Tales of YesterYea,t - o o In Case You Elave Forgotten by Dr. HAROLD A. ZAHL SIGNAL, OCTOBER, I97O cences in the sola N.Y.) Uooer and lower phoios: now Headquarters site o{-lhe Evans Area iti-ilf-".t'iii"' di""r-ni" Warfare'and Combal Surveillance lab- .ljt.ri"r. lPhoro "r"dit, Volume ll, The Wireless l{oildl 83
stafted marking out shorter lengths of the same type of construction, but shaping it up as an "Il"-building instead of a single length. Within an hour, we had every draftsman at our Fort Hancock site working feverishly on our new brain-child. Birth ol the "H"-Building At precisely 1100 hours, Lt. Friedrich reported to Colonel Corput in his Squier Laboratory office. He carried with him the requested drawings and a set of those which had just been finished. Using as much tact as possible, he persuaded the Colonel to look also at the new drawings. As Colonel Corput looked at the "H"-building drawings, a broad smile crept across his soldierly face, and the drawings for the 900-foot building quickly found a resting place in his wastepaper basket. And so the present "H"-building was born. And speaking of buildings, there is also a story about those many cubical wooden structures spread throughout the Evans Area. The form factor for these buildings originated at Fort Hancock as shelters for test models of the SCR-268, one radar per building. I T[e aulhor al the museum of the Twin Lighls His+orical Sociely, Highlands, <strong>New</strong> <strong>Jersey</strong>. 86 seem to recall that about 20 of these buildings were erected at Fort Hancock, neatly lined up with military precision. The argument for the plan was: fust, we must be able to work on many sets at once and under cover; second, we wanted to spread our resources so that in the event of German bombing or flre all would not be lost in one raid;. and third, a standardized construction design could produce many buildings cheaply and rapidly. Looking over our construction one day, a visiting Air Corps officer impishly said that the alignment and spacing of our buildings was just right for a bomber dropping 100-pound demolition bombs. One bomb would fall on the first building, the second on the next, the third on the following and so forth, all down the entire street, leaving areas between buildings unscathed. Fortunately, the bombers never came. When we moved to Evans, this same type of building construction came easily and in mass production. I seem to recall a figure of $40,000 per building, with only a few weeks required for delivery. So Evans was soon crowded with these SCR-268 shelters, all of which have been under continuous modification since 1942. Conspicuous Lettering Occupancy of the Belmar site started during the l94l-42 winter under the name of Signal Corps Radar Laboratory, a name conspicuouSly posed in large lettering for all to see from the public road passing by the headquarters building. The Fort Monmouth laboratory counterpart was called the Signal Corps General Development Laboratory. But the word "Radar" in the marquee did not stay up for many months, for wingh,e its way up from Washington came the message that the word "radar" was classifled, and great were the bonfires as tens of thousands of envelopes and letterheaC stationery became a part of the atmosphere. On March 31, 1942, the new site was designated a-* the Camp Evans Signal Laboratory, commemoratinE the late Paul Wesley Evans. On April 16, 1945, th= name was shortened to Evans Signal Laboratory. AnC so concludes my prologue. Reporting a Race The topography of my story now shifts some fifteem. miles north of Belmar to a place called Twin Lighis- Highlands, <strong>New</strong> <strong>Jersey</strong>, the highest point of land cm the Atlantic seaboard. Again, my story will be cd Marconi first and the U. S. Army second. It was the fall of 1899. On both sides of tb Atlantic, excitement ran high as Sir Thomas Liptomwith his British Shamrock, challenged the U. S yacht Columbia, n what later became known as tbe America's Cup Race. ft was to be their first meeting uf many more races to come. Young Marconi, workinrr for the <strong>New</strong> York Herald newspaper, hoped to bring ship-teshore radio coverage of a race in which Bridst seamanship challenged that of a former colony. Th Highlands at Navesink overlooking Fort Hancock, \ru <strong>Jersey</strong>, was selected as the site for the receh:mg station. Marconi's friend, W. W. Bradfield, was to mmr the receiving station while Marconi would be at s6 SIGNAL, OCTOBER, 5.M
Change language