 00:43:16.780 --> 00:43:18.920 And they didn't have a big electronics industry. 00:43:18.920 --> 00:43:22.020 So it wasn't easy for them to contemplate how to manufacture 00:43:22.020 --> 00:43:23.700 this thing in large numbers. 00:43:23.700 --> 00:43:28.380 So one scientist, his name was Sir Henry Tizard, he came over 00:43:28.380 --> 00:43:32.140 to the US on an ocean liner, exposed to Nazi submarines. 00:43:32.140 --> 00:43:33.630 And he brought one of these. 00:43:33.630 --> 00:43:37.630 Actually, I think he brought three of them in a trunk that 00:43:37.630 --> 00:43:39.600 he kept under his bed on the ocean liner. 00:43:39.600 --> 00:43:42.100 It was probably the most secret military technology of 00:43:42.100 --> 00:43:44.000 the war at the time. 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:49.390 And he just brought it on this civilian liner, sort of 00:43:49.390 --> 00:43:51.340 wrapped up in his socks and underwear. 00:43:51.340 --> 00:43:52.280 That's exaggeration. 00:43:52.280 --> 00:43:54.510 I think he had a special box for it. 00:43:54.510 --> 00:43:55.310 And he brought them. 00:43:55.310 --> 00:43:57.990 And he brought them to the government and said, we have 00:43:57.990 --> 00:43:58.870 this thing. 00:43:58.870 --> 00:44:01.470 And we want you to have it. 00:44:01.470 --> 00:44:03.080 And we want the Americans to figure it out. 00:44:03.080 --> 00:44:06.480 They actually intended for Bell Labs to deal with it. 00:44:06.480 --> 00:44:09.160 And they brought it to the NDRC and Bush sort of said, 00:44:09.160 --> 00:44:10.470 well, we'll bring this up to MIT. 00:44:10.470 --> 00:44:12.130 And they founded a lab about it. 00:44:12.130 --> 00:44:15.230 That's what happens in October of 1940. 00:44:15.230 --> 00:44:17.620 And that's when the Radiation Lab is founded. 00:44:17.620 --> 00:44:19.760 And it's interesting, because Rabi is said to 00:44:19.760 --> 00:44:20.970 have taken it out. 00:44:20.970 --> 00:44:23.570 And people said to him, he said well, how does this thing 00:44:23.570 --> 00:44:25.050 actually work? 00:44:25.050 --> 00:44:25.800 And they said well, that's easy. 00:44:25.800 --> 00:44:27.620 It works just like a whistle. 00:44:27.620 --> 00:44:31.040 It's like an electronic whistle, because you put power 00:44:31.040 --> 00:44:33.350 into it and it generates a resonance. 00:44:33.350 --> 00:44:36.020 And then Rabi looks up at it and he says, OK, well tell me 00:44:36.020 --> 00:44:37.600 how a whistle works? 00:44:37.600 --> 00:44:39.625 And nobody at the time could really explain to him how a 00:44:39.625 --> 00:44:41.120 whistle worked. 00:44:41.120 --> 00:44:43.780 But that's not a bad way to think about what the cavity 00:44:43.780 --> 00:44:46.530 magnetron does. 00:44:46.530 --> 00:44:48.860 AUDIENCE: So are you implying that the establishment of the 00:44:48.860 --> 00:44:52.970 Rad Lab here really rested on the proposition that it's not 00:44:52.970 --> 00:44:54.980 what you know, but you know? 00:44:54.980 --> 00:44:56.370 PROFESSOR: To some degree. 00:44:56.370 --> 00:44:59.140 And actually it should be said that of the three, I can't 00:44:59.140 --> 00:45:01.060 remember the exact number that came over, one of them 00:45:01.060 --> 00:45:03.450 went to Bell Labs. 00:45:03.450 --> 00:45:06.130 And they also did a lot of work in microwave radar during 00:45:06.130 --> 00:45:08.715 the war, but there was work enough to do for everybody. 00:45:13.410 --> 00:45:14.720 So this is an image-- 00:45:14.720 --> 00:45:17.170 I actually have a blown-up picture of this on the wall in 00:45:17.170 --> 00:45:20.110 my office, because one of the great things about the Rad Lab 00:45:20.110 --> 00:45:24.590 is that photography was kind of newly cheap at the time. 00:45:24.590 --> 00:45:27.890 And they documented a lot of the research with thousands 00:45:27.890 --> 00:45:29.300 and thousands of photographs. 00:45:29.300 --> 00:45:32.510 And years ago, I was working through some of those 00:45:32.510 --> 00:45:36.020 photographs at the MIT Museum and I said to Debbie Douglas, 00:45:36.020 --> 00:45:38.576 there's great pictures of daily life at MIT during World 00:45:38.576 --> 00:45:42.070 War II in the Rad Lab things, that are not the sort of PR 00:45:42.070 --> 00:45:44.250 photos you usually see about the Rad Lab. 00:45:44.250 --> 00:45:46.090 And then she took a bunch of those photos, and they're all 00:45:46.090 --> 00:45:49.430 beautiful four by five negatives, and blew them up 00:45:49.430 --> 00:45:52.610 and did a little art show of them. 00:45:52.610 --> 00:45:54.510 And this is one which I really like. 00:45:54.510 --> 00:45:56.480 And I'll turn the lights off, if I can. 00:45:56.480 --> 00:45:58.600 Just generally you can see them better. 00:46:12.460 --> 00:46:14.000 That do anything? 00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:14.940 Nope. 00:46:14.940 --> 00:46:16.190 OK. 00:46:19.380 --> 00:46:24.490 Just to look at them a little bit about life at MIT during 00:46:24.490 --> 00:46:26.630 the war, which Debbie's chapter does a nice job of 00:46:26.630 --> 00:46:27.810 describing. 00:46:27.810 --> 00:46:29.590 What can you observe from this image? 00:46:33.964 --> 00:46:34.936 Yep? 00:46:34.936 --> 00:46:37.970 AUDIENCE: The really, really high waist lines. 00:46:37.970 --> 00:46:39.780 PROFESSOR: OK, high waist lines. 00:46:39.780 --> 00:46:41.040 AUDIENCE: God, who wears there pants up that high? 00:46:44.800 --> 00:46:45.750 AUDIENCE: Both women. 00:46:45.750 --> 00:46:47.390 PROFESSOR: There are women there. 00:46:47.390 --> 00:46:50.500 A lot of women worked at the Rad Lab, very, very mixed 00:46:50.500 --> 00:46:52.650 gender environment. 00:46:52.650 --> 00:46:54.620 AUDIENCE: That would be sort of the scientific version of 00:46:54.620 --> 00:46:57.190 Rosie the Riveter in that sense. 00:46:57.190 --> 00:46:59.690 Lots of women go into the workforce doing this-- 00:46:59.690 --> 00:47:02.438 AUDIENCE: They were going to work as scientists or as other 00:47:02.438 --> 00:47:02.900 technicians. 00:47:02.900 --> 00:47:04.540 PROFESSOR: Mostly as technicians and 00:47:04.540 --> 00:47:06.190 administrators. 00:47:06.190 --> 00:47:08.810 Actually, I'm not even aware of one that worked as a senior 00:47:08.810 --> 00:47:10.405 scientist or even an engineer. 00:47:13.260 --> 00:47:14.510 What else? 00:47:17.576 --> 00:47:19.052 AUDIENCE: The facilities are not like-- 00:47:22.004 --> 00:47:23.901 I can see piping. 00:47:23.901 --> 00:47:24.370 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 00:47:24.370 --> 00:47:26.020 So that's pretty much the inside of Building 20. 00:47:26.020 --> 00:47:27.490 That's what it looked like. 00:47:27.490 --> 00:47:29.920 It was literally built in a few weeks. 00:47:29.920 --> 00:47:31.170 What else? 00:47:35.060 --> 00:47:38.220 This one just captures this, I think the sort of sense of the 00:47:38.220 --> 00:47:40.270 pace that the place must have had. 00:47:40.270 --> 00:47:41.470 You have a sense, everybody's busy. 00:47:41.470 --> 00:47:43.220 They're walking somewhere quickly. 00:47:43.220 --> 00:47:44.290 They're moving things around. 00:47:44.290 --> 00:47:46.070 There's equipment coming across the hall. 00:47:46.070 --> 00:47:47.680 That is a microwave radar antenna. 00:47:47.680 --> 00:47:50.110 That's a pretty radical departure from the previous 00:47:50.110 --> 00:47:52.570 slide I showed you of what a radar antenna looked like. 00:47:52.570 --> 00:47:56.720 That you can imagine putting on board an airplane. 00:47:56.720 --> 00:47:59.830 And there's also the two cigarettes there. 00:47:59.830 --> 00:48:01.440 These guys all sort of identically dressed. 00:48:01.440 --> 00:48:04.150 You get the sense it's a place where just things are moving 00:48:04.150 --> 00:48:06.370 fast, sort of like MIT today. 00:48:06.370 --> 00:48:09.350 It wouldn't be out of place that scene, in the Infinite 00:48:09.350 --> 00:48:11.620 Corridor between classes today. 00:48:15.780 --> 00:48:20.340 Here is another image, a much more formal one obviously, of 00:48:20.340 --> 00:48:23.630 the steering committee of the Rad Lab. 00:48:23.630 --> 00:48:27.590 You see people in here, like I mentioned Ivan Getting, who is 00:48:27.590 --> 00:48:34.700 here, who later went on, as I mentioned, to sort of spun the 00:48:34.700 --> 00:48:36.780 GPS project. 00:48:36.780 --> 00:48:41.510 Anybody know who that is right there? 00:48:41.510 --> 00:48:44.070 That's Jerry Weisner, who later became President 00:48:44.070 --> 00:48:47.540 Kennedy's science adviser and president of MIT. 00:48:47.540 --> 00:48:50.930 I think this is Lee Dubridge, who's the head of it. 00:48:50.930 --> 00:48:52.665 But again, a pretty informal environment. 00:48:56.670 --> 00:49:00.110 Part of the weekly meeting, another one. 00:49:00.110 --> 00:49:03.970 This may be the first time here, and Debbie had mentioned 00:49:03.970 --> 00:49:06.080 in her article and a bunch you mentioned in your response 00:49:06.080 --> 00:49:09.260 papers, the secrecy that was going on. 00:49:09.260 --> 00:49:13.240 Now, these days if any of have ever worked in even a mild 00:49:13.240 --> 00:49:15.320 corporate lab, you probably have to wear a 00:49:15.320 --> 00:49:17.720 badge all the time. 00:49:17.720 --> 00:49:19.320 This was probably the first time people had to 00:49:19.320 --> 00:49:20.960 wear badges at MIT. 00:49:20.960 --> 00:49:22.270 And this is what a badge looked like. 00:49:22.270 --> 00:49:23.770 It was a little button. 00:49:23.770 --> 00:49:29.120 It had your picture on it, your employee number, and 00:49:29.120 --> 00:49:31.430 allowed you to get into certain places and not into 00:49:31.430 --> 00:49:34.050 other places. 00:49:34.050 --> 00:49:36.180 Again, it was called the Radiation 00:49:36.180 --> 00:49:38.030 Laboratory for a reason. 00:49:38.030 --> 00:49:40.266 What was the reason? 00:49:40.266 --> 00:49:42.680 AUDIENCE: Disguise. 00:49:42.680 --> 00:49:44.850 PROFESSOR: To fool people into thinking it might be a nuclear 00:49:44.850 --> 00:49:47.120 physics laboratory. 00:49:47.120 --> 00:49:48.650 It was about radiation. 00:49:48.650 --> 00:49:52.510 But it was not called the radar-- well, the word "radar" 00:49:52.510 --> 00:49:55.620 wasn't even well recognized anyway at that point. 00:49:55.620 --> 00:49:57.535 But it tried to disguise it. 00:50:00.250 --> 00:50:02.080 Again, as we mentioned, lots of women 00:50:02.080 --> 00:50:03.330 working in these labs. 00:50:08.290 --> 00:50:10.770 Probably a pretty different work environment than what 00:50:10.770 --> 00:50:11.560 people were used to. 00:50:11.560 --> 00:50:16.130 Even though we've talked about women at MIT before, not in 00:50:16.130 --> 00:50:18.240 these kind of numbers and this much involved in 00:50:18.240 --> 00:50:19.490 the technical work. 00:50:22.650 --> 00:50:25.090 This is just a page out of the yearbook that the Rad Lab 00:50:25.090 --> 00:50:26.720 produced, showing all the different kinds 00:50:26.720 --> 00:50:28.120 of things they did. 00:50:28.120 --> 00:50:30.280 It didn't come out that well in the slide here. 00:50:33.450 --> 00:50:36.640 Another image, I love their images of this sort of 00:50:36.640 --> 00:50:38.645 electronic experimentation stuff. 00:50:42.080 --> 00:50:43.940 It has s sort of thrown together sense of the 00:50:43.940 --> 00:50:47.100 director's chair, an oscilloscope. 00:50:47.100 --> 00:50:49.110 What I find interesting is that a lot of the connectors 00:50:49.110 --> 00:50:51.220 on all these machines are still connectors you might use 00:50:51.220 --> 00:50:54.010 today, like a BMC connector. 00:50:54.010 --> 00:50:56.250 You still see those everywhere. 00:50:56.250 --> 00:50:58.430 And this is what it took to get this stuff up and running. 00:51:04.880 --> 00:51:10.160 More pictures of the labs, in this case without people. 00:51:10.160 --> 00:51:17.890 So this is probably the radar that was shown before in that 00:51:17.890 --> 00:51:22.100 hallway photo and is one of the more famous products of 00:51:22.100 --> 00:51:22.490 the Rad Lab. 00:51:22.490 --> 00:51:24.010 It was called H2X. 00:51:24.010 --> 00:51:26.810 And what H2X did was it allowed, if 00:51:26.810 --> 00:51:28.720 you were in a bomber-- 00:51:28.720 --> 00:51:32.160 the US and the British were bombing Germany on a regular 00:51:32.160 --> 00:51:34.750 basis during most of the war-- 00:51:34.750 --> 00:51:37.940 but they had this famous Norden bombsight, which would 00:51:37.940 --> 00:51:39.570 allow you to sight bombs. 00:51:39.570 --> 00:51:41.060 What was the problem with the Norden 00:51:41.060 --> 00:51:42.310 bombsight, anybody know? 00:51:46.514 --> 00:51:50.130 If it was cloudy, you couldn't use it. 00:51:50.130 --> 00:51:52.790 And if anybody's ever been to Germany or northern Europe, 00:51:52.790 --> 00:51:57.330 during eight months of the year it's pretty cloudy. 00:51:57.330 --> 00:51:59.640 And what this is, is a microwave radar. 00:51:59.640 --> 00:52:06.320 Again, it's not just an advantage that the antenna is 00:52:06.320 --> 00:52:08.230 small, but the wavelengths are small enough. 00:52:08.230 --> 00:52:10.190 You can see things that are very small, so you can make 00:52:10.190 --> 00:52:11.310 out a lot of detail. 00:52:11.310 --> 00:52:14.240 But you could actually fly over in cloud cover and map 00:52:14.240 --> 00:52:16.890 out a river and a city and all this stuff. 00:52:16.890 --> 00:52:23.150 And it allowed them to bomb with radar, either at night or 00:52:23.150 --> 00:52:24.500 in bad weather. 00:52:24.500 --> 00:52:26.130 It had a huge impact. 00:52:26.130 --> 00:52:27.940 The other thing about H2X, it was very important. 00:52:27.940 --> 00:52:29.940 It's worth keeping in mind about radar, because you see 00:52:29.940 --> 00:52:31.590 this with other weapons projects. 00:52:31.590 --> 00:52:34.590 Almost any weapons project that got made during the war, 00:52:34.590 --> 00:52:37.990 that actually was designed to blow something up, it was 00:52:37.990 --> 00:52:42.600 very, very hard for it to have impact in the war because for 00:52:42.600 --> 00:52:46.950 one thing, to go from a prototype in October of 1940 00:52:46.950 --> 00:52:50.210 through development and testing and production pretty 00:52:50.210 --> 00:52:51.790 much took the whole war. 00:52:51.790 --> 00:52:53.660 So there was basically one full 00:52:53.660 --> 00:52:55.080 product development cycle. 00:52:55.080 --> 00:52:57.590 If you look at like the great airplanes of the Second World 00:52:57.590 --> 00:53:01.270 War, the B29, the B17, these were all finished by the time 00:53:01.270 --> 00:53:04.170 the war started and it still took them years to get into 00:53:04.170 --> 00:53:06.110 production. 00:53:06.110 --> 00:53:09.860 Whereas, if you had, a radar, you could basically make one 00:53:09.860 --> 00:53:14.410 of them, send it out in the field in one of a bombing raid 00:53:14.410 --> 00:53:16.770 of 1,000 bombers and make a difference. 00:53:16.770 --> 00:53:20.410 So radar had this leveraging effect, where you could use 00:53:20.410 --> 00:53:21.980 very, very small numbers of them and 00:53:21.980 --> 00:53:23.750 still have a big impact. 00:53:23.750 --> 00:53:27.750 Which any kind of gun, if you didn't make a gun in numbers 00:53:27.750 --> 00:53:29.730 of the tens of thousands, it was not going to have any 00:53:29.730 --> 00:53:30.980 impact on the war. 00:53:34.888 --> 00:53:35.800 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:53:35.800 --> 00:53:37.734 PROFESSOR: Yep. 00:53:37.734 --> 00:53:41.220 AUDIENCE: How long between the development of that product 00:53:41.220 --> 00:53:44.720 would it be then on plane? 00:53:44.720 --> 00:53:46.210 PROFESSOR: In the case of the radiation lab, it would be 00:53:46.210 --> 00:53:46.955 weeks or months. 00:53:46.955 --> 00:53:47.670 AUDIENCE: Weeks or months. 00:53:47.670 --> 00:53:51.200 PROFESSOR: And actually, no small number of MIT engineers 00:53:51.200 --> 00:53:53.170 went in the field, made them work, 00:53:53.170 --> 00:53:55.100 went on bombing missions. 00:53:55.100 --> 00:53:58.700 A few of them were killed, literally taking these things 00:53:58.700 --> 00:54:00.570 in the field. 00:54:00.570 --> 00:54:03.520 Think about it any lab prototype you've ever made, it 00:54:03.520 --> 00:54:06.770 may be a little rickety in terms of its robustness for 00:54:06.770 --> 00:54:07.580 being in the field. 00:54:07.580 --> 00:54:10.340 It takes a lot of engineering to go from there to a package 00:54:10.340 --> 00:54:12.480 that some soldier is going to take out of a box. 00:54:12.480 --> 00:54:13.950 They didn't always wait for that time. 00:54:13.950 --> 00:54:16.610 And they did send people directly from the Rad Lab into 00:54:16.610 --> 00:54:19.490 the field, to train the troops and help them get up to speed. 00:54:19.490 --> 00:54:23.260 In fact, Karl Compton, the president of MIT, was not-- 00:54:23.260 --> 00:54:26.780 in a sense, Bush, before then, he was junior to Compton. 00:54:26.780 --> 00:54:30.020 He goes in and becomes head of the NDRC and is senior to him. 00:54:30.020 --> 00:54:32.400 Compton became head of what was called the Office of Field 00:54:32.400 --> 00:54:34.250 Service, where they did exactly that. 00:54:34.250 --> 00:54:36.490 They took all these things out and they helped people 00:54:36.490 --> 00:54:39.100 understand how to use them. 00:54:39.100 --> 00:54:42.780 There's a B17 at Hanscom Field, right out in the 00:54:42.780 --> 00:54:48.920 suburbs here, where the Rad Lab had a station. 00:54:48.920 --> 00:54:52.560 And they would do a lot of testing and a lot of different 00:54:52.560 --> 00:54:54.910 experimentation and flight tests and stuff, 00:54:54.910 --> 00:54:57.380 also at Logan Airport. 00:54:57.380 --> 00:55:05.480 Here's a H2X installation inside a B17, to allow the 00:55:05.480 --> 00:55:07.320 radar operator to look through the sight. 00:55:07.320 --> 00:55:09.130 And again, think about what a different kind 00:55:09.130 --> 00:55:10.600 of radar this is. 00:55:10.600 --> 00:55:13.970 The one I showed you from before, the prewar radar, 00:55:13.970 --> 00:55:16.150 they're basically soldiers on the battlefield, these guys. 00:55:16.150 --> 00:55:19.170 They're wearing helmets and they're very exposed. 00:55:19.170 --> 00:55:22.180 Here, not only are you in a high-altitude bomber, but the 00:55:22.180 --> 00:55:23.010 guy has a desk. 00:55:23.010 --> 00:55:26.940 It's much more like bringing a laboratory out into the war 00:55:26.940 --> 00:55:27.970 time field. 00:55:27.970 --> 00:55:31.340 And there's a lot of interesting stuff about 00:55:31.340 --> 00:55:34.410 thinking about radar as a way to isolate yourself from the 00:55:34.410 --> 00:55:36.645 battlefield and manipulate things on screens. 00:55:39.170 --> 00:55:41.480 One of the technicians who worked on these radars was a 00:55:41.480 --> 00:55:43.080 guy named-- 00:55:43.080 --> 00:55:45.430 well, what's the name-- 00:55:45.430 --> 00:55:47.290 Douglas Engelbart. 00:55:47.290 --> 00:55:48.540 Anybody know what he did? 00:55:51.170 --> 00:55:54.180 He invented the mouse. 00:55:54.180 --> 00:55:57.240 And he'll tell you, during the war I worked on radar. 00:55:57.240 --> 00:55:59.930 And I started to deal with like moving things around as 00:55:59.930 --> 00:56:02.870 blips on screens using things to turn things around. 00:56:02.870 --> 00:56:04.940 And after the war, when I started to work at Stanford 00:56:04.940 --> 00:56:09.680 and user interface stuff, he was not an MIT guy, some of 00:56:09.680 --> 00:56:12.540 the ideas for interactive computing really came out of 00:56:12.540 --> 00:56:15.830 this idea of looking at a screen. 00:56:18.630 --> 00:56:22.440 This is a famous image, one of the Rad Lab's 00:56:22.440 --> 00:56:24.400 sort of iconic images. 00:56:24.400 --> 00:56:25.906 Anybody know what it is? 00:56:25.906 --> 00:56:26.860 AUDIENCE: It's Cape Cod. 00:56:26.860 --> 00:56:27.930 PROFESSOR: It's Cape Cod, right. 00:56:27.930 --> 00:56:30.430 So this here is just a map showing you where 00:56:30.430 --> 00:56:31.650 the airplane was. 00:56:31.650 --> 00:56:32.760 And there's a radar on there. 00:56:32.760 --> 00:56:34.670 The antenna spins around. 00:56:34.670 --> 00:56:39.870 And this is one of the first H2X images, plotting out the 00:56:39.870 --> 00:56:42.870 contours of the land there. 00:56:42.870 --> 00:56:46.570 And so you'll see this appear in another second in something 00:56:46.570 --> 00:56:48.260 I'll show you. 00:56:48.260 --> 00:56:51.180 But this gives you the sense of, very, very different from 00:56:51.180 --> 00:56:52.150 blips on a screen. 00:56:52.150 --> 00:56:54.860 You're really able to sort of map where you. 00:56:54.860 --> 00:56:57.740 A whole other level of detail and in the military setting, 00:56:57.740 --> 00:57:00.630 that was very, very important. 00:57:00.630 --> 00:57:03.090 Here's even a higher resolution one. 00:57:03.090 --> 00:57:06.360 This is an image from an airplane, looking at another 00:57:06.360 --> 00:57:08.380 airplane nearby. 00:57:08.380 --> 00:57:11.265 And just to get a sense for that resolution, too. 00:57:11.265 --> 00:57:13.840 You know, crude by today's standards in some sense of 00:57:13.840 --> 00:57:20.510 digital radars and stuff, but pretty fancy for that day. 00:57:20.510 --> 00:57:26.570 And anybody know what this is, dead giveaway? 00:57:26.570 --> 00:57:28.780 This is the northern coast of France on D-Day. 00:57:28.780 --> 00:57:33.770 And here is the radar image of the fleet that's going to be 00:57:33.770 --> 00:57:36.140 the invasion force, taken from an airplane. 00:57:36.140 --> 00:57:43.030 And you can see 6 June, 7:00 o'clock in the morning, taken 00:57:43.030 --> 00:57:44.160 from a plane that was above. 00:57:44.160 --> 00:57:46.530 This is Western England. 00:57:50.100 --> 00:57:52.760 Another interesting radar is this one. 00:57:52.760 --> 00:57:55.540 It's a SCR-584. 00:57:55.540 --> 00:57:57.460 It was actually the first tracking radar. 00:57:57.460 --> 00:58:00.310 And so in the history of control theory and feedback 00:58:00.310 --> 00:58:02.200 control, it was the first radar that could actually move 00:58:02.200 --> 00:58:05.020 its antenna based on where it's target 00:58:05.020 --> 00:58:07.500 was and follow something. 00:58:07.500 --> 00:58:13.840 And they actually used these to track the buzz bombs that 00:58:13.840 --> 00:58:17.050 came across to England later in the war 00:58:17.050 --> 00:58:18.580 and shoot them down. 00:58:18.580 --> 00:58:23.710 It became also sort of an iconic radar, because this 00:58:23.710 --> 00:58:24.940 tracking head, it's interesting, 00:58:24.940 --> 00:58:26.485 it was made by Chrysler. 00:58:26.485 --> 00:58:28.400 And a lot of the gearing in it was taken 00:58:28.400 --> 00:58:30.650 out of Chrysler trucks. 00:58:30.650 --> 00:58:31.680 And it has these servos on it. 00:58:31.680 --> 00:58:35.120 It was a very, very good, very high precision tracking head. 00:58:35.120 --> 00:58:37.970 You see it in post-war photographs for tracking 00:58:37.970 --> 00:58:40.980 rockets and doing sort of early NASA work. 00:58:40.980 --> 00:58:44.330 And you'll still see these radar mounts. 00:58:44.330 --> 00:58:46.690 If you ever watch like storm trackers or anything, and 00:58:46.690 --> 00:58:49.510 their people who track tornadoes and stuff, they 00:58:49.510 --> 00:58:53.250 actually use army surplus radar mounts like this. 00:58:53.250 --> 00:58:56.930 But this radar also, sort of serves the same purpose as the 00:58:56.930 --> 00:58:59.040 268 that I showed you before. 00:58:59.040 --> 00:59:02.530 but again, they bring the operators inside the trailer, 00:59:02.530 --> 00:59:04.500 inside this sort of closed laboratory. 00:59:04.500 --> 00:59:07.760 And it's very much thinking of the battlefield and the 00:59:07.760 --> 00:59:10.680 electronic battlefield of bringing all these blips into 00:59:10.680 --> 00:59:12.620 a laboratory setting. 00:59:12.620 --> 00:59:16.250 And again, but the ultimate culmination of that are these 00:59:16.250 --> 00:59:18.280 big command and control centers you see during the 00:59:18.280 --> 00:59:21.570 Cold War, you see during the space program, but it's just 00:59:21.570 --> 00:59:24.040 the beginning of that. 00:59:24.040 --> 00:59:27.420 That's the inside of a CR-584, where they can plot 00:59:27.420 --> 00:59:29.370 things on the map. 00:59:29.370 --> 00:59:31.010 Also, this was one of the early air 00:59:31.010 --> 00:59:32.950 traffic control radars. 00:59:32.950 --> 00:59:35.600 It was precise enough that they could tell the pilots 00:59:35.600 --> 00:59:39.350 where they were and guide them by radio, say come up, come 00:59:39.350 --> 00:59:43.030 down, come up and down, and land them in very, very rough 00:59:43.030 --> 00:59:44.280 weather conditions. 00:59:47.600 --> 00:59:49.470 So I think this is the last image. 00:59:49.470 --> 00:59:54.210 This is actually an important image. 00:59:54.210 --> 00:59:57.370 At the end of the war, anybody know what happened to the 00:59:57.370 --> 00:59:58.620 Radiation Lab? 01:00:02.600 --> 01:00:03.470 Is it here today? 01:00:03.470 --> 01:00:05.270 Any of you students in the Rad Lab? 01:00:05.270 --> 01:00:07.331 Nope. 01:00:07.331 --> 01:00:10.140 AUDIENCE: I think part of it became the RLE. 01:00:10.140 --> 01:00:12.730 PROFESSOR: Part of it did become the RLE. 01:00:12.730 --> 01:00:14.810 And the rest of it? 01:00:14.810 --> 01:00:16.830 It just closed down one day. 01:00:16.830 --> 01:00:24.220 And went from 1945 to 1946, it shut down by a factor of 95%, 01:00:24.220 --> 01:00:28.400 and then all together in 1947. 01:00:28.400 --> 01:00:29.720 Which is a very interesting thing. 01:00:29.720 --> 01:00:31.850 It would be very hard to do in today's world. 01:00:31.850 --> 01:00:35.750 Remember from the Hunter Dupree article about Bush, one 01:00:35.750 --> 01:00:38.380 of the reasons he was able to grow this thing so quickly and 01:00:38.380 --> 01:00:41.160 so rapidly was that he always promised it would only last 01:00:41.160 --> 01:00:42.580 until the war was over. 01:00:42.580 --> 01:00:44.630 And then it ended and he kept true to his word. 01:00:44.630 --> 01:00:46.630 And the OSRD closed down. 01:00:46.630 --> 01:00:49.590 The NDRC closed down. 01:00:49.590 --> 01:00:53.820 And the Rad Lab just closed down. 01:00:53.820 --> 01:00:58.600 Which by the way, was not a bad way to influence the 01:00:58.600 --> 01:01:00.090 American electronics industry. 01:01:00.090 --> 01:01:02.855 Why? 01:01:02.855 --> 01:01:04.707 AUDIENCE: Probably there were lots of people who knew about 01:01:04.707 --> 01:01:06.100 electronics looking for work. 01:01:06.100 --> 01:01:08.050 PROFESSOR: It dispersed all that knowledge 01:01:08.050 --> 01:01:09.710 out into the world. 01:01:09.710 --> 01:01:12.980 And a lot of those people, many of them went to work on 01:01:12.980 --> 01:01:15.470 radar, but a lot of them went to work on television. 01:01:15.470 --> 01:01:18.800 The early American television industry was largely composed 01:01:18.800 --> 01:01:21.760 of Rad Lab graduates, who knew a lot about 01:01:21.760 --> 01:01:23.770 high frequency control. 01:01:23.770 --> 01:01:27.690 Also a lot of the early vacuum but computers, Eckert and 01:01:27.690 --> 01:01:32.210 Mauchly, who built ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania-- 01:01:32.210 --> 01:01:33.250 I know I'm going to forget which one-- 01:01:33.250 --> 01:01:35.610 I think it was Mauchly, came from the Rad Lab, where he 01:01:35.610 --> 01:01:38.580 learned about how to make vacuum tubes do high-speed 01:01:38.580 --> 01:01:41.740 pulse electronics, which by the way is essentially digital 01:01:41.740 --> 01:01:43.780 electronics. 01:01:43.780 --> 01:01:46.140 So these people all dispersed into the world. 01:01:46.140 --> 01:01:49.510 The RLE, which still does exist today, became the kind 01:01:49.510 --> 01:01:55.150 of intellectual core, people like Wiesner and Wiener, a 01:01:55.150 --> 01:01:55.980 bunch of other people-- 01:01:55.980 --> 01:02:00.550 I'll talk about that in the next two weeks, I think. 01:02:00.550 --> 01:02:02.910 And otherwise, the Radiation Lab closed down. 01:02:02.910 --> 01:02:06.440 But before they did, I meant to bring one of these, they 01:02:06.440 --> 01:02:10.310 published everything they did in a big series of textbooks. 01:02:10.310 --> 01:02:13.250 I think it's like 28 textbooks. 01:02:13.250 --> 01:02:16.240 And they just published it out to the world by McGraw Hill, 01:02:16.240 --> 01:02:19.350 not secret, not classified, none of that. 01:02:19.350 --> 01:02:23.780 And some of the first books in servomechanisms were there, 01:02:23.780 --> 01:02:25.700 antenna design, systems engineering. 01:02:25.700 --> 01:02:27.780 The first book ever in systems engineering came 01:02:27.780 --> 01:02:28.570 out of the Rad Lab. 01:02:28.570 --> 01:02:30.860 It was called Radar System Engineering. 01:02:30.860 --> 01:02:32.730 And they have this characteristic. 01:02:32.730 --> 01:02:34.290 You can still get them. 01:02:34.290 --> 01:02:36.000 But the original ones had this sort of 01:02:36.000 --> 01:02:37.540 burgundy cover with it. 01:02:37.540 --> 01:02:39.410 And this was the logo they had on the front. 01:02:39.410 --> 01:02:40.660 So what is that logo? 01:02:44.160 --> 01:02:45.880 It's the Cape Cod image. 01:02:45.880 --> 01:02:48.180 Anybody know what this is? 01:02:48.180 --> 01:02:49.120 AUDIENCE: That's the cavity. 01:02:49.120 --> 01:02:49.360 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 01:02:49.360 --> 01:02:52.710 That's the shape inside the cavity magnetron. 01:02:52.710 --> 01:02:54.990 It's sort of their logo. 01:02:54.990 --> 01:02:57.410 And if you cut a cavity magnetron open, that's what 01:02:57.410 --> 01:03:00.320 you'd see, is those little circles that are all the 01:03:00.320 --> 01:03:03.900 different resonate cavities, where I believe the wavelength 01:03:03.900 --> 01:03:06.785 of the radar is the circumference of that cavity. 01:03:10.530 --> 01:03:11.360 I meant to bring-- 01:03:11.360 --> 01:03:13.570 I have a few of the volumes. 01:03:13.570 --> 01:03:14.680 I don't have the whole set. 01:03:14.680 --> 01:03:15.730 You can buy the whole set on eBay. 01:03:15.730 --> 01:03:16.685 It's not hard to fine. 01:03:16.685 --> 01:03:19.070 Because most people think of it as obsolete. 01:03:19.070 --> 01:03:23.590 But you can find them in the libraries, as well. 01:03:23.590 --> 01:03:25.660 And it's a very famous textbook series. 01:03:25.660 --> 01:03:28.440 And for most people who studied electronics in the 01:03:28.440 --> 01:03:32.100 postwar period, they learned a lot of it from this Radiation 01:03:32.100 --> 01:03:33.810 Lab series of textbooks. 01:03:33.810 --> 01:03:36.400 So we were talking about secrecy and the effects of 01:03:36.400 --> 01:03:38.280 secrecy on campus. 01:03:38.280 --> 01:03:41.460 This is a sort of anti-secrecy effect, that it really just 01:03:41.460 --> 01:03:42.990 had the goal of-- 01:03:42.990 --> 01:03:44.630 yes, the Russians got it. 01:03:44.630 --> 01:03:46.310 Yes. 01:03:46.310 --> 01:03:48.280 Maybe some of our enemies learned something from it. 01:03:48.280 --> 01:03:52.930 But that was probably way less proportional than what our own 01:03:52.930 --> 01:03:55.726 people learn about it and what came out of it. 01:03:55.726 --> 01:03:59.480 I think that's my last slide. 01:03:59.480 --> 01:04:01.970 AUDIENCE: That was the origins of OpenCourseWare? 01:04:01.970 --> 01:04:03.250 PROFESSOR: The origins of OpenCourseWare, 01:04:03.250 --> 01:04:04.140 in some way, yeah. 01:04:04.140 --> 01:04:06.010 I mean I think that was the same kind of spirit. 01:04:06.010 --> 01:04:08.170 And that's one of the reasons that people like Bush felt 01:04:08.170 --> 01:04:10.190 that this stuff belong in universities. 01:04:10.190 --> 01:04:13.220 Because if it was in the Navy lab or in an Army lab, it 01:04:13.220 --> 01:04:15.110 would go behind closed doors and stay there 01:04:15.110 --> 01:04:15.880 forever pretty much. 01:04:15.880 --> 01:04:17.670 It's very hard to get stuff published out of there. 01:04:23.530 --> 01:04:25.840 I'll just look at in the numbers I have 01:04:25.840 --> 01:04:27.090 here, if any of them-- 01:04:30.930 --> 01:04:35.580 So then going on from there, I mean the Research Lab of 01:04:35.580 --> 01:04:38.050 Electronics is a really interesting 01:04:38.050 --> 01:04:39.240 topic in and of itself. 01:04:39.240 --> 01:04:43.670 And they get into acoustics in a big way. 01:04:43.670 --> 01:04:47.330 People like, as we mentioned, Jerry Wiesner is there. 01:04:47.330 --> 01:04:49.100 Weiner is there. 01:04:49.100 --> 01:04:50.980 People like Amar Bose come out of there. 01:04:50.980 --> 01:04:53.310 And the Bose Corporation, who may make your headphones or 01:04:53.310 --> 01:04:56.900 your speakers, is a spin-off from the RLE. 01:04:56.900 --> 01:04:59.460 Even people like Noam Chomsky kind of get their start in 01:04:59.460 --> 01:05:00.000 that world. 01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:04.520 And there are a lot of intellectual ties to, this is 01:05:04.520 --> 01:05:07.630 a little bit of a diversion, but if you think about some of 01:05:07.630 --> 01:05:10.780 the early work that goes on in linguistics here that Chomsky 01:05:10.780 --> 01:05:13.650 does, it has very much the same kind of systems 01:05:13.650 --> 01:05:18.290 engineering approach to it, about thinking about grammar 01:05:18.290 --> 01:05:21.290 and language, along the lines of people are thinking about 01:05:21.290 --> 01:05:24.830 these different kinds of systems and systems ideas. 01:05:24.830 --> 01:05:27.210 That was the Lily Kay piece that Will mentioned, that we 01:05:27.210 --> 01:05:28.540 cut off the syllabus for this year. 01:05:28.540 --> 01:05:31.300 The same thing in biology, people thinking about 01:05:31.300 --> 01:05:33.830 information and communication in these more and 01:05:33.830 --> 01:05:35.510 more unified ways. 01:05:35.510 --> 01:05:39.110 So what's remarkable about the war is that this effort ended 01:05:39.110 --> 01:05:41.810 at the end of the Second World War, but it had all of these 01:05:41.810 --> 01:05:43.740 kind of fingers that lasted. 01:05:43.740 --> 01:05:47.730 We'll talk next week about Whirlwind and digital 01:05:47.730 --> 01:05:52.230 computing and aerospace and stuff on campus. 01:05:52.230 --> 01:05:55.510 But it's not a coincidence the way that Cybernetics is 01:05:55.510 --> 01:05:58.750 published in 1948, Claude Shannon's information theory 01:05:58.750 --> 01:06:02.260 is published in 1948. 01:06:02.260 --> 01:06:06.550 Also interestingly, I think it's 1948, Kurt Vonnegut first 01:06:06.550 --> 01:06:10.230 novel, Player Piano, is published in 1948. 01:06:10.230 --> 01:06:12.670 Has anybody read that book? 01:06:12.670 --> 01:06:13.870 It's a really interesting book. 01:06:13.870 --> 01:06:19.400 And the lead character in it, I believe is named Norbert. 01:06:19.400 --> 01:06:20.290 Am I right about that? 01:06:20.290 --> 01:06:21.270 It's been a while. 01:06:21.270 --> 01:06:23.470 It's got a very clear allusion to Norbert Wiener. 01:06:23.470 --> 01:06:25.980 It's all about the implications of cybernetics in 01:06:25.980 --> 01:06:29.960 factories and other kinds of settings. 01:06:29.960 --> 01:06:33.220 And there is this intellectual thread that runs through a lot 01:06:33.220 --> 01:06:37.570 of this work about this link between systems, and human 01:06:37.570 --> 01:06:41.900 machine interfaces, and communication, and feedback 01:06:41.900 --> 01:06:44.720 control, and computing, that you can carry 01:06:44.720 --> 01:06:45.710 that through at MIT. 01:06:45.710 --> 01:06:47.430 And we'll talk later about Project MAC, 01:06:47.430 --> 01:06:49.420 which is the 1960s. 01:06:49.420 --> 01:06:53.450 20 years later, people are still thinking about 01:06:53.450 --> 01:06:55.800 interactive computing in very similar ways. 01:06:55.800 --> 01:07:00.010 I mentioned Doug Engelbart, who was not an MIT guy, but 01:07:00.010 --> 01:07:03.370 very much is very clear in his memoirs, that he started 01:07:03.370 --> 01:07:05.380 thinking about these issues when he was interacting with 01:07:05.380 --> 01:07:07.410 the radar during the war. 01:07:07.410 --> 01:07:11.180 And then it's only out of this that you really get the 01:07:11.180 --> 01:07:15.620 beginnings of digital computing and I think, and 01:07:15.620 --> 01:07:18.910 I'll talk about this next time, a very particularly MIT 01:07:18.910 --> 01:07:22.600 take on those technologies that's not so much focused on 01:07:22.600 --> 01:07:25.710 the kind of basic mathematics of them, but really thinking 01:07:25.710 --> 01:07:28.850 of these computers as embedded in control systems, much in 01:07:28.850 --> 01:07:30.830 the way that all these different radars were embedded 01:07:30.830 --> 01:07:31.680 in control systems. 01:07:31.680 --> 01:07:35.000 So that's where you can sort of see that the way that MIT 01:07:35.000 --> 01:07:38.030 is organized, the way that the federal government is funding 01:07:38.030 --> 01:07:40.920 science and technology, and the politics of Washington 01:07:40.920 --> 01:07:43.720 around it, and the actual content of what kind of work 01:07:43.720 --> 01:07:46.480 people are doing, and what sort of ideas they're doing, 01:07:46.480 --> 01:07:49.350 are all really very much connected in this story about 01:07:49.350 --> 01:07:50.220 World War II. 01:07:50.220 --> 01:07:55.190 It's hard to overemphasize how much profound influence on the 01:07:55.190 --> 01:07:58.110 world that we live in, even just even just the local world 01:07:58.110 --> 01:08:02.000 here, came out of this really just five-year, seven-year 01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:04.790 period at MIT. 01:08:04.790 --> 01:08:08.690 We also looked at "Science, The Endless Frontier." And 01:08:08.690 --> 01:08:12.560 that was where Truman came to Bush at the end of the war, 01:08:12.560 --> 01:08:14.550 pretty much at the end of the war, because Truman isn't even 01:08:14.550 --> 01:08:17.540 president until right before the war ends, and says, what 01:08:17.540 --> 01:08:18.920 are we going to do in this in the future? 01:08:18.920 --> 01:08:20.670 How are we going to take this forward? 01:08:20.670 --> 01:08:24.109 And Bush writes this report, whereas somebody commented in 01:08:24.109 --> 01:08:26.450 the response for today, it's really very forward thinking 01:08:26.450 --> 01:08:28.800 where he says, OK, we're done with war. 01:08:28.800 --> 01:08:29.630 That's important. 01:08:29.630 --> 01:08:32.810 But let's really think about doing this in a context that's 01:08:32.810 --> 01:08:35.740 really going to help our people, and that's medicine 01:08:35.740 --> 01:08:40.830 and biomed and other sorts of civilian applications to it. 01:08:40.830 --> 01:08:45.069 And that report to this day, I mean that's sort of-- 01:08:45.069 --> 01:08:49.090 has anybody read that before the class or heard about it? 01:08:49.090 --> 01:08:51.640 It's sort of basic required reading, if you have a career 01:08:51.640 --> 01:08:52.620 in science in the US. 01:08:52.620 --> 01:08:56.330 It really is considered the template for how the NIH and 01:08:56.330 --> 01:09:00.229 the NSF and a lot of other federal agencies work. 01:09:00.229 --> 01:09:03.350 Interestingly, it's not so much the continuation of the 01:09:03.350 --> 01:09:05.359 OSRD model. 01:09:05.359 --> 01:09:09.300 The OSRD model kind of dies in 1945. 01:09:09.300 --> 01:09:11.700 If anything, it's carried on by the Office of Naval 01:09:11.700 --> 01:09:14.919 Research, which is a very small office, during the five 01:09:14.919 --> 01:09:16.890 years after the war. 01:09:16.890 --> 01:09:19.750 And then late in the '50s, I think it's picked up again 01:09:19.750 --> 01:09:22.840 when DARPA is formed in 1958, also with a 01:09:22.840 --> 01:09:24.130 very big MIT input. 01:09:24.130 --> 01:09:26.470 We'll talk about that next time. 01:09:26.470 --> 01:09:30.490 But if you want to look at the modern heir to the OSRD, it's 01:09:30.490 --> 01:09:31.729 not the National Science Foundation. 01:09:31.729 --> 01:09:32.990 The National Science Foundation 01:09:32.990 --> 01:09:34.649 works by peer review. 01:09:34.649 --> 01:09:37.529 It has a charge to not only fund the best science, but to 01:09:37.529 --> 01:09:41.319 do education and to sort of spread its resources out, 01:09:41.319 --> 01:09:44.910 throughout the country in a kind of even way. 01:09:44.910 --> 01:09:47.870 Whereas DARPA is much more based on the model of the 01:09:47.870 --> 01:09:50.510 OSRD, intentionally or unintentionally. 01:09:50.510 --> 01:09:54.010 You have very strong program managers, who can sort of 01:09:54.010 --> 01:09:56.700 shape the fields the way they see fit. 01:09:56.700 --> 01:09:59.800 It's within the military, but it doesn't belong to the Air 01:09:59.800 --> 01:10:01.370 Force or the Army or the Navy. 01:10:01.370 --> 01:10:03.110 And it has does its own sort of thing. 01:10:03.110 --> 01:10:05.480 And it's sort of set apart, very much in the same way. 01:10:05.480 --> 01:10:06.210 But that's-- 01:10:06.210 --> 01:10:07.230 AUDIENCE: It's run academics. 01:10:07.230 --> 01:10:07.990 PROFESSOR: --another story. 01:10:07.990 --> 01:10:10.450 It's run by academics, yeah. 01:10:10.450 --> 01:10:13.680 And the first director was Jack Ruina, who was a 01:10:13.680 --> 01:10:15.380 colleague of ours here. 01:10:15.380 --> 01:10:16.590 We'll talk about that next time. 01:10:16.590 --> 01:10:17.830 That's a post-Sputnik thing. 01:10:17.830 --> 01:10:19.790 That's the next big thing that happened.