To download as a PDF click here - US Army Center Of Military History

ReseaRch a n d developmenT In T h e aIR fo R c e 91
War II: the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University and the Radiation
Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1945,
the AAF’s Air Technical Service Command (ATSC) dispatched recruiters to the
Harvard and MIT laboratories to hire technical personnel and acquire equipment
for the electronics programs already underway at Wright Field and the Watson
Laboratories at Red Bank, New Jersey. 70 Employee resistance to the anticipated
move from Boston, however, prompted ATSC to establish a separate field station
of the Watson Laboratories at Cambridge to conduct R&D on the radar and radio
technologies previously supported by the wartime Office of Scientific Research
and Development. In 1947, when the Air Force separated from the Army, the station’s
mission broadened to include more fundamental scientific studies in the electronics
field, though not wholly divorced from specific applications. The following
year, the station was granted permanent status as an Air Force research installation.
The newly named Air Force Cambridge Research Center transferred to the
Air Research and Development Command in June 1951. 71
Organizationally, the R&D program at Cambridge comprised two directorates:
electronics and geophysics. 72 Despite an early emphasis on fundamental
research, the electronics directorate gradually moved toward hardware
development in the 1950s, even though this latter function was already the
assigned mission of Cambridge’s sister facility—Rome Air Development Center.
At Cambridge during this period, a substantial R&D effort focused on
digital communication and data processing to support the development of systems
for air defense and tactical air control. Although work on some of these
technologies, such as the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air
defense system, was outsourced to private-sector institutions (including MIT
in the case of SAGE), the directorate nevertheless operated its own in-house
laboratories to pursue a multitude of related R&D programs. The propagation
laboratory, for example, studied the effects of transmission media on the
behavior of electromagnetic radiation, while physicists, chemists, and optical
specialists working in the components and techniques laboratory examined
the properties of new classes of semiconductor and magnetic materials slated
for use in avionics equipment. 73 Meanwhile, other technology-oriented labo-
70 The Watson Laboratories had been founded during the war as part of the expansion of the Army
Signal Corps laboratories at nearby Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The Signal Corps transferred Watson
to the AAF’s Air Service Technical Command in 1945. On the origins of the Watson Laboratories, see
Weitze, Installations and Facilities, 402–03. On wartime R&D in the Signal Corps, see George Raynor
Thompson et al., The Signal Corps: The Test, in United States Army in World War II, The Technical Services
(Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957); and George Raynor Thompson and
Dixie R. Harris, The Signal Corps: The Outcome, in United States Army in World War II, The Technical
Services (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966).
71 Cambridge was officially designated the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in July 1949.
“Laboratories” changed to “Center” two years later but reverted back to the former when ARDC and
AMC merged into the new Air Force Systems Command in 1961. I. Stone, “Cambridge’s Bailiwick: Earth,
Sky, and Sea,” Aviation Week 59 (17 August 1953): 229; Sigethy, “The Air Force Organization for Basic
Research,” 28–29, 55.
72 Cambridge added an atomic warfare directorate in October 1951 but deactivated it three years later.
Sigethy, “The Air Force Organization for Basic Research,” 55.
73 Like their counterparts working in the laboratories operated by the large electronics firms, researchers