1 00:00:00,100 --> 00:00:02,470 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,470 --> 00:00:03,880 Commons license. 3 00:00:03,880 --> 00:00:06,920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 4 00:00:06,920 --> 00:00:10,570 offer high-quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,570 --> 00:00:13,470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 6 00:00:13,470 --> 00:00:17,400 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 7 00:00:17,400 --> 00:00:18,650 ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:31,230 --> 00:00:33,600 PROFESSOR: But the topic for today is a big topic and an 9 00:00:33,600 --> 00:00:34,440 interesting one. 10 00:00:34,440 --> 00:00:35,710 So there's a lot to say about it. 11 00:00:35,710 --> 00:00:38,520 So I guess we're going to want to get started on that, which 12 00:00:38,520 --> 00:00:39,770 is MIT in World War II. 13 00:00:43,394 --> 00:00:49,915 I asked you to read I believe three pieces, the Hunter 14 00:00:49,915 --> 00:00:53,860 Dupree article, four, right, Hunter Dupree, Debbie Douglas 15 00:00:53,860 --> 00:00:57,200 piece, "Science Analysts Frontier," and 16 00:00:57,200 --> 00:00:58,460 the cybernetics piece. 17 00:00:58,460 --> 00:01:00,380 AUDIENCE: The Lily Kay too. 18 00:01:00,380 --> 00:01:01,720 It was on the copy I have. 19 00:01:01,720 --> 00:01:03,540 PROFESSOR: Was the Lily Kay article on there? 20 00:01:03,540 --> 00:01:06,710 AUDIENCE: There was no Lily Kay on there. 21 00:01:06,710 --> 00:01:09,700 PROFESSOR: Well, maybe last year's syllabus. 22 00:01:09,700 --> 00:01:11,600 I think we took that one off for this year. 23 00:01:11,600 --> 00:01:12,850 AUDIENCE: OK. 24 00:01:14,810 --> 00:01:16,750 I read more than you did this year. 25 00:01:16,750 --> 00:01:18,690 Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nah. 26 00:01:18,690 --> 00:01:20,420 PROFESSOR: But that's a good one to add, as 27 00:01:20,420 --> 00:01:21,940 well in some ways. 28 00:01:21,940 --> 00:01:27,270 And the reason that I picked those four is-- 29 00:01:27,270 --> 00:01:29,870 and actually, I think they're quite interrelated. 30 00:01:29,870 --> 00:01:32,060 And some people kind of picked that up in 31 00:01:32,060 --> 00:01:34,530 the response papers. 32 00:01:34,530 --> 00:01:37,390 And I'll sort of underscore that a little more. 33 00:01:37,390 --> 00:01:40,440 In that one of them is about the overall kind of national 34 00:01:40,440 --> 00:01:42,210 science policy sorts of stuff. 35 00:01:42,210 --> 00:01:44,930 That's the Dupree article. 36 00:01:44,930 --> 00:01:49,270 One of them is about how those changes affected life on 37 00:01:49,270 --> 00:01:53,100 campus here on a day-to-day basis. 38 00:01:53,100 --> 00:01:57,470 The Wiener one is about how those changes affected the 39 00:01:57,470 --> 00:02:00,280 core content of what people were doing on campus and the 40 00:02:00,280 --> 00:02:03,490 actual kinds of science and engineering that were going 41 00:02:03,490 --> 00:02:04,830 on, because cybernetics was very much a 42 00:02:04,830 --> 00:02:06,460 product of that time. 43 00:02:06,460 --> 00:02:08,960 And then "Science Analysts Frontier" is a sort of outcome 44 00:02:08,960 --> 00:02:11,310 of the end of the war, looking forward. 45 00:02:11,310 --> 00:02:14,730 And all of those things I think have a big impact on the 46 00:02:14,730 --> 00:02:20,520 MIT that you experience today and the landscape of how 47 00:02:20,520 --> 00:02:23,300 science is funded and organized in this country that 48 00:02:23,300 --> 00:02:26,890 you'll experience, probably regardless of whether you go 49 00:02:26,890 --> 00:02:30,010 into a research career or a career in industry, certainly 50 00:02:30,010 --> 00:02:33,520 if you go into a career in research, how 51 00:02:33,520 --> 00:02:34,770 technology gets generated. 52 00:02:37,290 --> 00:02:40,350 So I just wanted to say a little bit by way of review 53 00:02:40,350 --> 00:02:42,140 and then go into some other things. 54 00:02:42,140 --> 00:02:45,330 And I have lots of pictures to show, to give it a little bit 55 00:02:45,330 --> 00:02:46,580 of texture. 56 00:02:51,510 --> 00:02:56,610 So Hunter Dupree talks about what he calls the Great 57 00:02:56,610 --> 00:03:01,605 Instauration, which is actually 58 00:03:01,605 --> 00:03:04,060 was allusion to Bacon. 59 00:03:04,060 --> 00:03:07,020 And a few people comment on his distinction between the 60 00:03:07,020 --> 00:03:10,430 Baconian scientists who sort of engaged in the affairs of 61 00:03:10,430 --> 00:03:12,900 the world and the more Cartesian model of a 62 00:03:12,900 --> 00:03:15,940 scientist, who is sort of isolated in the laboratory in 63 00:03:15,940 --> 00:03:18,140 a purely intellectual space, and that's an interesting way 64 00:03:18,140 --> 00:03:24,510 to think about this whole thing, and how these things 65 00:03:24,510 --> 00:03:27,370 sort of formulated in the years leading up to the 66 00:03:27,370 --> 00:03:29,720 Second World War. 67 00:03:29,720 --> 00:03:32,840 What is the generally accepted start of the Second World War? 68 00:03:32,840 --> 00:03:34,090 Anybody know? 69 00:03:38,960 --> 00:03:40,210 Just date-wise? 70 00:03:42,290 --> 00:03:43,258 Yeah? 71 00:03:43,258 --> 00:03:45,680 AUDIENCE: Was it August 1939? 72 00:03:45,680 --> 00:03:47,180 PROFESSOR: Close. 73 00:03:47,180 --> 00:03:49,270 Within a month, September 1939. 74 00:03:49,270 --> 00:03:50,390 AUDIENCE: The first day of September. 75 00:03:50,390 --> 00:03:55,080 PROFESSOR: What happens in September 1939? 76 00:03:55,080 --> 00:03:56,430 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 77 00:03:56,430 --> 00:03:57,030 PROFESSOR: Sorry. 78 00:03:57,030 --> 00:03:57,710 AUDIENCE: Nazi invasion. 79 00:03:57,710 --> 00:03:58,030 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 80 00:03:58,030 --> 00:03:59,610 Nazi invasion of Poland. 81 00:03:59,610 --> 00:04:02,190 That's the sort of generally accepted moment, although 82 00:04:02,190 --> 00:04:04,770 there's the Spanish Civil War before that and what not. 83 00:04:04,770 --> 00:04:07,619 When does the US get into the war? 84 00:04:07,619 --> 00:04:09,010 AUDIENCE: December 7, 1941. 85 00:04:09,010 --> 00:04:13,560 PROFESSOR: December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor, more than two 86 00:04:13,560 --> 00:04:15,970 years later. 87 00:04:15,970 --> 00:04:20,529 A very long period, where Europe and most of Asia is at 88 00:04:20,529 --> 00:04:23,800 war and the US is not only not as the war-- it's not like 89 00:04:23,800 --> 00:04:26,000 when we get into it, there are a lot of people who really 90 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:28,805 don't want us too and think we should stay out, Charles 91 00:04:28,805 --> 00:04:32,090 Lindbergh among them. 92 00:04:32,090 --> 00:04:35,340 And so this is this kind of limbo period where-- 93 00:04:38,730 --> 00:04:40,720 and it's actually in a way the same as in 94 00:04:40,720 --> 00:04:41,830 the first world war. 95 00:04:41,830 --> 00:04:44,030 The US is very late getting into it and has a lot of time 96 00:04:44,030 --> 00:04:45,280 to prepare. 97 00:04:46,990 --> 00:04:50,920 If the US had gotten into the war in September 1939, we 98 00:04:50,920 --> 00:04:53,180 would have been a lot of trouble. 99 00:04:53,180 --> 00:04:54,470 There was nothing. 100 00:04:54,470 --> 00:04:57,410 There was no military to speak of in a sense. 101 00:04:57,410 --> 00:05:01,120 Whereas by December 1941, things had been 102 00:05:01,120 --> 00:05:02,800 gearing up for a while. 103 00:05:02,800 --> 00:05:06,810 And that's this period where not only does Bush get 104 00:05:06,810 --> 00:05:10,770 interested and involved, but also the predecessor is-- 105 00:05:10,770 --> 00:05:12,720 there's this very interesting, sort of curious committee 106 00:05:12,720 --> 00:05:16,010 called the Scientific Aids to Learning, that is done under 107 00:05:16,010 --> 00:05:18,690 the National Academy of Sciences, which includes 108 00:05:18,690 --> 00:05:21,810 Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant, who's is the president 109 00:05:21,810 --> 00:05:24,620 of Harvard, a chemist, and also Frank Jewett, who we've 110 00:05:24,620 --> 00:05:27,930 mentioned before, who is an MIT graduate. 111 00:05:27,930 --> 00:05:29,840 He taught here. 112 00:05:29,840 --> 00:05:35,070 He is then head of Bell Labs, head of research for AT&T, and 113 00:05:35,070 --> 00:05:37,350 actually president of the National Academy of Sciences 114 00:05:37,350 --> 00:05:39,910 in the 1930s. 115 00:05:39,910 --> 00:05:41,920 And these guys all get together on this sort of 116 00:05:41,920 --> 00:05:44,310 abstract study about-- 117 00:05:44,310 --> 00:05:45,480 anybody know what that refers to, 118 00:05:45,480 --> 00:05:48,600 Scientific Aids to Learning? 119 00:05:48,600 --> 00:05:52,260 It's a very modern topic in a way. 120 00:05:52,260 --> 00:05:55,210 How can we use new technology to help education? 121 00:05:55,210 --> 00:05:57,160 What are the new technologies they're talking about? 122 00:05:59,700 --> 00:06:04,000 LP records, 33 and 1/3 records-- 123 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:07,000 does anybody know what a record is? 124 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:13,450 LP records, 16 millimeter film, to some degree 35 125 00:06:13,450 --> 00:06:16,390 millimeter photography, these are all the cutting edge media 126 00:06:16,390 --> 00:06:18,400 technologies in 1939. 127 00:06:18,400 --> 00:06:21,490 And there are people saying, gee, there must be way to 128 00:06:21,490 --> 00:06:23,640 improve education using these things. 129 00:06:23,640 --> 00:06:25,510 And it's interesting when you think about-- 130 00:06:25,510 --> 00:06:26,950 we may have mentioned this before. 131 00:06:26,950 --> 00:06:28,290 We'll certainly mention it later-- 132 00:06:28,290 --> 00:06:31,230 Vannevar Bush's great paper, "As We May Think," where he 133 00:06:31,230 --> 00:06:33,780 introduces this idea of the memex, which is very much 134 00:06:33,780 --> 00:06:36,760 credited as being a kind of predecessor to the World Wide 135 00:06:36,760 --> 00:06:39,150 Web, so right about this time period. 136 00:06:39,150 --> 00:06:42,180 So he's got exposure to these sort of media film 137 00:06:42,180 --> 00:06:43,690 technologies at the time. 138 00:06:43,690 --> 00:06:45,950 And in the course of that committee, these guys get 139 00:06:45,950 --> 00:06:47,520 together and they think there's 140 00:06:47,520 --> 00:06:48,990 really something happening. 141 00:06:48,990 --> 00:06:51,940 The United States is generally mobilizing. 142 00:06:51,940 --> 00:06:54,390 Even though there's a lot of political debate, people 143 00:06:54,390 --> 00:06:58,210 really see that the US needs to build up the military 144 00:06:58,210 --> 00:07:00,110 during this period. 145 00:07:00,110 --> 00:07:04,340 And it's not at all clear that the scientific talent of the 146 00:07:04,340 --> 00:07:06,870 country is going to be utilized in the best way. 147 00:07:06,870 --> 00:07:08,720 And a lot of people, and we talked about this, during 148 00:07:08,720 --> 00:07:11,600 World War I felt that it really wasn't utilized in the 149 00:07:11,600 --> 00:07:13,790 most effective way. 150 00:07:13,790 --> 00:07:18,420 And Dupree talks about, there's a lot of different 151 00:07:18,420 --> 00:07:23,030 options for ways that you might bring either scientists, 152 00:07:23,030 --> 00:07:26,400 to use that term generally, or people like you, to bear on 153 00:07:26,400 --> 00:07:27,030 the war effort. 154 00:07:27,030 --> 00:07:28,310 What might those ways be? 155 00:07:28,310 --> 00:07:30,000 What are the different options you might have? 156 00:07:39,540 --> 00:07:42,170 Well, one option is to just draft you all, send you into 157 00:07:42,170 --> 00:07:45,270 the military, and then I've got lots of smart MIT people 158 00:07:45,270 --> 00:07:48,050 working in the army. 159 00:07:48,050 --> 00:07:50,460 Especially the army in 1940, you'd probably spent a lot of 160 00:07:50,460 --> 00:07:52,270 time peeling potatoes. 161 00:07:52,270 --> 00:07:54,370 You'd probably get handed a rifle and told to run into the 162 00:07:54,370 --> 00:07:55,640 machine gun fire. 163 00:07:55,640 --> 00:07:57,790 I'm going to draft you and rather than you being sent to 164 00:07:57,790 --> 00:08:05,940 the front, I'm going to send to the Watertown Arsenal to 165 00:08:05,940 --> 00:08:09,830 make guns or to help engineer the manufacture of guns. 166 00:08:09,830 --> 00:08:11,660 OK, you go work for the government, you work in a 167 00:08:11,660 --> 00:08:15,700 government facility, and you help with some important job. 168 00:08:15,700 --> 00:08:18,160 That's not a bad way to do it actually. 169 00:08:18,160 --> 00:08:22,130 But you end up working on things 170 00:08:22,130 --> 00:08:24,230 that are already existing. 171 00:08:24,230 --> 00:08:28,200 And so there are labs internal to the government. 172 00:08:28,200 --> 00:08:29,020 The Navy has them. 173 00:08:29,020 --> 00:08:31,180 The Army has them. 174 00:08:31,180 --> 00:08:33,409 Even the Army Air Force had some stuff like that. 175 00:08:37,380 --> 00:08:41,820 But they were generally seen as not the most cutting edge. 176 00:08:41,820 --> 00:08:43,620 And there's a lot of truth to be said to that. 177 00:08:43,620 --> 00:08:46,770 They were sort of concerned with building weapons that 178 00:08:46,770 --> 00:08:50,240 they had built for a long time, not really very good at 179 00:08:50,240 --> 00:08:53,100 dealing with things like electronics or other new 180 00:08:53,100 --> 00:08:55,880 things, and very, very hard for them to think about stuff 181 00:08:55,880 --> 00:08:57,260 that was outside the box. 182 00:08:57,260 --> 00:09:00,900 If you were in the Navy, the Navy had a great cadre of 183 00:09:00,900 --> 00:09:03,480 people who knew how to build warships because they built 184 00:09:03,480 --> 00:09:05,490 best warships and that's all they did. 185 00:09:05,490 --> 00:09:07,510 But outside of building warships, it was very hard to 186 00:09:07,510 --> 00:09:08,780 think about what you might do. 187 00:09:08,780 --> 00:09:11,170 Because that's what the Navy did, was they built warships, 188 00:09:11,170 --> 00:09:13,290 to some degree airplanes, mostly warships and 189 00:09:13,290 --> 00:09:14,940 submarines. 190 00:09:14,940 --> 00:09:16,780 You could send all the scientists and engineers into 191 00:09:16,780 --> 00:09:19,700 industrial labs and have them work in industry and close 192 00:09:19,700 --> 00:09:20,950 down the school. 193 00:09:23,630 --> 00:09:26,920 You could organize a separate corps, where you say-- 194 00:09:26,920 --> 00:09:28,800 actually there are some things like this today. 195 00:09:28,800 --> 00:09:31,270 There's the Public Health Service. 196 00:09:31,270 --> 00:09:35,360 There's the NOAH corps, which is the oceanographic corp. 197 00:09:35,360 --> 00:09:38,330 These are sort of little quasi-military organizations 198 00:09:38,330 --> 00:09:40,470 that are peppered around the government. 199 00:09:40,470 --> 00:09:42,420 You could say let's have a government-- 200 00:09:42,420 --> 00:09:43,850 well, there's a Peace Corps. 201 00:09:43,850 --> 00:09:45,180 I'm sure you've heard of that. 202 00:09:45,180 --> 00:09:48,730 You could have the War Corps. 203 00:09:48,730 --> 00:09:51,630 And a lot of different options there for organizing. 204 00:09:51,630 --> 00:09:53,460 And these guys started to become worried that they 205 00:09:53,460 --> 00:09:56,720 didn't think that left to its own devices, it was going to 206 00:09:56,720 --> 00:09:58,150 go the right way. 207 00:09:58,150 --> 00:10:02,320 And so Bush and his group, particularly Bush in using his 208 00:10:02,320 --> 00:10:05,530 political connections, gets them took to create this thing 209 00:10:05,530 --> 00:10:08,580 called the National Defense Research Committee. 210 00:10:08,580 --> 00:10:12,440 And he writes this famous memo that Dupree talks about, in 211 00:10:12,440 --> 00:10:15,930 June of 1940, which happens to be-- 212 00:10:15,930 --> 00:10:19,530 anybody know that picture is? 213 00:10:19,530 --> 00:10:23,988 What happens in June 1940? 214 00:10:23,988 --> 00:10:25,470 AUDIENCE: Germans take France. 215 00:10:25,470 --> 00:10:26,000 PROFESSOR: Right. 216 00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:29,070 France falls to the Nazis. 217 00:10:29,070 --> 00:10:31,480 So this is what, about less than a year 218 00:10:31,480 --> 00:10:33,000 after the war starts. 219 00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:35,270 And here you have Hitler walking down-- 220 00:10:35,270 --> 00:10:39,770 there's Hitler right there, Albert Speer, by the way, 221 00:10:39,770 --> 00:10:42,300 right there, touring Paris. 222 00:10:42,300 --> 00:10:46,990 And that's a pretty shocking image for the West to see. 223 00:10:46,990 --> 00:10:55,240 And it was a time of doom and gloom. 224 00:10:55,240 --> 00:10:59,112 A time of really the sense that if the US didn't get off 225 00:10:59,112 --> 00:11:02,990 its rear end and start doing things, bad things 226 00:11:02,990 --> 00:11:04,220 were going to happen. 227 00:11:04,220 --> 00:11:06,420 And you also have the Battle of Britain. 228 00:11:06,420 --> 00:11:09,960 And the Battle of Britain refers, of course, the Nazi-- 229 00:11:09,960 --> 00:11:12,380 they were next going to invade England. 230 00:11:12,380 --> 00:11:15,120 But Hitler wouldn't do it until Goering could give him 231 00:11:15,120 --> 00:11:16,520 air superiority. 232 00:11:16,520 --> 00:11:18,690 And so they started going over and bombing and 233 00:11:18,690 --> 00:11:20,050 preparing the ground. 234 00:11:20,050 --> 00:11:22,420 And they never quite got air superiority, because of the 235 00:11:22,420 --> 00:11:25,210 Spitfires and the Hurricanes and all this, not least of it 236 00:11:25,210 --> 00:11:26,500 aided by radar. 237 00:11:26,500 --> 00:11:30,440 And so in the spring of 1940, into the summer of 1940, is 238 00:11:30,440 --> 00:11:33,000 what they call the Blitz in London. 239 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:34,140 I'm sure if you've been to London, 240 00:11:34,140 --> 00:11:36,170 you've seen that stuff. 241 00:11:36,170 --> 00:11:39,100 Not only is there this sense of military emergency, but 242 00:11:39,100 --> 00:11:41,390 there's this sense that a lot of the danger is 243 00:11:41,390 --> 00:11:42,770 coming from the sky. 244 00:11:42,770 --> 00:11:45,090 And we really don't know how to shoot down airplanes and we 245 00:11:45,090 --> 00:11:46,570 don't know how to combat airplanes. 246 00:11:46,570 --> 00:11:49,080 And there's this sense of defense that is 247 00:11:49,080 --> 00:11:50,330 not being taken up. 248 00:11:53,370 --> 00:11:55,640 And so these guys from the Scientific Aids to Learning, 249 00:11:55,640 --> 00:11:58,160 and this memo that Bush writes, particularly concerned 250 00:11:58,160 --> 00:12:02,460 about anti-aircraft defenses-- 251 00:12:02,460 --> 00:12:11,550 and Harry Hopkins, who is the chief of staff for the 252 00:12:11,550 --> 00:12:14,270 president, basically puts this memo in front of him. 253 00:12:14,270 --> 00:12:18,410 And he writes across it, OK, FDR. 254 00:12:18,410 --> 00:12:19,890 And that's the letter. 255 00:12:19,890 --> 00:12:22,470 And with that letter, in the government world, if you have 256 00:12:22,470 --> 00:12:25,360 that signature on your letter you can pretty much do 257 00:12:25,360 --> 00:12:26,060 anything you want. 258 00:12:26,060 --> 00:12:28,140 It's literally like a blank check. 259 00:12:28,140 --> 00:12:31,970 And Bush goes around in the summer of 1940 collecting all 260 00:12:31,970 --> 00:12:35,520 these people to work in this National 261 00:12:35,520 --> 00:12:39,000 Defense Research Committee. 262 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:43,280 And they divided up initially-- 263 00:12:43,280 --> 00:12:44,950 it's later called the OSRD. 264 00:12:44,950 --> 00:12:46,570 And it's a little bit confusing the way the 265 00:12:46,570 --> 00:12:47,820 terminology works. 266 00:12:52,590 --> 00:12:55,060 But they divided up into different divisions. 267 00:12:55,060 --> 00:12:57,630 There's a division for transport and communication; 268 00:12:57,630 --> 00:13:01,140 aircraft, submarines, and mine defense; guns, projectiles, 269 00:13:01,140 --> 00:13:04,940 and armor; and bombs, fuels, gases, and chemistry. 270 00:13:04,940 --> 00:13:07,540 And these tend to be things that are not things that they 271 00:13:07,540 --> 00:13:09,380 feel are being addressed 272 00:13:09,380 --> 00:13:11,550 adequately through the services. 273 00:13:11,550 --> 00:13:14,540 What's the one thing they leave out, by the way? 274 00:13:14,540 --> 00:13:16,180 They don't go near, they don't touch it? 275 00:13:19,680 --> 00:13:21,410 Aviation. 276 00:13:21,410 --> 00:13:24,280 They feel that the NACA, which Bush has then been chair of, 277 00:13:24,280 --> 00:13:27,680 the predecessor to NASA has aviation sewed up. 278 00:13:27,680 --> 00:13:29,260 AUDIENCE: Is fire control listed there? 279 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:31,430 PROFESSOR: Fire control is under guns, projectiles, 280 00:13:31,430 --> 00:13:34,670 armor, and materials. 281 00:13:34,670 --> 00:13:39,660 And so what they do in a sense is they grab onto all of the 282 00:13:39,660 --> 00:13:45,060 technologies that don't fit neatly into the services, the 283 00:13:45,060 --> 00:13:46,340 military services. 284 00:13:46,340 --> 00:13:49,420 And you'll see this again when we talk about DARPA. 285 00:13:49,420 --> 00:13:51,990 Because the Navy knows how to build ships. 286 00:13:51,990 --> 00:13:54,040 They're not going tell the Navy how to build ships. 287 00:13:54,040 --> 00:13:56,170 But the Navy doesn't know the first thing about radar, and 288 00:13:56,170 --> 00:13:58,730 they're not particularly good at radio, and they certainly 289 00:13:58,730 --> 00:14:03,320 don't think very much about other sorts of things. 290 00:14:03,320 --> 00:14:04,310 There's this great quote. 291 00:14:04,310 --> 00:14:06,700 I don't know if it's in that reading, from Bush, where he 292 00:14:06,700 --> 00:14:09,740 says, there were those who protested that the action of 293 00:14:09,740 --> 00:14:12,750 setting up the NDRC was an end run. 294 00:14:12,750 --> 00:14:15,080 A grab by which a small company of scientists and 295 00:14:15,080 --> 00:14:19,160 engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold 296 00:14:19,160 --> 00:14:21,240 of the authority and money for the program of 297 00:14:21,240 --> 00:14:23,340 developing new weapons. 298 00:14:23,340 --> 00:14:25,920 So they met a lot of resistance, particularly from 299 00:14:25,920 --> 00:14:28,980 the military itself, saying why are you guys doing this? 300 00:14:28,980 --> 00:14:32,170 And Bush says, that's in fact exactly what it was. 301 00:14:32,170 --> 00:14:33,030 It was an end run. 302 00:14:33,030 --> 00:14:34,940 They went around all the established people. 303 00:14:34,940 --> 00:14:37,750 There are millions and millions of dollars flowing 304 00:14:37,750 --> 00:14:40,590 into Navy laboratories, flowing into other things, but 305 00:14:40,590 --> 00:14:43,140 building very traditional weapons and things along the 306 00:14:43,140 --> 00:14:45,860 lines that they didn't feel were going to be really 307 00:14:45,860 --> 00:14:48,210 thinking differently. 308 00:14:48,210 --> 00:14:49,570 So they set this thing up. 309 00:14:49,570 --> 00:14:51,730 It's outside the Army. 310 00:14:51,730 --> 00:14:53,780 It's outside the Navy. 311 00:14:53,780 --> 00:14:57,350 And you have no idea what a bureaucracy is like until you 312 00:14:57,350 --> 00:15:00,640 look at the Army or the Navy in 1940. 313 00:15:00,640 --> 00:15:03,230 These are organizations that have existed for hundreds of 314 00:15:03,230 --> 00:15:06,690 years practically, or at least 150 years at that point. 315 00:15:09,270 --> 00:15:12,410 There was not a lot of rapid change going on, except maybe 316 00:15:12,410 --> 00:15:15,940 in the air arm in the Army. 317 00:15:15,940 --> 00:15:21,350 And they bring these people on who can actually understand, 318 00:15:21,350 --> 00:15:25,900 who can manage the research and pretty much write checks 319 00:15:25,900 --> 00:15:28,030 with government money, with a handshake. 320 00:15:28,030 --> 00:15:31,230 This is not the NSF, where you have to go through peer review 321 00:15:31,230 --> 00:15:33,230 and you have to get your program approved and all the 322 00:15:33,230 --> 00:15:35,070 sort of things that a lot of people here 323 00:15:35,070 --> 00:15:36,370 on campus do today. 324 00:15:36,370 --> 00:15:40,680 This is like, show up at somebody's lab, ask them if 325 00:15:40,680 --> 00:15:41,750 they'd like to be involved? 326 00:15:41,750 --> 00:15:45,330 And the next thing they know, they got a check for $250,000, 327 00:15:45,330 --> 00:15:47,735 which in 1940 is a lot of money for scientist. 328 00:15:50,240 --> 00:15:53,940 And one of the things they really get right early on is 329 00:15:53,940 --> 00:15:56,720 this whole business about electronics and what role 330 00:15:56,720 --> 00:16:00,930 electronics could potentially play in the war effort. 331 00:16:00,930 --> 00:16:02,280 There's radar. 332 00:16:02,280 --> 00:16:03,470 There's computing. 333 00:16:03,470 --> 00:16:05,980 There's different kinds of systems integration. 334 00:16:05,980 --> 00:16:08,080 I'll talk more and I'll show you some pictures about 335 00:16:08,080 --> 00:16:10,880 proximity fuses and fire control and 336 00:16:10,880 --> 00:16:12,410 I'll mention radar. 337 00:16:12,410 --> 00:16:14,940 And also of course, and Dupree mentions this, there's this 338 00:16:14,940 --> 00:16:15,920 uranium committee. 339 00:16:15,920 --> 00:16:18,350 Which is another one of these things that gee, it seems like 340 00:16:18,350 --> 00:16:19,270 it has potential. 341 00:16:19,270 --> 00:16:22,210 It's a bunch of pointy-headed scientists telling us some 342 00:16:22,210 --> 00:16:24,700 abstract thing that could be the greatest ever, but 343 00:16:24,700 --> 00:16:25,980 what do they know? 344 00:16:25,980 --> 00:16:29,350 These are like Hungarian physicists, who just have this 345 00:16:29,350 --> 00:16:31,520 idea on a blackboard. 346 00:16:31,520 --> 00:16:34,360 And this uranium committee had sort of existed. 347 00:16:34,360 --> 00:16:35,820 But the Army didn't really own it. 348 00:16:35,820 --> 00:16:37,180 The Navy didn't really own it. 349 00:16:37,180 --> 00:16:42,700 And of course it belongs then, it gets folded into the NDRC. 350 00:16:42,700 --> 00:16:45,060 What does it become? 351 00:16:45,060 --> 00:16:45,560 AUDIENCE: The Manhattan Project. 352 00:16:45,560 --> 00:16:47,730 PROFESSOR: The Manhattan Project. 353 00:16:47,730 --> 00:16:50,600 Then it actually branches out of NDRC. 354 00:16:50,600 --> 00:16:53,540 For a grant from the NSF. 355 00:16:53,540 --> 00:16:57,170 And say I want to get $100,000, how much do I need 356 00:16:57,170 --> 00:17:00,000 to get from the NSF? 357 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:01,710 Anybody know what the overhead rate is? 358 00:17:09,180 --> 00:17:11,930 It's like-- and I'll get this within 5% because I don't 359 00:17:11,930 --> 00:17:14,560 follow it every year-- it's like 63 and 1/2%. 360 00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:17,040 So if I want to get a grant, any faculty member you work 361 00:17:17,040 --> 00:17:20,280 with that goes to the NSF and needs $100,000 to do the work, 362 00:17:20,280 --> 00:17:23,359 I have to get $163,500. 363 00:17:23,359 --> 00:17:26,599 And that $63,500 from the top, just goes right off the top 364 00:17:26,599 --> 00:17:29,260 into MIT's bank account. 365 00:17:29,260 --> 00:17:31,743 And the reason I ask if you've heard about it, because a lot 366 00:17:31,743 --> 00:17:33,470 of faculty complain about it a lot because it 367 00:17:33,470 --> 00:17:35,050 feels kind of painful. 368 00:17:35,050 --> 00:17:37,200 And what does it do? 369 00:17:37,200 --> 00:17:39,830 Theoretically, it goes to pay for keeping the lights, on 370 00:17:39,830 --> 00:17:43,600 keeping the heat on, somebody to come in and sweep the lab 371 00:17:43,600 --> 00:17:46,500 out at night, all the different things, the 372 00:17:46,500 --> 00:17:49,610 paperwork, that it takes to actually run these grants. 373 00:17:49,610 --> 00:17:52,280 And it is expensive to do that. 374 00:17:52,280 --> 00:17:55,260 And most faculty see it as a big burden because gee, my 375 00:17:55,260 --> 00:18:00,560 $63,500 which the NSF gave me, suddenly gets taken as rent by 376 00:18:00,560 --> 00:18:02,480 my landlord. 377 00:18:02,480 --> 00:18:03,780 And what do I get in return? 378 00:18:03,780 --> 00:18:05,970 All I do is get somebody who comes in to sweep the floor 379 00:18:05,970 --> 00:18:09,100 and it sounds like a lot of money. 380 00:18:09,100 --> 00:18:11,770 And Dupree really tells you why that was so important. 381 00:18:11,770 --> 00:18:15,670 And it was invented in this month, pretty much. 382 00:18:15,670 --> 00:18:18,710 And it was one of the most critical ideas of getting all 383 00:18:18,710 --> 00:18:21,540 this stuff to work so impressively, which was-- 384 00:18:24,580 --> 00:18:29,070 MIT's total research budget in 1940, before this started, was 385 00:18:29,070 --> 00:18:33,340 on the order of $300,000, the entire research budget for the 386 00:18:33,340 --> 00:18:36,230 entire Institute. 387 00:18:36,230 --> 00:18:37,535 I wrote the number down here. 388 00:18:43,460 --> 00:19:01,550 Well, in total MIT got from the NDRC, $116 million. 389 00:19:04,870 --> 00:19:09,340 $116 million, even in today's world, is a lot of research. 390 00:19:09,340 --> 00:19:10,070 And what does that mean? 391 00:19:10,070 --> 00:19:12,400 It mostly means people and desks and laboratories and all 392 00:19:12,400 --> 00:19:13,530 that stuff. 393 00:19:13,530 --> 00:19:18,050 If MIT had to pay for building all those buildings and 394 00:19:18,050 --> 00:19:20,730 building all those desks and building all that heating and 395 00:19:20,730 --> 00:19:23,620 all that infrastructure, it have bankrupted the Institute 396 00:19:23,620 --> 00:19:26,630 by the time it got to $3 million. 397 00:19:26,630 --> 00:19:32,250 But they added this overhead charge on there so that any 398 00:19:32,250 --> 00:19:36,810 time money came for research to hire post-docs or research 399 00:19:36,810 --> 00:19:40,160 assistants or technicians or other people, it came with 400 00:19:40,160 --> 00:19:41,120 this overhead. 401 00:19:41,120 --> 00:19:46,160 That meant that the dollar figure could grow infinitely 402 00:19:46,160 --> 00:19:48,970 large, infinitely large. 403 00:19:48,970 --> 00:19:53,320 And again, think about that $300,000 to $116 million in 404 00:19:53,320 --> 00:19:55,040 under five years. 405 00:19:55,040 --> 00:19:58,690 We wish we saw that kind of growth now. 406 00:19:58,690 --> 00:20:01,360 And it was only able to happen because they built into this 407 00:20:01,360 --> 00:20:04,380 idea of the research contract, this notion of indirect costs. 408 00:20:04,380 --> 00:20:06,040 It was really a very fundamental thing that we 409 00:20:06,040 --> 00:20:07,390 still live with today. 410 00:20:07,390 --> 00:20:09,940 That means that if I as a faculty member went to DARPA 411 00:20:09,940 --> 00:20:13,340 and I got $100 million contract, MIT 412 00:20:13,340 --> 00:20:14,100 could support it. 413 00:20:14,100 --> 00:20:16,510 And they might have to build me a building, which happens 414 00:20:16,510 --> 00:20:18,700 all the time, you see these buildings around here. 415 00:20:18,700 --> 00:20:20,240 But they could actually do it. 416 00:20:25,040 --> 00:20:29,770 The other thing about it was all of the research contracts, 417 00:20:29,770 --> 00:20:32,100 the military, the only thing they knew how to do up until 418 00:20:32,100 --> 00:20:33,625 then was to buy stuff. 419 00:20:33,625 --> 00:20:34,560 It's called procurement. 420 00:20:34,560 --> 00:20:36,910 It's still something they do a lot of. 421 00:20:36,910 --> 00:20:39,450 So if I wanted to do an experimental radar set, the 422 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 423 00:20:42,080 --> 00:20:44,030 to buy 10 radar sets. 424 00:20:44,030 --> 00:20:45,960 And we probably won't even use them and they may not even 425 00:20:45,960 --> 00:20:47,970 work, but at least we'll have a contract that has a 426 00:20:47,970 --> 00:20:49,460 procurement. 427 00:20:49,460 --> 00:20:52,280 And what they invented during this period also with this R&D 428 00:20:52,280 --> 00:20:56,380 contract, where MIT doesn't deliver anything other than 429 00:20:56,380 --> 00:20:59,240 promising to put out its best effort to do the research and 430 00:20:59,240 --> 00:21:01,850 hopefully publish some papers on it. 431 00:21:01,850 --> 00:21:03,700 That was also a pretty revolutionary 432 00:21:03,700 --> 00:21:04,780 idea in that point. 433 00:21:04,780 --> 00:21:06,330 Until that point, there was no way for the 434 00:21:06,330 --> 00:21:07,580 government to do that. 435 00:21:10,810 --> 00:21:15,520 So here's what Dupree says about it. 436 00:21:15,520 --> 00:21:18,240 It's a nice little sentence that captures it all. 437 00:21:18,240 --> 00:21:20,910 The contract was the device by which universities and 438 00:21:20,910 --> 00:21:24,550 industrial research labs were preserved as institutions, 439 00:21:24,550 --> 00:21:27,840 even while their social role was radically changed. 440 00:21:27,840 --> 00:21:29,985 I mean this was very much the vision that people like Bush 441 00:21:29,985 --> 00:21:33,330 and Conant had, was we want to keep MIT for what it is, keep 442 00:21:33,330 --> 00:21:35,400 it as the character that it has. 443 00:21:35,400 --> 00:21:38,300 Obviously, it changed during the war in some basic ways. 444 00:21:38,300 --> 00:21:41,640 But it didn't change permanently in some sense. 445 00:21:41,640 --> 00:21:43,650 Where there's a free flow of ideas, there's an 446 00:21:43,650 --> 00:21:46,390 open flow of ideas. 447 00:21:46,390 --> 00:21:50,510 But I haven't addressed all these other kinds of problems. 448 00:21:50,510 --> 00:21:54,070 Without becoming part of the Army, or without it becoming 449 00:21:54,070 --> 00:21:56,940 part of the Navy, or having just everybody drafted and 450 00:21:56,940 --> 00:21:58,250 closing the place down for five years. 451 00:22:01,970 --> 00:22:08,720 So the NDRC is created in June of 1940. 452 00:22:08,720 --> 00:22:09,780 It gets up and running. 453 00:22:09,780 --> 00:22:14,830 It starts to issue its first contracts in September, 454 00:22:14,830 --> 00:22:16,970 October of 1940. 455 00:22:16,970 --> 00:22:19,040 I'll talk about the radiation lab in a couple minutes when I 456 00:22:19,040 --> 00:22:19,990 show the slides. 457 00:22:19,990 --> 00:22:23,160 Well, it's worth knowing that they get started under the 458 00:22:23,160 --> 00:22:27,270 NDRC in October, I believe, of 1940. 459 00:22:27,270 --> 00:22:30,160 They deliver their first radar set in March of 460 00:22:30,160 --> 00:22:31,000 the following year. 461 00:22:31,000 --> 00:22:34,420 So think about the turnaround there, to take a completely 462 00:22:34,420 --> 00:22:37,650 new technology and to deliver something the military can use 463 00:22:37,650 --> 00:22:40,300 in the field in four months. 464 00:22:40,300 --> 00:22:42,480 It was a pretty remarkable turn-around. 465 00:22:42,480 --> 00:22:44,650 And in fact, some people in their response papers 466 00:22:44,650 --> 00:22:48,060 mentioned the intensity of the environment that sort of 467 00:22:48,060 --> 00:22:50,380 developed around here during that period. 468 00:22:52,900 --> 00:22:59,650 And commenting, a couple people, that it was hard to 469 00:22:59,650 --> 00:23:02,370 imagine it was any more intense than it is today. 470 00:23:02,370 --> 00:23:04,970 Although it probably was. 471 00:23:04,970 --> 00:23:07,230 And one thing that wasn't really captured in the 472 00:23:07,230 --> 00:23:11,850 readings is why it was so intense? 473 00:23:11,850 --> 00:23:16,060 What was it that was driving people to work such long hours 474 00:23:16,060 --> 00:23:17,940 and put such incredible time in? 475 00:23:17,940 --> 00:23:20,270 Again, most of the people doing this work are people 476 00:23:20,270 --> 00:23:20,890 just like you. 477 00:23:20,890 --> 00:23:24,870 They're either students or just recent graduates who are 478 00:23:24,870 --> 00:23:26,120 occupying these labs. 479 00:23:31,750 --> 00:23:36,320 Especially for the men, what happens to all your friends? 480 00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:38,120 AUDIENCE: Going and getting drafted. 481 00:23:38,120 --> 00:23:41,350 PROFESSOR: Well, what are all your friends doing? 482 00:23:41,350 --> 00:23:42,180 AUDIENCE: Getting drafted. 483 00:23:42,180 --> 00:23:43,915 PROFESSOR: Either getting drafted or signing up. 484 00:23:46,930 --> 00:23:49,310 It's not that the people who are working in the labs are 485 00:23:49,310 --> 00:23:51,420 trying to avoid getting drafted. 486 00:23:51,420 --> 00:23:54,870 That's more of a product of later wars. 487 00:23:54,870 --> 00:23:57,420 They're exempted from the draft because they're doing 488 00:23:57,420 --> 00:23:58,920 critical work. 489 00:23:58,920 --> 00:24:02,410 And there's a lot of social pressure about not shirking 490 00:24:02,410 --> 00:24:03,960 your service. 491 00:24:03,960 --> 00:24:07,370 So it can be seen as a kind of embarrassment to be exempted 492 00:24:07,370 --> 00:24:10,650 from the draft to do laboratory work. 493 00:24:10,650 --> 00:24:11,815 It's a sort of cushy assignment. 494 00:24:11,815 --> 00:24:15,200 It's the sort of thing that people like Dick Cheney and 495 00:24:15,200 --> 00:24:18,370 George Bush were criticized for during 496 00:24:18,370 --> 00:24:20,920 presidential campaigns. 497 00:24:20,920 --> 00:24:23,080 All your friends are going off to war and you're staying home 498 00:24:23,080 --> 00:24:26,770 in Cambridge, working at MIT. 499 00:24:26,770 --> 00:24:29,500 A lot of I think the motivation for people was they 500 00:24:29,500 --> 00:24:31,810 really wanted to prove they were doing something important 501 00:24:31,810 --> 00:24:34,880 and making a contribution to the war effort and not just 502 00:24:34,880 --> 00:24:36,150 avoiding the draft. 503 00:24:36,150 --> 00:24:39,230 Because they were exempted from the draft. 504 00:24:39,230 --> 00:24:43,850 And that they really were serving their country in the 505 00:24:43,850 --> 00:24:44,940 same kind of way. 506 00:24:44,940 --> 00:24:47,500 This was not the Vietnam War, which was very contentious 507 00:24:47,500 --> 00:24:49,260 about who went and who didn't go and who 508 00:24:49,260 --> 00:24:50,210 wanted to get drafted. 509 00:24:50,210 --> 00:24:53,160 This was where the entire country literally mobilized. 510 00:24:53,160 --> 00:24:56,430 And everybody's job, everybody's home life, 511 00:24:56,430 --> 00:24:57,530 everybody moved around. 512 00:24:57,530 --> 00:24:58,770 And it really fundamentally changed the 513 00:24:58,770 --> 00:25:00,160 country for that period. 514 00:25:00,160 --> 00:25:03,830 So you have this environment inside the laboratories which 515 00:25:03,830 --> 00:25:05,080 is very different. 516 00:25:07,090 --> 00:25:11,170 So a couple of statistics, as I mentioned MIT was the single 517 00:25:11,170 --> 00:25:14,790 largest recipient of OSRD already funds, I think by a 518 00:25:14,790 --> 00:25:19,200 factor of two or three, $116 million over five years. 519 00:25:19,200 --> 00:25:23,210 Again, that's a lot of money in today's world, much less in 520 00:25:23,210 --> 00:25:25,450 1940 dollars, where the total budget was 521 00:25:25,450 --> 00:25:29,250 $300,000 before then. 522 00:25:29,250 --> 00:25:33,120 There were about 2,300 contracts overall in the OSRD, 523 00:25:33,120 --> 00:25:34,750 totaling $500 million. 524 00:25:34,750 --> 00:25:38,850 So MIT got more than 20% of the total funds. 525 00:25:38,850 --> 00:25:42,700 It was a bit of an inside job, no doubt about it. 526 00:25:42,700 --> 00:25:46,110 The Radiation Laboratory by 1942, again it was only 527 00:25:46,110 --> 00:25:50,180 founded in the end of 1940, so within a year it was as large 528 00:25:50,180 --> 00:25:53,410 as the rest of MIT all together. 529 00:25:53,410 --> 00:25:55,390 And it was of course, right there. 530 00:25:59,330 --> 00:26:02,930 The overhead started out as 30% and got 531 00:26:02,930 --> 00:26:04,410 reduced down to 10%-- 532 00:26:04,410 --> 00:26:06,470 again today it's 63 and 1/2%-- 533 00:26:06,470 --> 00:26:09,670 because they didn't want to be seen as raking off all this 534 00:26:09,670 --> 00:26:10,920 cash that came in. 535 00:26:18,990 --> 00:26:20,580 And again, there was a lot of resistance. 536 00:26:20,580 --> 00:26:22,870 There's a great quote by Harold Bowen, who was the head 537 00:26:22,870 --> 00:26:24,120 of the Naval Research Laboratory. 538 00:26:24,120 --> 00:26:24,980 He was an MIT graduate. 539 00:26:24,980 --> 00:26:26,540 He said-- 540 00:26:26,540 --> 00:26:28,800 he's coming from within the Navy-- 541 00:26:28,800 --> 00:26:31,160 those of us who had been working in applied science for 542 00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:35,090 years cannot be blamed for not always enthusiastically 543 00:26:35,090 --> 00:26:37,800 endorsing all the efforts of the Johnny-come-latelys who 544 00:26:37,800 --> 00:26:39,540 inevitably steam into Washington at the 545 00:26:39,540 --> 00:26:40,830 beginning of the war. 546 00:26:40,830 --> 00:26:42,710 So that was how they viewed Vannevar Bush and all these 547 00:26:42,710 --> 00:26:44,450 scientists, was they were coming in. 548 00:26:44,450 --> 00:26:45,750 We've been working on radar. 549 00:26:45,750 --> 00:26:46,360 In fact, they did. 550 00:26:46,360 --> 00:26:49,750 The Naval Research Lab really invented radar. 551 00:26:49,750 --> 00:26:52,000 And here comes Vannevar Bush, saying we're going to do it 552 00:26:52,000 --> 00:26:53,280 all at MIT. 553 00:26:53,280 --> 00:26:55,410 And in a certain way, taking it away from the Naval 554 00:26:55,410 --> 00:26:56,200 Research Lab. 555 00:26:56,200 --> 00:27:00,930 Very contentious stuff, lots of power politics going on. 556 00:27:00,930 --> 00:27:03,470 Also with AT&T. I'll talk about that a 557 00:27:03,470 --> 00:27:04,720 little bit in a minute. 558 00:27:08,220 --> 00:27:10,580 Some of the other big benefactors, and I mention 559 00:27:10,580 --> 00:27:14,270 this because these places all still exist and may be places 560 00:27:14,270 --> 00:27:17,990 you'd come across, the Jet Propulsion 561 00:27:17,990 --> 00:27:20,150 Laboratory at Caltech-- 562 00:27:20,150 --> 00:27:21,880 anybody ever heard of that place? 563 00:27:21,880 --> 00:27:24,530 Founded right during this period. 564 00:27:24,530 --> 00:27:27,645 What do they do now? 565 00:27:27,645 --> 00:27:29,010 AUDIENCE: Stuff for NASA. 566 00:27:29,010 --> 00:27:30,560 PROFESSOR: Yeah, it's part of NASA. 567 00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:32,290 They do a lot of deep space probes. 568 00:27:32,290 --> 00:27:35,210 They did the Mars Rovers that you've read about. 569 00:27:35,210 --> 00:27:39,070 They do essentially nothing with jet propulsion. 570 00:27:39,070 --> 00:27:41,882 But they were founded, under the direction of Theodore von 571 00:27:41,882 --> 00:27:45,550 Karman, to do rocket research basically. 572 00:27:45,550 --> 00:27:48,010 There's a whole new institution out there created 573 00:27:48,010 --> 00:27:51,310 right about the same time, by the same thing. 574 00:27:51,310 --> 00:27:53,780 The Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. 575 00:27:53,780 --> 00:27:55,810 Anybody ever hear of that lab? 576 00:27:55,810 --> 00:27:58,050 Also a big government lab, associated with the 577 00:27:58,050 --> 00:27:59,790 university. 578 00:27:59,790 --> 00:28:02,560 They do all kinds of interesting secret stuff. 579 00:28:02,560 --> 00:28:05,915 They do submarine tracking and they do a lot of space design 580 00:28:05,915 --> 00:28:07,220 and they build satellites. 581 00:28:07,220 --> 00:28:10,925 And in fact, the former head of NASA, Mike 582 00:28:10,925 --> 00:28:13,710 Griffin came out of there. 583 00:28:13,710 --> 00:28:17,090 And they were founded in the same period to develop the 584 00:28:17,090 --> 00:28:19,530 proximity fuse, which was a little radar device. 585 00:28:19,530 --> 00:28:21,770 It was built into an artillery shell. 586 00:28:21,770 --> 00:28:24,280 It was designed to explode when it came near an airplane. 587 00:28:26,820 --> 00:28:30,980 So these are all places that still exist. 588 00:28:30,980 --> 00:28:34,320 A lot of these big government or quasi-government research 589 00:28:34,320 --> 00:28:35,570 labs exist. 590 00:28:38,710 --> 00:28:39,820 Let me maybe turn to the slides. 591 00:28:39,820 --> 00:28:41,270 Any questions on any of that? 592 00:28:45,860 --> 00:28:53,345 I have a few more numbers about the Rad Lab radar. 593 00:28:53,345 --> 00:28:57,720 AUDIENCE: I mean one of the things that comes out in the 594 00:28:57,720 --> 00:29:00,850 article by Debbie Douglas is that the significance of the 595 00:29:00,850 --> 00:29:05,210 microwave research here at MIT was it that allowed people to 596 00:29:05,210 --> 00:29:07,580 make radar units smaller. 597 00:29:07,580 --> 00:29:09,200 So what had existed before? 598 00:29:09,200 --> 00:29:10,890 You mentioned the Navy. 599 00:29:10,890 --> 00:29:11,990 PROFESSOR: I think I have pictures of that. 600 00:29:11,990 --> 00:29:13,440 AUDIENCE: OK, great. 601 00:29:13,440 --> 00:29:15,750 PROFESSOR: So here's one example. 602 00:29:15,750 --> 00:29:21,970 This will become relevant when we talk about Apollo actually. 603 00:29:21,970 --> 00:29:27,200 Again, one of the big concerns was about gunfire control. 604 00:29:27,200 --> 00:29:30,470 And this is a device-- 605 00:29:30,470 --> 00:29:31,860 I may have mentioned this before. 606 00:29:31,860 --> 00:29:34,790 Did I show this picture before so far? 607 00:29:34,790 --> 00:29:36,710 I actually have two of these things in my office. 608 00:29:36,710 --> 00:29:40,290 I bought them on eBay for about $25, still brand new in 609 00:29:40,290 --> 00:29:43,520 the box from 1945, when there were manufactured. 610 00:29:43,520 --> 00:29:47,080 And this is a gun site for a guy, an anti-aircraft gunner, 611 00:29:47,080 --> 00:29:48,330 aboard a Naval ship. 612 00:29:48,330 --> 00:29:51,960 And what it does is it's got two gyroscopes in it. 613 00:29:51,960 --> 00:29:55,510 And it has a little mirror and it automatically calculates 614 00:29:55,510 --> 00:29:57,230 the lead for the gunner. 615 00:29:57,230 --> 00:30:00,880 So if there's an airplane coming in and you've got to 616 00:30:00,880 --> 00:30:05,260 lead it by some amount in order to fire ahead of it, 617 00:30:05,260 --> 00:30:08,150 because it takes time for the bullets to get there, and it 618 00:30:08,150 --> 00:30:10,520 can be very hard to train people to do that, that's how 619 00:30:10,520 --> 00:30:12,640 you shoot skeet and stuff. 620 00:30:12,640 --> 00:30:15,060 And what this thing does, is it just says, if you just put 621 00:30:15,060 --> 00:30:19,980 the cross-hairs in your site, on the actual airplane, it 622 00:30:19,980 --> 00:30:22,400 will automatically calculate the lead and sort of force 623 00:30:22,400 --> 00:30:24,710 your hands to lead the gun. 624 00:30:24,710 --> 00:30:28,990 And this was built by, not only by Charles Stark Draper 625 00:30:28,990 --> 00:30:32,300 in the Instrumentation Lab here, but also by Bob Siemens, 626 00:30:32,300 --> 00:30:34,600 who was one of his students, who then became second in 627 00:30:34,600 --> 00:30:36,430 command at NASA during the Apollo program. 628 00:30:36,430 --> 00:30:37,920 We'll talk about that. 629 00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:43,040 And was one of their first forays into gyroscopes, which 630 00:30:43,040 --> 00:30:46,620 then became really important during the Cold War and later. 631 00:30:46,620 --> 00:30:49,560 I keep pushing the wrong side of the mouse. 632 00:30:49,560 --> 00:30:51,820 And this is actually how it worked. 633 00:30:51,820 --> 00:30:56,650 So you can see they can just see the site and it sort of 634 00:30:56,650 --> 00:30:59,790 forces the gunner, if he keep the cross-hair on the plane, 635 00:30:59,790 --> 00:31:01,620 to calculate the lead. 636 00:31:01,620 --> 00:31:05,190 And one of the reasons I show you this is that one of the 637 00:31:05,190 --> 00:31:09,240 real themes that runs through the work that gets done at MIT 638 00:31:09,240 --> 00:31:12,450 is not just the microwave physics itself, but the user 639 00:31:12,450 --> 00:31:14,130 interfaces for a lot of these things. 640 00:31:14,130 --> 00:31:16,690 And building on that work that we talked about with the 641 00:31:16,690 --> 00:31:20,110 differential analyzer, how you actually kind of match these 642 00:31:20,110 --> 00:31:23,300 systems to human performance is really one of the big 643 00:31:23,300 --> 00:31:24,360 themes in the research. 644 00:31:24,360 --> 00:31:27,400 And that sort of leads us obviously up through Weiner 645 00:31:27,400 --> 00:31:28,650 and cybernetics. 646 00:31:30,730 --> 00:31:35,370 This is one of the divisions of the NDRC, which was devoted 647 00:31:35,370 --> 00:31:39,320 to fire control, which is that's the same issue about 648 00:31:39,320 --> 00:31:42,130 how do you aim these different kinds of guns? 649 00:31:42,130 --> 00:31:45,620 And I give you this list because I want to show you the 650 00:31:45,620 --> 00:31:50,410 combination of people who were here and the representatives 651 00:31:50,410 --> 00:31:54,990 from both industry and the government and then also in 652 00:31:54,990 --> 00:31:56,630 the world of computing. 653 00:31:56,630 --> 00:31:59,560 So just to give you a couple examples. 654 00:31:59,560 --> 00:32:03,380 This guy here is Warren Weaver, who is one of the 655 00:32:03,380 --> 00:32:05,590 senior people at the Rockefeller Foundation, who 656 00:32:05,590 --> 00:32:08,300 funds Bush's differential analyzer. 657 00:32:08,300 --> 00:32:12,410 Also is the guy who invented the term "molecular biology." 658 00:32:12,410 --> 00:32:16,200 And so he comes from the kind of pre-World War II private 659 00:32:16,200 --> 00:32:18,980 foundation world of science funding. 660 00:32:18,980 --> 00:32:21,330 This is Preston Bassett, who is the president of the Sperry 661 00:32:21,330 --> 00:32:25,050 Gyroscope Company, which makes a lot of these kinds of 662 00:32:25,050 --> 00:32:27,060 control systems. 663 00:32:27,060 --> 00:32:30,580 Harold Hazen, who is a student of Bush, who writes the first 664 00:32:30,580 --> 00:32:34,610 paper on the theory of servomechanisms in 1934 and 665 00:32:34,610 --> 00:32:36,395 becomes dean of engineering at MIT. 666 00:32:39,620 --> 00:32:44,430 This guy here is George Stibitz. 667 00:32:44,430 --> 00:32:48,590 He invented the word "digital" and built all kinds of control 668 00:32:48,590 --> 00:32:51,840 computers out of telephone relays during the war. 669 00:32:51,840 --> 00:32:52,800 This guy is Ivan Getting. 670 00:32:52,800 --> 00:32:54,450 And I'll talk about him in a little bit. 671 00:32:54,450 --> 00:32:56,610 He did a lot of the early work on radar. 672 00:32:56,610 --> 00:32:59,480 And later on, was really the father of the GPS 673 00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:04,180 constellation, that we now use to navigate our cars. 674 00:33:04,180 --> 00:33:06,150 Karl Wildes, also a electrical engineering 675 00:33:06,150 --> 00:33:08,740 professor here at MIT. 676 00:33:08,740 --> 00:33:11,950 George Philbrick, who really kind of invented the analog 677 00:33:11,950 --> 00:33:14,140 computer, electrical analog computer. 678 00:33:14,140 --> 00:33:17,290 And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. 679 00:33:17,290 --> 00:33:19,330 So you have all these people sort of coming together on 680 00:33:19,330 --> 00:33:20,330 this problem. 681 00:33:20,330 --> 00:33:22,680 None of them had ever thought about this problem before in 682 00:33:22,680 --> 00:33:23,920 their entire careers. 683 00:33:23,920 --> 00:33:26,060 Which was sort of a benefit, right, because the Navy 684 00:33:26,060 --> 00:33:28,760 figured they knew how to do it and all these guys just sort 685 00:33:28,760 --> 00:33:31,930 of came in and did it in a different way, 686 00:33:31,930 --> 00:33:35,520 with some fresh ideas. 687 00:33:35,520 --> 00:33:38,130 This is an electronic, analog electronic 688 00:33:38,130 --> 00:33:39,380 computer that they built. 689 00:33:42,220 --> 00:33:44,530 You see these two guys here looking through these sites. 690 00:33:44,530 --> 00:33:47,470 The actual electronics for the computer is here. 691 00:33:47,470 --> 00:33:50,850 And they follow an airplane with these optical sites. 692 00:33:50,850 --> 00:33:54,050 And then it actually has giant servos on the gun that 693 00:33:54,050 --> 00:33:56,740 actually point the gun to aim it in the right place 694 00:33:56,740 --> 00:33:57,810 and then fire it. 695 00:33:57,810 --> 00:33:59,050 So it's the beginning of a kind of 696 00:33:59,050 --> 00:34:00,840 integrated control system. 697 00:34:00,840 --> 00:34:06,550 And anybody here ever hear the term "operational amplifier" 698 00:34:06,550 --> 00:34:08,580 or use an operational amplifier? 699 00:34:08,580 --> 00:34:11,530 It's one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. 700 00:34:11,530 --> 00:34:13,409 It's sort of the basic feedback loop. 701 00:34:13,409 --> 00:34:16,739 Any of you take, what is it 6002, I think they probably do 702 00:34:16,739 --> 00:34:18,595 op amps in that course. 703 00:34:18,595 --> 00:34:23,380 The first op amps are invented to go into this device. 704 00:34:23,380 --> 00:34:25,969 And the whole idea of a feedback amplifier being used 705 00:34:25,969 --> 00:34:29,560 to do addition and subtraction and multiplication and 706 00:34:29,560 --> 00:34:32,620 division and integration and differentiation, all comes out 707 00:34:32,620 --> 00:34:36,194 of this device, from again, from the telephone company. 708 00:34:39,480 --> 00:34:41,909 Again, we read about Wiener. 709 00:34:41,909 --> 00:34:44,400 Weiner is a sort of mathematical adviser to all 710 00:34:44,400 --> 00:34:45,949 these guys. 711 00:34:45,949 --> 00:34:51,860 The book that I assigned the intro for you is from 1948, 712 00:34:51,860 --> 00:34:52,810 Cybernetics. 713 00:34:52,810 --> 00:34:55,250 But as he talks about in there, really kind of the 714 00:34:55,250 --> 00:34:58,620 genesis of it was him thinking about anti-aircraft fire 715 00:34:58,620 --> 00:35:01,136 control during the Second World War. 716 00:35:01,136 --> 00:35:05,110 And of course, now we have the idea of cyberspace and cyber 717 00:35:05,110 --> 00:35:08,800 this, and my Sony Cyber-shot, and all this kind of stuff. 718 00:35:08,800 --> 00:35:13,680 The basic ideas of a lot of this came from people like 719 00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:16,700 Norbert Wiener, working out not only the basic 720 00:35:16,700 --> 00:35:18,746 mathematics-- 721 00:35:18,746 --> 00:35:21,550 in fact, you can see them on the board here. 722 00:35:21,550 --> 00:35:26,650 If you read the rest of that book of Cybernetics, which is 723 00:35:26,650 --> 00:35:31,540 a lot of mathematics, a lot of it is the basic equations for 724 00:35:31,540 --> 00:35:35,000 what today you call signal processing or digital signal 725 00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:35,460 processing. 726 00:35:35,460 --> 00:35:37,250 It wasn't digital when he did it. 727 00:35:37,250 --> 00:35:39,940 But the whole idea of correlation and convolution 728 00:35:39,940 --> 00:35:43,700 and different kinds of filters and stuff 729 00:35:43,700 --> 00:35:44,900 is came out of there. 730 00:35:44,900 --> 00:35:45,880 Yup? 731 00:35:45,880 --> 00:35:48,330 AUDIENCE: So actually I got curious and went onto 732 00:35:48,330 --> 00:35:49,800 Wikipedia and looked them up. 733 00:35:49,800 --> 00:35:52,500 Those equations are actually on Wikipedia under an article 734 00:35:52,500 --> 00:35:54,080 called the "Weiner filter." 735 00:35:54,080 --> 00:35:55,100 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 736 00:35:55,100 --> 00:35:58,760 The Weiner filter is a sort of classic optimal filter that is 737 00:35:58,760 --> 00:36:00,650 a predecessor to the common filter, which is something 738 00:36:00,650 --> 00:36:02,340 that people use all the time today in 739 00:36:02,340 --> 00:36:03,590 design and control systems. 740 00:36:09,350 --> 00:36:12,810 There's Building 20, which is the actual radiation lab. 741 00:36:12,810 --> 00:36:16,000 Let's see if we can orient ourselves to it. 742 00:36:16,000 --> 00:36:19,090 Well, I'll let you see if you can do it. 743 00:36:19,090 --> 00:36:20,340 What are you seeing there? 744 00:36:23,904 --> 00:36:25,370 AUDIENCE: Is that Vassar Street? 745 00:36:25,370 --> 00:36:25,650 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 746 00:36:25,650 --> 00:36:28,920 This is Vassar Street here. 747 00:36:28,920 --> 00:36:30,330 AUDIENCE: Oh, wow. 748 00:36:30,330 --> 00:36:32,210 It's really big. 749 00:36:32,210 --> 00:36:33,650 PROFESSOR: It's big. 750 00:36:33,650 --> 00:36:35,480 It was built in about four months. 751 00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:38,780 It lasted about 40 years, probably longer, 45 years. 752 00:36:41,450 --> 00:36:43,180 It was basically built like an army barracks. 753 00:36:46,530 --> 00:36:47,840 What's this right here? 754 00:36:53,090 --> 00:36:53,680 I think that's us. 755 00:36:53,680 --> 00:36:55,900 AUDIENCE: That's where we are now. 756 00:36:55,900 --> 00:36:58,110 PROFESSOR: Where we are right now. 757 00:36:58,110 --> 00:36:59,515 In fact, yeah. 758 00:36:59,515 --> 00:37:01,270 AUDIENCE: Almost exactly. 759 00:37:01,270 --> 00:37:02,280 PROFESSOR: What's this? 760 00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:02,990 AUDIENCE: Swimming pool. 761 00:37:02,990 --> 00:37:04,580 PROFESSOR: That's the alumni pool, which is right out the 762 00:37:04,580 --> 00:37:07,290 window, which was already built then. 763 00:37:07,290 --> 00:37:10,480 Everything that happened is built around that. 764 00:37:10,480 --> 00:37:11,740 And so here is the-- 765 00:37:15,890 --> 00:37:17,310 I'm not sure which building that is. 766 00:37:17,310 --> 00:37:21,070 That looks like one of the original main group buildings. 767 00:37:21,070 --> 00:37:22,700 So there's the Rad Lab. 768 00:37:22,700 --> 00:37:24,140 You can see this huge loading dock. 769 00:37:24,140 --> 00:37:27,020 Lots of stuff going in and going out. 770 00:37:27,020 --> 00:37:28,410 These different kind of fingers. 771 00:37:28,410 --> 00:37:30,960 And all these wacky radar antennas up on the roof for 772 00:37:30,960 --> 00:37:33,170 experimental testing. 773 00:37:33,170 --> 00:37:39,190 Does nobody know what was it-- 774 00:37:39,190 --> 00:37:40,960 it's still there today-- the Christian 775 00:37:40,960 --> 00:37:43,920 Science church downtown? 776 00:37:43,920 --> 00:37:46,100 If you go like to Boston Symphony Hall, there's a big 777 00:37:46,100 --> 00:37:48,560 plaza and there's a dome. 778 00:37:48,560 --> 00:37:51,390 Which before Boston was built up, that was one of the 779 00:37:51,390 --> 00:37:53,430 prominent features of the Boston skyline. 780 00:37:53,430 --> 00:37:56,680 That was the first microwave radar target in history, from 781 00:37:56,680 --> 00:37:59,810 a building at MIT, fired over and reflected off that dome. 782 00:38:05,010 --> 00:38:14,390 This is just an image of the various labs. 783 00:38:14,390 --> 00:38:18,950 There's many of these different labs in the Rad Lab. 784 00:38:18,950 --> 00:38:22,190 And it's considered a kind of prototype of what a modern R&D 785 00:38:22,190 --> 00:38:24,250 lab could be set up like. 786 00:38:24,250 --> 00:38:25,960 You can see here, it's divided up. 787 00:38:25,960 --> 00:38:31,000 There's a receiver lab, an indicator antenna lab, a 788 00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:32,280 shielded room, a darkroom. 789 00:38:36,130 --> 00:38:37,450 If you know the history of physics, 790 00:38:37,450 --> 00:38:38,840 you'll know a lot of-- 791 00:38:38,840 --> 00:38:40,890 Lee Dubridge was the head of it. 792 00:38:40,890 --> 00:38:44,410 I.I. Rabi is a famous Columbia physicist. 793 00:38:44,410 --> 00:38:47,280 Kenneth Bainbridge I think was a Nobel Prize winner. 794 00:38:47,280 --> 00:38:50,440 I'm not sure about that. 795 00:38:50,440 --> 00:38:52,030 Pollard later won the Nobel Prize. 796 00:38:55,740 --> 00:38:58,990 So lots of people, who later became very, very important, 797 00:38:58,990 --> 00:39:02,030 including people like Paul Samuelson, the Noble Prize 798 00:39:02,030 --> 00:39:09,860 winning economist here at MIT, that you might not expect. 799 00:39:09,860 --> 00:39:11,720 So the Rad Lab gets started around this 800 00:39:11,720 --> 00:39:13,580 device, the cavity magnetron. 801 00:39:13,580 --> 00:39:15,170 Anybody seen something like this before? 802 00:39:18,360 --> 00:39:20,556 There's two places you might have seen it. 803 00:39:20,556 --> 00:39:22,420 AUDIENCE: It's on the poster in Lab 7. 804 00:39:22,420 --> 00:39:22,930 PROFESSOR: So three. 805 00:39:22,930 --> 00:39:24,540 It is on the poster in Lab 7. 806 00:39:24,540 --> 00:39:25,370 Very good. 807 00:39:25,370 --> 00:39:27,550 I forgot about that one. 808 00:39:27,550 --> 00:39:28,160 Where else? 809 00:39:28,160 --> 00:39:28,680 AUDIENCE: The museum. 810 00:39:28,680 --> 00:39:31,800 PROFESSOR: So there's one in the museum. 811 00:39:31,800 --> 00:39:34,790 One other place you might have seen it, knowing what MIT 812 00:39:34,790 --> 00:39:37,560 students might be like. 813 00:39:37,560 --> 00:39:39,520 If you ever take apart a microwave oven, you'll see one 814 00:39:39,520 --> 00:39:42,200 of these things inside there. 815 00:39:42,200 --> 00:39:43,310 In fact, that's kind of the only place 816 00:39:43,310 --> 00:39:44,650 you'll still find them. 817 00:39:44,650 --> 00:39:48,910 So this device is only about this big. 818 00:39:48,910 --> 00:39:50,330 If you go to the museum, you'll see it. 819 00:39:50,330 --> 00:39:52,070 It's one of the 150 objects. 820 00:39:52,070 --> 00:39:57,480 And radar had been invented in the early '30s really. 821 00:39:57,480 --> 00:39:59,350 But it was pretty long-wave radar. 822 00:39:59,350 --> 00:40:01,750 I may have a picture of it. 823 00:40:01,750 --> 00:40:03,150 Yeah. 824 00:40:03,150 --> 00:40:06,590 So this is pre-World War II radar. 825 00:40:06,590 --> 00:40:08,500 This is built by Western Electric, which is 826 00:40:08,500 --> 00:40:09,930 part of Bell Labs. 827 00:40:09,930 --> 00:40:12,450 And there's a couple of key things to notice about it. 828 00:40:12,450 --> 00:40:13,790 What do you notice about it? 829 00:40:17,070 --> 00:40:18,250 It's really big. 830 00:40:18,250 --> 00:40:19,500 Why is it big? 831 00:40:22,758 --> 00:40:24,160 AUDIENCE: With long waves. 832 00:40:24,160 --> 00:40:27,360 AUDIENCE: It's using relatively long wavelengths, 833 00:40:27,360 --> 00:40:30,090 in the sort of hundreds of megahertz wavelengths. 834 00:40:30,090 --> 00:40:31,940 You can see the antenna and all the wires 835 00:40:31,940 --> 00:40:33,090 for it on the left. 836 00:40:33,090 --> 00:40:34,710 And this is pretty much state of the art when 837 00:40:34,710 --> 00:40:36,220 the Rad Lab is founded. 838 00:40:36,220 --> 00:40:38,530 And more or less, this is an American radar. 839 00:40:38,530 --> 00:40:40,840 But the British have a version of this that they used during 840 00:40:40,840 --> 00:40:43,740 the Battle of Britain, they call it Chain Home, that is 841 00:40:43,740 --> 00:40:45,880 able to detect attacking aircraft. 842 00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:48,694 And it does actually work in fact. 843 00:40:48,694 --> 00:40:52,680 In fact, the Pear Harbor attack was detected by one of 844 00:40:52,680 --> 00:40:56,380 these right radars, as SCR-268 268, before it happened, a 845 00:40:56,380 --> 00:40:57,670 couple hours before it happened. 846 00:40:57,670 --> 00:41:00,480 But nobody really had any faith in the technology. 847 00:41:00,480 --> 00:41:01,070 And it was new. 848 00:41:01,070 --> 00:41:02,350 And people didn't really understand it. 849 00:41:02,350 --> 00:41:04,220 And it was just a bunch of blips on the screen. 850 00:41:04,220 --> 00:41:09,120 And the warning that the radar station issued, was ignored. 851 00:41:09,120 --> 00:41:11,970 Tells you something about any technology needs to develop 852 00:41:11,970 --> 00:41:15,260 its own credibility and to have people believe in it. 853 00:41:15,260 --> 00:41:19,100 After that, they tended to believe in it, once it-- 854 00:41:19,100 --> 00:41:20,920 But it's a very big radar. 855 00:41:20,920 --> 00:41:22,850 It's pretty unwieldy. 856 00:41:22,850 --> 00:41:24,710 You can see, it probably didn't work very well in the 857 00:41:24,710 --> 00:41:28,720 rain, because the guys are all standing there outside, 858 00:41:28,720 --> 00:41:31,740 exposed, and the electronics are fairly exposed. 859 00:41:31,740 --> 00:41:34,800 He's just looking into an oscilloscope right there. 860 00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:36,760 That's a pre-World War II oscilloscope. 861 00:41:36,760 --> 00:41:38,685 It's the size of a Volkswagen practically. 862 00:41:38,685 --> 00:41:43,610 And you see he's looking in through just a darkened hood. 863 00:41:43,610 --> 00:41:45,840 And the British, the problem was that for higher 864 00:41:45,840 --> 00:41:48,750 frequencies, it was that very hard to generate enough power, 865 00:41:48,750 --> 00:41:51,310 at what they call microwave frequencies, which is sort of 866 00:41:51,310 --> 00:41:54,970 centimeters and below, in the kind of high hundreds of 867 00:41:54,970 --> 00:41:57,870 megahertz up to several gigahertz range. 868 00:41:57,870 --> 00:41:59,380 And the British come up with this thing 869 00:41:59,380 --> 00:42:01,440 called a cavity magnetron. 870 00:42:06,390 --> 00:42:09,420 There it is. 871 00:42:09,420 --> 00:42:12,310 And again, it's not a big device at all. 872 00:42:12,310 --> 00:42:17,080 But I'll show you the shape of it in a little bit. 873 00:42:17,080 --> 00:42:20,200 It's got a central hole and there's little resonators all 874 00:42:20,200 --> 00:42:21,720 around it, a very characteristic shape of what's 875 00:42:21,720 --> 00:42:22,610 inside there. 876 00:42:22,610 --> 00:42:24,780 You put that in a magnetic field and pump a very high 877 00:42:24,780 --> 00:42:27,960 voltage into it and it generates really large, very 878 00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:29,990 high-power microwaves. 879 00:42:29,990 --> 00:42:33,040 And this has all kinds of advantages. 880 00:42:33,040 --> 00:42:35,760 But the key one is that it's just small and the antennas 881 00:42:35,760 --> 00:42:38,250 are small and it allows you to do all kinds of different 882 00:42:38,250 --> 00:42:39,110 things with it. 883 00:42:39,110 --> 00:42:42,720 But it implies a whole new kind of electronics. 884 00:42:42,720 --> 00:42:46,070 For example, you may be familiar with this, but 885 00:42:46,070 --> 00:42:48,370 microwaves at high powers don't really like to go 886 00:42:48,370 --> 00:42:49,820 through wires. 887 00:42:49,820 --> 00:42:51,810 They need to go through pipes. 888 00:42:51,810 --> 00:42:52,670 What are those pipes called? 889 00:42:52,670 --> 00:42:54,090 Anybody know? 890 00:42:54,090 --> 00:42:54,560 AUDIENCE: Wave guides. 891 00:42:54,560 --> 00:42:55,730 PROFESSOR: They're called wave guides, right. 892 00:42:55,730 --> 00:42:57,150 So you have to invent a whole new kind 893 00:42:57,150 --> 00:42:58,440 of wiring or plumbing. 894 00:42:58,440 --> 00:43:01,750 You literally plumb this kind of stuff through. 895 00:43:01,750 --> 00:43:04,220 And all that stuff didn't exist. 896 00:43:04,220 --> 00:43:05,960 But what the British did was they built this. 897 00:43:05,960 --> 00:43:08,030 They figured out that it worked. 898 00:43:08,030 --> 00:43:11,530 And in September of 1940, they were being bombed to 899 00:43:11,530 --> 00:43:14,830 smithereens by the Nazis on a regular basis. 900 00:43:14,830 --> 00:43:16,780 They were barely surviving the war effort. 901 00:43:16,780 --> 00:43:18,920 And they didn't have a big electronics industry. 902 00:43:18,920 --> 00:43:22,020 So it wasn't easy for them to contemplate how to manufacture 903 00:43:22,020 --> 00:43:23,700 this thing in large numbers. 904 00:43:23,700 --> 00:43:28,380 So one scientist, his name was Sir Henry Tizard, he came over 905 00:43:28,380 --> 00:43:32,140 to the US on an ocean liner, exposed to Nazi submarines. 906 00:43:32,140 --> 00:43:33,630 And he brought one of these. 907 00:43:33,630 --> 00:43:37,630 Actually, I think he brought three of them in a trunk that 908 00:43:37,630 --> 00:43:39,600 he kept under his bed on the ocean liner. 909 00:43:39,600 --> 00:43:42,100 It was probably the most secret military technology of 910 00:43:42,100 --> 00:43:44,000 the war at the time. 911 00:43:44,000 --> 00:43:49,390 And he just brought it on this civilian liner, sort of 912 00:43:49,390 --> 00:43:51,340 wrapped up in his socks and underwear. 913 00:43:51,340 --> 00:43:52,280 That's exaggeration. 914 00:43:52,280 --> 00:43:54,510 I think he had a special box for it. 915 00:43:54,510 --> 00:43:55,310 And he brought them. 916 00:43:55,310 --> 00:43:57,990 And he brought them to the government and said, we have 917 00:43:57,990 --> 00:43:58,870 this thing. 918 00:43:58,870 --> 00:44:01,470 And we want you to have it. 919 00:44:01,470 --> 00:44:03,080 And we want the Americans to figure it out. 920 00:44:03,080 --> 00:44:06,480 They actually intended for Bell Labs to deal with it. 921 00:44:06,480 --> 00:44:09,160 And they brought it to the NDRC and Bush sort of said, 922 00:44:09,160 --> 00:44:10,470 well, we'll bring this up to MIT. 923 00:44:10,470 --> 00:44:12,130 And they founded a lab about it. 924 00:44:12,130 --> 00:44:15,230 That's what happens in October of 1940. 925 00:44:15,230 --> 00:44:17,620 And that's when the Radiation Lab is founded. 926 00:44:17,620 --> 00:44:19,760 And it's interesting, because Rabi is said to 927 00:44:19,760 --> 00:44:20,970 have taken it out. 928 00:44:20,970 --> 00:44:23,570 And people said to him, he said well, how does this thing 929 00:44:23,570 --> 00:44:25,050 actually work? 930 00:44:25,050 --> 00:44:25,800 And they said well, that's easy. 931 00:44:25,800 --> 00:44:27,620 It works just like a whistle. 932 00:44:27,620 --> 00:44:31,040 It's like an electronic whistle, because you put power 933 00:44:31,040 --> 00:44:33,350 into it and it generates a resonance. 934 00:44:33,350 --> 00:44:36,020 And then Rabi looks up at it and he says, OK, well tell me 935 00:44:36,020 --> 00:44:37,600 how a whistle works? 936 00:44:37,600 --> 00:44:39,625 And nobody at the time could really explain to him how a 937 00:44:39,625 --> 00:44:41,120 whistle worked. 938 00:44:41,120 --> 00:44:43,780 But that's not a bad way to think about what the cavity 939 00:44:43,780 --> 00:44:46,530 magnetron does. 940 00:44:46,530 --> 00:44:48,860 AUDIENCE: So are you implying that the establishment of the 941 00:44:48,860 --> 00:44:52,970 Rad Lab here really rested on the proposition that it's not 942 00:44:52,970 --> 00:44:54,980 what you know, but you know? 943 00:44:54,980 --> 00:44:56,370 PROFESSOR: To some degree. 944 00:44:56,370 --> 00:44:59,140 And actually it should be said that of the three, I can't 945 00:44:59,140 --> 00:45:01,060 remember the exact number that came over, one of them 946 00:45:01,060 --> 00:45:03,450 went to Bell Labs. 947 00:45:03,450 --> 00:45:06,130 And they also did a lot of work in microwave radar during 948 00:45:06,130 --> 00:45:08,715 the war, but there was work enough to do for everybody. 949 00:45:13,410 --> 00:45:14,720 So this is an image-- 950 00:45:14,720 --> 00:45:17,170 I actually have a blown-up picture of this on the wall in 951 00:45:17,170 --> 00:45:20,110 my office, because one of the great things about the Rad Lab 952 00:45:20,110 --> 00:45:24,590 is that photography was kind of newly cheap at the time. 953 00:45:24,590 --> 00:45:27,890 And they documented a lot of the research with thousands 954 00:45:27,890 --> 00:45:29,300 and thousands of photographs. 955 00:45:29,300 --> 00:45:32,510 And years ago, I was working through some of those 956 00:45:32,510 --> 00:45:36,020 photographs at the MIT Museum and I said to Debbie Douglas, 957 00:45:36,020 --> 00:45:38,576 there's great pictures of daily life at MIT during World 958 00:45:38,576 --> 00:45:42,070 War II in the Rad Lab things, that are not the sort of PR 959 00:45:42,070 --> 00:45:44,250 photos you usually see about the Rad Lab. 960 00:45:44,250 --> 00:45:46,090 And then she took a bunch of those photos, and they're all 961 00:45:46,090 --> 00:45:49,430 beautiful four by five negatives, and blew them up 962 00:45:49,430 --> 00:45:52,610 and did a little art show of them. 963 00:45:52,610 --> 00:45:54,510 And this is one which I really like. 964 00:45:54,510 --> 00:45:56,480 And I'll turn the lights off, if I can. 965 00:45:56,480 --> 00:45:58,600 Just generally you can see them better. 966 00:46:12,460 --> 00:46:14,000 That do anything? 967 00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:14,940 Nope. 968 00:46:14,940 --> 00:46:16,190 OK. 969 00:46:19,380 --> 00:46:24,490 Just to look at them a little bit about life at MIT during 970 00:46:24,490 --> 00:46:26,630 the war, which Debbie's chapter does a nice job of 971 00:46:26,630 --> 00:46:27,810 describing. 972 00:46:27,810 --> 00:46:29,590 What can you observe from this image? 973 00:46:33,964 --> 00:46:34,936 Yep? 974 00:46:34,936 --> 00:46:37,970 AUDIENCE: The really, really high waist lines. 975 00:46:37,970 --> 00:46:39,780 PROFESSOR: OK, high waist lines. 976 00:46:39,780 --> 00:46:41,040 AUDIENCE: God, who wears there pants up that high? 977 00:46:44,800 --> 00:46:45,750 AUDIENCE: Both women. 978 00:46:45,750 --> 00:46:47,390 PROFESSOR: There are women there. 979 00:46:47,390 --> 00:46:50,500 A lot of women worked at the Rad Lab, very, very mixed 980 00:46:50,500 --> 00:46:52,650 gender environment. 981 00:46:52,650 --> 00:46:54,620 AUDIENCE: That would be sort of the scientific version of 982 00:46:54,620 --> 00:46:57,190 Rosie the Riveter in that sense. 983 00:46:57,190 --> 00:46:59,690 Lots of women go into the workforce doing this-- 984 00:46:59,690 --> 00:47:02,438 AUDIENCE: They were going to work as scientists or as other 985 00:47:02,438 --> 00:47:02,900 technicians. 986 00:47:02,900 --> 00:47:04,540 PROFESSOR: Mostly as technicians and 987 00:47:04,540 --> 00:47:06,190 administrators. 988 00:47:06,190 --> 00:47:08,810 Actually, I'm not even aware of one that worked as a senior 989 00:47:08,810 --> 00:47:10,405 scientist or even an engineer. 990 00:47:13,260 --> 00:47:14,510 What else? 991 00:47:17,576 --> 00:47:19,052 AUDIENCE: The facilities are not like-- 992 00:47:22,004 --> 00:47:23,901 I can see piping. 993 00:47:23,901 --> 00:47:24,370 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 994 00:47:24,370 --> 00:47:26,020 So that's pretty much the inside of Building 20. 995 00:47:26,020 --> 00:47:27,490 That's what it looked like. 996 00:47:27,490 --> 00:47:29,920 It was literally built in a few weeks. 997 00:47:29,920 --> 00:47:31,170 What else? 998 00:47:35,060 --> 00:47:38,220 This one just captures this, I think the sort of sense of the 999 00:47:38,220 --> 00:47:40,270 pace that the place must have had. 1000 00:47:40,270 --> 00:47:41,470 You have a sense, everybody's busy. 1001 00:47:41,470 --> 00:47:43,220 They're walking somewhere quickly. 1002 00:47:43,220 --> 00:47:44,290 They're moving things around. 1003 00:47:44,290 --> 00:47:46,070 There's equipment coming across the hall. 1004 00:47:46,070 --> 00:47:47,680 That is a microwave radar antenna. 1005 00:47:47,680 --> 00:47:50,110 That's a pretty radical departure from the previous 1006 00:47:50,110 --> 00:47:52,570 slide I showed you of what a radar antenna looked like. 1007 00:47:52,570 --> 00:47:56,720 That you can imagine putting on board an airplane. 1008 00:47:56,720 --> 00:47:59,830 And there's also the two cigarettes there. 1009 00:47:59,830 --> 00:48:01,440 These guys all sort of identically dressed. 1010 00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:04,150 You get the sense it's a place where just things are moving 1011 00:48:04,150 --> 00:48:06,370 fast, sort of like MIT today. 1012 00:48:06,370 --> 00:48:09,350 It wouldn't be out of place that scene, in the Infinite 1013 00:48:09,350 --> 00:48:11,620 Corridor between classes today. 1014 00:48:15,780 --> 00:48:20,340 Here is another image, a much more formal one obviously, of 1015 00:48:20,340 --> 00:48:23,630 the steering committee of the Rad Lab. 1016 00:48:23,630 --> 00:48:27,590 You see people in here, like I mentioned Ivan Getting, who is 1017 00:48:27,590 --> 00:48:34,700 here, who later went on, as I mentioned, to sort of spun the 1018 00:48:34,700 --> 00:48:36,780 GPS project. 1019 00:48:36,780 --> 00:48:41,510 Anybody know who that is right there? 1020 00:48:41,510 --> 00:48:44,070 That's Jerry Weisner, who later became President 1021 00:48:44,070 --> 00:48:47,540 Kennedy's science adviser and president of MIT. 1022 00:48:47,540 --> 00:48:50,930 I think this is Lee Dubridge, who's the head of it. 1023 00:48:50,930 --> 00:48:52,665 But again, a pretty informal environment. 1024 00:48:56,670 --> 00:49:00,110 Part of the weekly meeting, another one. 1025 00:49:00,110 --> 00:49:03,970 This may be the first time here, and Debbie had mentioned 1026 00:49:03,970 --> 00:49:06,080 in her article and a bunch you mentioned in your response 1027 00:49:06,080 --> 00:49:09,260 papers, the secrecy that was going on. 1028 00:49:09,260 --> 00:49:13,240 Now, these days if any of have ever worked in even a mild 1029 00:49:13,240 --> 00:49:15,320 corporate lab, you probably have to wear a 1030 00:49:15,320 --> 00:49:17,720 badge all the time. 1031 00:49:17,720 --> 00:49:19,320 This was probably the first time people had to 1032 00:49:19,320 --> 00:49:20,960 wear badges at MIT. 1033 00:49:20,960 --> 00:49:22,270 And this is what a badge looked like. 1034 00:49:22,270 --> 00:49:23,770 It was a little button. 1035 00:49:23,770 --> 00:49:29,120 It had your picture on it, your employee number, and 1036 00:49:29,120 --> 00:49:31,430 allowed you to get into certain places and not into 1037 00:49:31,430 --> 00:49:34,050 other places. 1038 00:49:34,050 --> 00:49:36,180 Again, it was called the Radiation 1039 00:49:36,180 --> 00:49:38,030 Laboratory for a reason. 1040 00:49:38,030 --> 00:49:40,266 What was the reason? 1041 00:49:40,266 --> 00:49:42,680 AUDIENCE: Disguise. 1042 00:49:42,680 --> 00:49:44,850 PROFESSOR: To fool people into thinking it might be a nuclear 1043 00:49:44,850 --> 00:49:47,120 physics laboratory. 1044 00:49:47,120 --> 00:49:48,650 It was about radiation. 1045 00:49:48,650 --> 00:49:52,510 But it was not called the radar-- well, the word "radar" 1046 00:49:52,510 --> 00:49:55,620 wasn't even well recognized anyway at that point. 1047 00:49:55,620 --> 00:49:57,535 But it tried to disguise it. 1048 00:50:00,250 --> 00:50:02,080 Again, as we mentioned, lots of women 1049 00:50:02,080 --> 00:50:03,330 working in these labs. 1050 00:50:08,290 --> 00:50:10,770 Probably a pretty different work environment than what 1051 00:50:10,770 --> 00:50:11,560 people were used to. 1052 00:50:11,560 --> 00:50:16,130 Even though we've talked about women at MIT before, not in 1053 00:50:16,130 --> 00:50:18,240 these kind of numbers and this much involved in 1054 00:50:18,240 --> 00:50:19,490 the technical work. 1055 00:50:22,650 --> 00:50:25,090 This is just a page out of the yearbook that the Rad Lab 1056 00:50:25,090 --> 00:50:26,720 produced, showing all the different kinds 1057 00:50:26,720 --> 00:50:28,120 of things they did. 1058 00:50:28,120 --> 00:50:30,280 It didn't come out that well in the slide here. 1059 00:50:33,450 --> 00:50:36,640 Another image, I love their images of this sort of 1060 00:50:36,640 --> 00:50:38,645 electronic experimentation stuff. 1061 00:50:42,080 --> 00:50:43,940 It has s sort of thrown together sense of the 1062 00:50:43,940 --> 00:50:47,100 director's chair, an oscilloscope. 1063 00:50:47,100 --> 00:50:49,110 What I find interesting is that a lot of the connectors 1064 00:50:49,110 --> 00:50:51,220 on all these machines are still connectors you might use 1065 00:50:51,220 --> 00:50:54,010 today, like a BMC connector. 1066 00:50:54,010 --> 00:50:56,250 You still see those everywhere. 1067 00:50:56,250 --> 00:50:58,430 And this is what it took to get this stuff up and running. 1068 00:51:04,880 --> 00:51:10,160 More pictures of the labs, in this case without people. 1069 00:51:10,160 --> 00:51:17,890 So this is probably the radar that was shown before in that 1070 00:51:17,890 --> 00:51:22,100 hallway photo and is one of the more famous products of 1071 00:51:22,100 --> 00:51:22,490 the Rad Lab. 1072 00:51:22,490 --> 00:51:24,010 It was called H2X. 1073 00:51:24,010 --> 00:51:26,810 And what H2X did was it allowed, if 1074 00:51:26,810 --> 00:51:28,720 you were in a bomber-- 1075 00:51:28,720 --> 00:51:32,160 the US and the British were bombing Germany on a regular 1076 00:51:32,160 --> 00:51:34,750 basis during most of the war-- 1077 00:51:34,750 --> 00:51:37,940 but they had this famous Norden bombsight, which would 1078 00:51:37,940 --> 00:51:39,570 allow you to sight bombs. 1079 00:51:39,570 --> 00:51:41,060 What was the problem with the Norden 1080 00:51:41,060 --> 00:51:42,310 bombsight, anybody know? 1081 00:51:46,514 --> 00:51:50,130 If it was cloudy, you couldn't use it. 1082 00:51:50,130 --> 00:51:52,790 And if anybody's ever been to Germany or northern Europe, 1083 00:51:52,790 --> 00:51:57,330 during eight months of the year it's pretty cloudy. 1084 00:51:57,330 --> 00:51:59,640 And what this is, is a microwave radar. 1085 00:51:59,640 --> 00:52:06,320 Again, it's not just an advantage that the antenna is 1086 00:52:06,320 --> 00:52:08,230 small, but the wavelengths are small enough. 1087 00:52:08,230 --> 00:52:10,190 You can see things that are very small, so you can make 1088 00:52:10,190 --> 00:52:11,310 out a lot of detail. 1089 00:52:11,310 --> 00:52:14,240 But you could actually fly over in cloud cover and map 1090 00:52:14,240 --> 00:52:16,890 out a river and a city and all this stuff. 1091 00:52:16,890 --> 00:52:23,150 And it allowed them to bomb with radar, either at night or 1092 00:52:23,150 --> 00:52:24,500 in bad weather. 1093 00:52:24,500 --> 00:52:26,130 It had a huge impact. 1094 00:52:26,130 --> 00:52:27,940 The other thing about H2X, it was very important. 1095 00:52:27,940 --> 00:52:29,940 It's worth keeping in mind about radar, because you see 1096 00:52:29,940 --> 00:52:31,590 this with other weapons projects. 1097 00:52:31,590 --> 00:52:34,590 Almost any weapons project that got made during the war, 1098 00:52:34,590 --> 00:52:37,990 that actually was designed to blow something up, it was 1099 00:52:37,990 --> 00:52:42,600 very, very hard for it to have impact in the war because for 1100 00:52:42,600 --> 00:52:46,950 one thing, to go from a prototype in October of 1940 1101 00:52:46,950 --> 00:52:50,210 through development and testing and production pretty 1102 00:52:50,210 --> 00:52:51,790 much took the whole war. 1103 00:52:51,790 --> 00:52:53,660 So there was basically one full 1104 00:52:53,660 --> 00:52:55,080 product development cycle. 1105 00:52:55,080 --> 00:52:57,590 If you look at like the great airplanes of the Second World 1106 00:52:57,590 --> 00:53:01,270 War, the B29, the B17, these were all finished by the time 1107 00:53:01,270 --> 00:53:04,170 the war started and it still took them years to get into 1108 00:53:04,170 --> 00:53:06,110 production. 1109 00:53:06,110 --> 00:53:09,860 Whereas, if you had, a radar, you could basically make one 1110 00:53:09,860 --> 00:53:14,410 of them, send it out in the field in one of a bombing raid 1111 00:53:14,410 --> 00:53:16,770 of 1,000 bombers and make a difference. 1112 00:53:16,770 --> 00:53:20,410 So radar had this leveraging effect, where you could use 1113 00:53:20,410 --> 00:53:21,980 very, very small numbers of them and 1114 00:53:21,980 --> 00:53:23,750 still have a big impact. 1115 00:53:23,750 --> 00:53:27,750 Which any kind of gun, if you didn't make a gun in numbers 1116 00:53:27,750 --> 00:53:29,730 of the tens of thousands, it was not going to have any 1117 00:53:29,730 --> 00:53:30,980 impact on the war. 1118 00:53:34,888 --> 00:53:35,800 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. 1119 00:53:35,800 --> 00:53:37,734 PROFESSOR: Yep. 1120 00:53:37,734 --> 00:53:41,220 AUDIENCE: How long between the development of that product 1121 00:53:41,220 --> 00:53:44,720 would it be then on plane? 1122 00:53:44,720 --> 00:53:46,210 PROFESSOR: In the case of the radiation lab, it would be 1123 00:53:46,210 --> 00:53:46,955 weeks or months. 1124 00:53:46,955 --> 00:53:47,670 AUDIENCE: Weeks or months. 1125 00:53:47,670 --> 00:53:51,200 PROFESSOR: And actually, no small number of MIT engineers 1126 00:53:51,200 --> 00:53:53,170 went in the field, made them work, 1127 00:53:53,170 --> 00:53:55,100 went on bombing missions. 1128 00:53:55,100 --> 00:53:58,700 A few of them were killed, literally taking these things 1129 00:53:58,700 --> 00:54:00,570 in the field. 1130 00:54:00,570 --> 00:54:03,520 Think about it any lab prototype you've ever made, it 1131 00:54:03,520 --> 00:54:06,770 may be a little rickety in terms of its robustness for 1132 00:54:06,770 --> 00:54:07,580 being in the field. 1133 00:54:07,580 --> 00:54:10,340 It takes a lot of engineering to go from there to a package 1134 00:54:10,340 --> 00:54:12,480 that some soldier is going to take out of a box. 1135 00:54:12,480 --> 00:54:13,950 They didn't always wait for that time. 1136 00:54:13,950 --> 00:54:16,610 And they did send people directly from the Rad Lab into 1137 00:54:16,610 --> 00:54:19,490 the field, to train the troops and help them get up to speed. 1138 00:54:19,490 --> 00:54:23,260 In fact, Karl Compton, the president of MIT, was not-- 1139 00:54:23,260 --> 00:54:26,780 in a sense, Bush, before then, he was junior to Compton. 1140 00:54:26,780 --> 00:54:30,020 He goes in and becomes head of the NDRC and is senior to him. 1141 00:54:30,020 --> 00:54:32,400 Compton became head of what was called the Office of Field 1142 00:54:32,400 --> 00:54:34,250 Service, where they did exactly that. 1143 00:54:34,250 --> 00:54:36,490 They took all these things out and they helped people 1144 00:54:36,490 --> 00:54:39,100 understand how to use them. 1145 00:54:39,100 --> 00:54:42,780 There's a B17 at Hanscom Field, right out in the 1146 00:54:42,780 --> 00:54:48,920 suburbs here, where the Rad Lab had a station. 1147 00:54:48,920 --> 00:54:52,560 And they would do a lot of testing and a lot of different 1148 00:54:52,560 --> 00:54:54,910 experimentation and flight tests and stuff, 1149 00:54:54,910 --> 00:54:57,380 also at Logan Airport. 1150 00:54:57,380 --> 00:55:05,480 Here's a H2X installation inside a B17, to allow the 1151 00:55:05,480 --> 00:55:07,320 radar operator to look through the sight. 1152 00:55:07,320 --> 00:55:09,130 And again, think about what a different kind 1153 00:55:09,130 --> 00:55:10,600 of radar this is. 1154 00:55:10,600 --> 00:55:13,970 The one I showed you from before, the prewar radar, 1155 00:55:13,970 --> 00:55:16,150 they're basically soldiers on the battlefield, these guys. 1156 00:55:16,150 --> 00:55:19,170 They're wearing helmets and they're very exposed. 1157 00:55:19,170 --> 00:55:22,180 Here, not only are you in a high-altitude bomber, but the 1158 00:55:22,180 --> 00:55:23,010 guy has a desk. 1159 00:55:23,010 --> 00:55:26,940 It's much more like bringing a laboratory out into the war 1160 00:55:26,940 --> 00:55:27,970 time field. 1161 00:55:27,970 --> 00:55:31,340 And there's a lot of interesting stuff about 1162 00:55:31,340 --> 00:55:34,410 thinking about radar as a way to isolate yourself from the 1163 00:55:34,410 --> 00:55:36,645 battlefield and manipulate things on screens. 1164 00:55:39,170 --> 00:55:41,480 One of the technicians who worked on these radars was a 1165 00:55:41,480 --> 00:55:43,080 guy named-- 1166 00:55:43,080 --> 00:55:45,430 well, what's the name-- 1167 00:55:45,430 --> 00:55:47,290 Douglas Engelbart. 1168 00:55:47,290 --> 00:55:48,540 Anybody know what he did? 1169 00:55:51,170 --> 00:55:54,180 He invented the mouse. 1170 00:55:54,180 --> 00:55:57,240 And he'll tell you, during the war I worked on radar. 1171 00:55:57,240 --> 00:55:59,930 And I started to deal with like moving things around as 1172 00:55:59,930 --> 00:56:02,870 blips on screens using things to turn things around. 1173 00:56:02,870 --> 00:56:04,940 And after the war, when I started to work at Stanford 1174 00:56:04,940 --> 00:56:09,680 and user interface stuff, he was not an MIT guy, some of 1175 00:56:09,680 --> 00:56:12,540 the ideas for interactive computing really came out of 1176 00:56:12,540 --> 00:56:15,830 this idea of looking at a screen. 1177 00:56:18,630 --> 00:56:22,440 This is a famous image, one of the Rad Lab's 1178 00:56:22,440 --> 00:56:24,400 sort of iconic images. 1179 00:56:24,400 --> 00:56:25,906 Anybody know what it is? 1180 00:56:25,906 --> 00:56:26,860 AUDIENCE: It's Cape Cod. 1181 00:56:26,860 --> 00:56:27,930 PROFESSOR: It's Cape Cod, right. 1182 00:56:27,930 --> 00:56:30,430 So this here is just a map showing you where 1183 00:56:30,430 --> 00:56:31,650 the airplane was. 1184 00:56:31,650 --> 00:56:32,760 And there's a radar on there. 1185 00:56:32,760 --> 00:56:34,670 The antenna spins around. 1186 00:56:34,670 --> 00:56:39,870 And this is one of the first H2X images, plotting out the 1187 00:56:39,870 --> 00:56:42,870 contours of the land there. 1188 00:56:42,870 --> 00:56:46,570 And so you'll see this appear in another second in something 1189 00:56:46,570 --> 00:56:48,260 I'll show you. 1190 00:56:48,260 --> 00:56:51,180 But this gives you the sense of, very, very different from 1191 00:56:51,180 --> 00:56:52,150 blips on a screen. 1192 00:56:52,150 --> 00:56:54,860 You're really able to sort of map where you. 1193 00:56:54,860 --> 00:56:57,740 A whole other level of detail and in the military setting, 1194 00:56:57,740 --> 00:57:00,630 that was very, very important. 1195 00:57:00,630 --> 00:57:03,090 Here's even a higher resolution one. 1196 00:57:03,090 --> 00:57:06,360 This is an image from an airplane, looking at another 1197 00:57:06,360 --> 00:57:08,380 airplane nearby. 1198 00:57:08,380 --> 00:57:11,265 And just to get a sense for that resolution, too. 1199 00:57:11,265 --> 00:57:13,840 You know, crude by today's standards in some sense of 1200 00:57:13,840 --> 00:57:20,510 digital radars and stuff, but pretty fancy for that day. 1201 00:57:20,510 --> 00:57:26,570 And anybody know what this is, dead giveaway? 1202 00:57:26,570 --> 00:57:28,780 This is the northern coast of France on D-Day. 1203 00:57:28,780 --> 00:57:33,770 And here is the radar image of the fleet that's going to be 1204 00:57:33,770 --> 00:57:36,140 the invasion force, taken from an airplane. 1205 00:57:36,140 --> 00:57:43,030 And you can see 6 June, 7:00 o'clock in the morning, taken 1206 00:57:43,030 --> 00:57:44,160 from a plane that was above. 1207 00:57:44,160 --> 00:57:46,530 This is Western England. 1208 00:57:50,100 --> 00:57:52,760 Another interesting radar is this one. 1209 00:57:52,760 --> 00:57:55,540 It's a SCR-584. 1210 00:57:55,540 --> 00:57:57,460 It was actually the first tracking radar. 1211 00:57:57,460 --> 00:58:00,310 And so in the history of control theory and feedback 1212 00:58:00,310 --> 00:58:02,200 control, it was the first radar that could actually move 1213 00:58:02,200 --> 00:58:05,020 its antenna based on where it's target 1214 00:58:05,020 --> 00:58:07,500 was and follow something. 1215 00:58:07,500 --> 00:58:13,840 And they actually used these to track the buzz bombs that 1216 00:58:13,840 --> 00:58:17,050 came across to England later in the war 1217 00:58:17,050 --> 00:58:18,580 and shoot them down. 1218 00:58:18,580 --> 00:58:23,710 It became also sort of an iconic radar, because this 1219 00:58:23,710 --> 00:58:24,940 tracking head, it's interesting, 1220 00:58:24,940 --> 00:58:26,485 it was made by Chrysler. 1221 00:58:26,485 --> 00:58:28,400 And a lot of the gearing in it was taken 1222 00:58:28,400 --> 00:58:30,650 out of Chrysler trucks. 1223 00:58:30,650 --> 00:58:31,680 And it has these servos on it. 1224 00:58:31,680 --> 00:58:35,120 It was a very, very good, very high precision tracking head. 1225 00:58:35,120 --> 00:58:37,970 You see it in post-war photographs for tracking 1226 00:58:37,970 --> 00:58:40,980 rockets and doing sort of early NASA work. 1227 00:58:40,980 --> 00:58:44,330 And you'll still see these radar mounts. 1228 00:58:44,330 --> 00:58:46,690 If you ever watch like storm trackers or anything, and 1229 00:58:46,690 --> 00:58:49,510 their people who track tornadoes and stuff, they 1230 00:58:49,510 --> 00:58:53,250 actually use army surplus radar mounts like this. 1231 00:58:53,250 --> 00:58:56,930 But this radar also, sort of serves the same purpose as the 1232 00:58:56,930 --> 00:58:59,040 268 that I showed you before. 1233 00:58:59,040 --> 00:59:02,530 but again, they bring the operators inside the trailer, 1234 00:59:02,530 --> 00:59:04,500 inside this sort of closed laboratory. 1235 00:59:04,500 --> 00:59:07,760 And it's very much thinking of the battlefield and the 1236 00:59:07,760 --> 00:59:10,680 electronic battlefield of bringing all these blips into 1237 00:59:10,680 --> 00:59:12,620 a laboratory setting. 1238 00:59:12,620 --> 00:59:16,250 And again, but the ultimate culmination of that are these 1239 00:59:16,250 --> 00:59:18,280 big command and control centers you see during the 1240 00:59:18,280 --> 00:59:21,570 Cold War, you see during the space program, but it's just 1241 00:59:21,570 --> 00:59:24,040 the beginning of that. 1242 00:59:24,040 --> 00:59:27,420 That's the inside of a CR-584, where they can plot 1243 00:59:27,420 --> 00:59:29,370 things on the map. 1244 00:59:29,370 --> 00:59:31,010 Also, this was one of the early air 1245 00:59:31,010 --> 00:59:32,950 traffic control radars. 1246 00:59:32,950 --> 00:59:35,600 It was precise enough that they could tell the pilots 1247 00:59:35,600 --> 00:59:39,350 where they were and guide them by radio, say come up, come 1248 00:59:39,350 --> 00:59:43,030 down, come up and down, and land them in very, very rough 1249 00:59:43,030 --> 00:59:44,280 weather conditions. 1250 00:59:47,600 --> 00:59:49,470 So I think this is the last image. 1251 00:59:49,470 --> 00:59:54,210 This is actually an important image. 1252 00:59:54,210 --> 00:59:57,370 At the end of the war, anybody know what happened to the 1253 00:59:57,370 --> 00:59:58,620 Radiation Lab? 1254 01:00:02,600 --> 01:00:03,470 Is it here today? 1255 01:00:03,470 --> 01:00:05,270 Any of you students in the Rad Lab? 1256 01:00:05,270 --> 01:00:07,331 Nope. 1257 01:00:07,331 --> 01:00:10,140 AUDIENCE: I think part of it became the RLE. 1258 01:00:10,140 --> 01:00:12,730 PROFESSOR: Part of it did become the RLE. 1259 01:00:12,730 --> 01:00:14,810 And the rest of it? 1260 01:00:14,810 --> 01:00:16,830 It just closed down one day. 1261 01:00:16,830 --> 01:00:24,220 And went from 1945 to 1946, it shut down by a factor of 95%, 1262 01:00:24,220 --> 01:00:28,400 and then all together in 1947. 1263 01:00:28,400 --> 01:00:29,720 Which is a very interesting thing. 1264 01:00:29,720 --> 01:00:31,850 It would be very hard to do in today's world. 1265 01:00:31,850 --> 01:00:35,750 Remember from the Hunter Dupree article about Bush, one 1266 01:00:35,750 --> 01:00:38,380 of the reasons he was able to grow this thing so quickly and 1267 01:00:38,380 --> 01:00:41,160 so rapidly was that he always promised it would only last 1268 01:00:41,160 --> 01:00:42,580 until the war was over. 1269 01:00:42,580 --> 01:00:44,630 And then it ended and he kept true to his word. 1270 01:00:44,630 --> 01:00:46,630 And the OSRD closed down. 1271 01:00:46,630 --> 01:00:49,590 The NDRC closed down. 1272 01:00:49,590 --> 01:00:53,820 And the Rad Lab just closed down. 1273 01:00:53,820 --> 01:00:58,600 Which by the way, was not a bad way to influence the 1274 01:00:58,600 --> 01:01:00,090 American electronics industry. 1275 01:01:00,090 --> 01:01:02,855 Why? 1276 01:01:02,855 --> 01:01:04,707 AUDIENCE: Probably there were lots of people who knew about 1277 01:01:04,707 --> 01:01:06,100 electronics looking for work. 1278 01:01:06,100 --> 01:01:08,050 PROFESSOR: It dispersed all that knowledge 1279 01:01:08,050 --> 01:01:09,710 out into the world. 1280 01:01:09,710 --> 01:01:12,980 And a lot of those people, many of them went to work on 1281 01:01:12,980 --> 01:01:15,470 radar, but a lot of them went to work on television. 1282 01:01:15,470 --> 01:01:18,800 The early American television industry was largely composed 1283 01:01:18,800 --> 01:01:21,760 of Rad Lab graduates, who knew a lot about 1284 01:01:21,760 --> 01:01:23,770 high frequency control. 1285 01:01:23,770 --> 01:01:27,690 Also a lot of the early vacuum but computers, Eckert and 1286 01:01:27,690 --> 01:01:32,210 Mauchly, who built ENIAC at University of Pennsylvania-- 1287 01:01:32,210 --> 01:01:33,250 I know I'm going to forget which one-- 1288 01:01:33,250 --> 01:01:35,610 I think it was Mauchly, came from the Rad Lab, where he 1289 01:01:35,610 --> 01:01:38,580 learned about how to make vacuum tubes do high-speed 1290 01:01:38,580 --> 01:01:41,740 pulse electronics, which by the way is essentially digital 1291 01:01:41,740 --> 01:01:43,780 electronics. 1292 01:01:43,780 --> 01:01:46,140 So these people all dispersed into the world. 1293 01:01:46,140 --> 01:01:49,510 The RLE, which still does exist today, became the kind 1294 01:01:49,510 --> 01:01:55,150 of intellectual core, people like Wiesner and Wiener, a 1295 01:01:55,150 --> 01:01:55,980 bunch of other people-- 1296 01:01:55,980 --> 01:02:00,550 I'll talk about that in the next two weeks, I think. 1297 01:02:00,550 --> 01:02:02,910 And otherwise, the Radiation Lab closed down. 1298 01:02:02,910 --> 01:02:06,440 But before they did, I meant to bring one of these, they 1299 01:02:06,440 --> 01:02:10,310 published everything they did in a big series of textbooks. 1300 01:02:10,310 --> 01:02:13,250 I think it's like 28 textbooks. 1301 01:02:13,250 --> 01:02:16,240 And they just published it out to the world by McGraw Hill, 1302 01:02:16,240 --> 01:02:19,350 not secret, not classified, none of that. 1303 01:02:19,350 --> 01:02:23,780 And some of the first books in servomechanisms were there, 1304 01:02:23,780 --> 01:02:25,700 antenna design, systems engineering. 1305 01:02:25,700 --> 01:02:27,780 The first book ever in systems engineering came 1306 01:02:27,780 --> 01:02:28,570 out of the Rad Lab. 1307 01:02:28,570 --> 01:02:30,860 It was called Radar System Engineering. 1308 01:02:30,860 --> 01:02:32,730 And they have this characteristic. 1309 01:02:32,730 --> 01:02:34,290 You can still get them. 1310 01:02:34,290 --> 01:02:36,000 But the original ones had this sort of 1311 01:02:36,000 --> 01:02:37,540 burgundy cover with it. 1312 01:02:37,540 --> 01:02:39,410 And this was the logo they had on the front. 1313 01:02:39,410 --> 01:02:40,660 So what is that logo? 1314 01:02:44,160 --> 01:02:45,880 It's the Cape Cod image. 1315 01:02:45,880 --> 01:02:48,180 Anybody know what this is? 1316 01:02:48,180 --> 01:02:49,120 AUDIENCE: That's the cavity. 1317 01:02:49,120 --> 01:02:49,360 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 1318 01:02:49,360 --> 01:02:52,710 That's the shape inside the cavity magnetron. 1319 01:02:52,710 --> 01:02:54,990 It's sort of their logo. 1320 01:02:54,990 --> 01:02:57,410 And if you cut a cavity magnetron open, that's what 1321 01:02:57,410 --> 01:03:00,320 you'd see, is those little circles that are all the 1322 01:03:00,320 --> 01:03:03,900 different resonate cavities, where I believe the wavelength 1323 01:03:03,900 --> 01:03:06,785 of the radar is the circumference of that cavity. 1324 01:03:10,530 --> 01:03:11,360 I meant to bring-- 1325 01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:13,570 I have a few of the volumes. 1326 01:03:13,570 --> 01:03:14,680 I don't have the whole set. 1327 01:03:14,680 --> 01:03:15,730 You can buy the whole set on eBay. 1328 01:03:15,730 --> 01:03:16,685 It's not hard to fine. 1329 01:03:16,685 --> 01:03:19,070 Because most people think of it as obsolete. 1330 01:03:19,070 --> 01:03:23,590 But you can find them in the libraries, as well. 1331 01:03:23,590 --> 01:03:25,660 And it's a very famous textbook series. 1332 01:03:25,660 --> 01:03:28,440 And for most people who studied electronics in the 1333 01:03:28,440 --> 01:03:32,100 postwar period, they learned a lot of it from this Radiation 1334 01:03:32,100 --> 01:03:33,810 Lab series of textbooks. 1335 01:03:33,810 --> 01:03:36,400 So we were talking about secrecy and the effects of 1336 01:03:36,400 --> 01:03:38,280 secrecy on campus. 1337 01:03:38,280 --> 01:03:41,460 This is a sort of anti-secrecy effect, that it really just 1338 01:03:41,460 --> 01:03:42,990 had the goal of-- 1339 01:03:42,990 --> 01:03:44,630 yes, the Russians got it. 1340 01:03:44,630 --> 01:03:46,310 Yes. 1341 01:03:46,310 --> 01:03:48,280 Maybe some of our enemies learned something from it. 1342 01:03:48,280 --> 01:03:52,930 But that was probably way less proportional than what our own 1343 01:03:52,930 --> 01:03:55,726 people learn about it and what came out of it. 1344 01:03:55,726 --> 01:03:59,480 I think that's my last slide. 1345 01:03:59,480 --> 01:04:01,970 AUDIENCE: That was the origins of OpenCourseWare? 1346 01:04:01,970 --> 01:04:03,250 PROFESSOR: The origins of OpenCourseWare, 1347 01:04:03,250 --> 01:04:04,140 in some way, yeah. 1348 01:04:04,140 --> 01:04:06,010 I mean I think that was the same kind of spirit. 1349 01:04:06,010 --> 01:04:08,170 And that's one of the reasons that people like Bush felt 1350 01:04:08,170 --> 01:04:10,190 that this stuff belong in universities. 1351 01:04:10,190 --> 01:04:13,220 Because if it was in the Navy lab or in an Army lab, it 1352 01:04:13,220 --> 01:04:15,110 would go behind closed doors and stay there 1353 01:04:15,110 --> 01:04:15,880 forever pretty much. 1354 01:04:15,880 --> 01:04:17,670 It's very hard to get stuff published out of there. 1355 01:04:23,530 --> 01:04:25,840 I'll just look at in the numbers I have 1356 01:04:25,840 --> 01:04:27,090 here, if any of them-- 1357 01:04:30,930 --> 01:04:35,580 So then going on from there, I mean the Research Lab of 1358 01:04:35,580 --> 01:04:38,050 Electronics is a really interesting 1359 01:04:38,050 --> 01:04:39,240 topic in and of itself. 1360 01:04:39,240 --> 01:04:43,670 And they get into acoustics in a big way. 1361 01:04:43,670 --> 01:04:47,330 People like, as we mentioned, Jerry Wiesner is there. 1362 01:04:47,330 --> 01:04:49,100 Weiner is there. 1363 01:04:49,100 --> 01:04:50,980 People like Amar Bose come out of there. 1364 01:04:50,980 --> 01:04:53,310 And the Bose Corporation, who may make your headphones or 1365 01:04:53,310 --> 01:04:56,900 your speakers, is a spin-off from the RLE. 1366 01:04:56,900 --> 01:04:59,460 Even people like Noam Chomsky kind of get their start in 1367 01:04:59,460 --> 01:05:00,000 that world. 1368 01:05:00,000 --> 01:05:04,520 And there are a lot of intellectual ties to, this is 1369 01:05:04,520 --> 01:05:07,630 a little bit of a diversion, but if you think about some of 1370 01:05:07,630 --> 01:05:10,780 the early work that goes on in linguistics here that Chomsky 1371 01:05:10,780 --> 01:05:13,650 does, it has very much the same kind of systems 1372 01:05:13,650 --> 01:05:18,290 engineering approach to it, about thinking about grammar 1373 01:05:18,290 --> 01:05:21,290 and language, along the lines of people are thinking about 1374 01:05:21,290 --> 01:05:24,830 these different kinds of systems and systems ideas. 1375 01:05:24,830 --> 01:05:27,210 That was the Lily Kay piece that Will mentioned, that we 1376 01:05:27,210 --> 01:05:28,540 cut off the syllabus for this year. 1377 01:05:28,540 --> 01:05:31,300 The same thing in biology, people thinking about 1378 01:05:31,300 --> 01:05:33,830 information and communication in these more and 1379 01:05:33,830 --> 01:05:35,510 more unified ways. 1380 01:05:35,510 --> 01:05:39,110 So what's remarkable about the war is that this effort ended 1381 01:05:39,110 --> 01:05:41,810 at the end of the Second World War, but it had all of these 1382 01:05:41,810 --> 01:05:43,740 kind of fingers that lasted. 1383 01:05:43,740 --> 01:05:47,730 We'll talk next week about Whirlwind and digital 1384 01:05:47,730 --> 01:05:52,230 computing and aerospace and stuff on campus. 1385 01:05:52,230 --> 01:05:55,510 But it's not a coincidence the way that Cybernetics is 1386 01:05:55,510 --> 01:05:58,750 published in 1948, Claude Shannon's information theory 1387 01:05:58,750 --> 01:06:02,260 is published in 1948. 1388 01:06:02,260 --> 01:06:06,550 Also interestingly, I think it's 1948, Kurt Vonnegut first 1389 01:06:06,550 --> 01:06:10,230 novel, Player Piano, is published in 1948. 1390 01:06:10,230 --> 01:06:12,670 Has anybody read that book? 1391 01:06:12,670 --> 01:06:13,870 It's a really interesting book. 1392 01:06:13,870 --> 01:06:19,400 And the lead character in it, I believe is named Norbert. 1393 01:06:19,400 --> 01:06:20,290 Am I right about that? 1394 01:06:20,290 --> 01:06:21,270 It's been a while. 1395 01:06:21,270 --> 01:06:23,470 It's got a very clear allusion to Norbert Wiener. 1396 01:06:23,470 --> 01:06:25,980 It's all about the implications of cybernetics in 1397 01:06:25,980 --> 01:06:29,960 factories and other kinds of settings. 1398 01:06:29,960 --> 01:06:33,220 And there is this intellectual thread that runs through a lot 1399 01:06:33,220 --> 01:06:37,570 of this work about this link between systems, and human 1400 01:06:37,570 --> 01:06:41,900 machine interfaces, and communication, and feedback 1401 01:06:41,900 --> 01:06:44,720 control, and computing, that you can carry 1402 01:06:44,720 --> 01:06:45,710 that through at MIT. 1403 01:06:45,710 --> 01:06:47,430 And we'll talk later about Project MAC, 1404 01:06:47,430 --> 01:06:49,420 which is the 1960s. 1405 01:06:49,420 --> 01:06:53,450 20 years later, people are still thinking about 1406 01:06:53,450 --> 01:06:55,800 interactive computing in very similar ways. 1407 01:06:55,800 --> 01:07:00,010 I mentioned Doug Engelbart, who was not an MIT guy, but 1408 01:07:00,010 --> 01:07:03,370 very much is very clear in his memoirs, that he started 1409 01:07:03,370 --> 01:07:05,380 thinking about these issues when he was interacting with 1410 01:07:05,380 --> 01:07:07,410 the radar during the war. 1411 01:07:07,410 --> 01:07:11,180 And then it's only out of this that you really get the 1412 01:07:11,180 --> 01:07:15,620 beginnings of digital computing and I think, and 1413 01:07:15,620 --> 01:07:18,910 I'll talk about this next time, a very particularly MIT 1414 01:07:18,910 --> 01:07:22,600 take on those technologies that's not so much focused on 1415 01:07:22,600 --> 01:07:25,710 the kind of basic mathematics of them, but really thinking 1416 01:07:25,710 --> 01:07:28,850 of these computers as embedded in control systems, much in 1417 01:07:28,850 --> 01:07:30,830 the way that all these different radars were embedded 1418 01:07:30,830 --> 01:07:31,680 in control systems. 1419 01:07:31,680 --> 01:07:35,000 So that's where you can sort of see that the way that MIT 1420 01:07:35,000 --> 01:07:38,030 is organized, the way that the federal government is funding 1421 01:07:38,030 --> 01:07:40,920 science and technology, and the politics of Washington 1422 01:07:40,920 --> 01:07:43,720 around it, and the actual content of what kind of work 1423 01:07:43,720 --> 01:07:46,480 people are doing, and what sort of ideas they're doing, 1424 01:07:46,480 --> 01:07:49,350 are all really very much connected in this story about 1425 01:07:49,350 --> 01:07:50,220 World War II. 1426 01:07:50,220 --> 01:07:55,190 It's hard to overemphasize how much profound influence on the 1427 01:07:55,190 --> 01:07:58,110 world that we live in, even just even just the local world 1428 01:07:58,110 --> 01:08:02,000 here, came out of this really just five-year, seven-year 1429 01:08:02,000 --> 01:08:04,790 period at MIT. 1430 01:08:04,790 --> 01:08:08,690 We also looked at "Science, The Endless Frontier." And 1431 01:08:08,690 --> 01:08:12,560 that was where Truman came to Bush at the end of the war, 1432 01:08:12,560 --> 01:08:14,550 pretty much at the end of the war, because Truman isn't even 1433 01:08:14,550 --> 01:08:17,540 president until right before the war ends, and says, what 1434 01:08:17,540 --> 01:08:18,920 are we going to do in this in the future? 1435 01:08:18,920 --> 01:08:20,670 How are we going to take this forward? 1436 01:08:20,670 --> 01:08:24,109 And Bush writes this report, whereas somebody commented in 1437 01:08:24,109 --> 01:08:26,450 the response for today, it's really very forward thinking 1438 01:08:26,450 --> 01:08:28,800 where he says, OK, we're done with war. 1439 01:08:28,800 --> 01:08:29,630 That's important. 1440 01:08:29,630 --> 01:08:32,810 But let's really think about doing this in a context that's 1441 01:08:32,810 --> 01:08:35,740 really going to help our people, and that's medicine 1442 01:08:35,740 --> 01:08:40,830 and biomed and other sorts of civilian applications to it. 1443 01:08:40,830 --> 01:08:45,069 And that report to this day, I mean that's sort of-- 1444 01:08:45,069 --> 01:08:49,090 has anybody read that before the class or heard about it? 1445 01:08:49,090 --> 01:08:51,640 It's sort of basic required reading, if you have a career 1446 01:08:51,640 --> 01:08:52,620 in science in the US. 1447 01:08:52,620 --> 01:08:56,330 It really is considered the template for how the NIH and 1448 01:08:56,330 --> 01:09:00,229 the NSF and a lot of other federal agencies work. 1449 01:09:00,229 --> 01:09:03,350 Interestingly, it's not so much the continuation of the 1450 01:09:03,350 --> 01:09:05,359 OSRD model. 1451 01:09:05,359 --> 01:09:09,300 The OSRD model kind of dies in 1945. 1452 01:09:09,300 --> 01:09:11,700 If anything, it's carried on by the Office of Naval 1453 01:09:11,700 --> 01:09:14,919 Research, which is a very small office, during the five 1454 01:09:14,919 --> 01:09:16,890 years after the war. 1455 01:09:16,890 --> 01:09:19,750 And then late in the '50s, I think it's picked up again 1456 01:09:19,750 --> 01:09:22,840 when DARPA is formed in 1958, also with a 1457 01:09:22,840 --> 01:09:24,130 very big MIT input. 1458 01:09:24,130 --> 01:09:26,470 We'll talk about that next time. 1459 01:09:26,470 --> 01:09:30,490 But if you want to look at the modern heir to the OSRD, it's 1460 01:09:30,490 --> 01:09:31,729 not the National Science Foundation. 1461 01:09:31,729 --> 01:09:32,990 The National Science Foundation 1462 01:09:32,990 --> 01:09:34,649 works by peer review. 1463 01:09:34,649 --> 01:09:37,529 It has a charge to not only fund the best science, but to 1464 01:09:37,529 --> 01:09:41,319 do education and to sort of spread its resources out, 1465 01:09:41,319 --> 01:09:44,910 throughout the country in a kind of even way. 1466 01:09:44,910 --> 01:09:47,870 Whereas DARPA is much more based on the model of the 1467 01:09:47,870 --> 01:09:50,510 OSRD, intentionally or unintentionally. 1468 01:09:50,510 --> 01:09:54,010 You have very strong program managers, who can sort of 1469 01:09:54,010 --> 01:09:56,700 shape the fields the way they see fit. 1470 01:09:56,700 --> 01:09:59,800 It's within the military, but it doesn't belong to the Air 1471 01:09:59,800 --> 01:10:01,370 Force or the Army or the Navy. 1472 01:10:01,370 --> 01:10:03,110 And it has does its own sort of thing. 1473 01:10:03,110 --> 01:10:05,480 And it's sort of set apart, very much in the same way. 1474 01:10:05,480 --> 01:10:06,210 But that's-- 1475 01:10:06,210 --> 01:10:07,230 AUDIENCE: It's run academics. 1476 01:10:07,230 --> 01:10:07,990 PROFESSOR: --another story. 1477 01:10:07,990 --> 01:10:10,450 It's run by academics, yeah. 1478 01:10:10,450 --> 01:10:13,680 And the first director was Jack Ruina, who was a 1479 01:10:13,680 --> 01:10:15,380 colleague of ours here. 1480 01:10:15,380 --> 01:10:16,590 We'll talk about that next time. 1481 01:10:16,590 --> 01:10:17,830 That's a post-Sputnik thing. 1482 01:10:17,830 --> 01:10:19,790 That's the next big thing that happened.