i2o Miracles Ahead! 



The Radar "eye" in the nose of R.A.F. night fighter planes 

 informed the pilot when a Nazi was within range and per- 

 mitted the defending planes to hunt down the enemy even in 

 the blackest night. 



Radar gets much of the credit for saving Britain. It might 

 have saved many ships and lives at Pearl Harbor. The United 

 States Army Signal Corps Radar installation was not sleeping 

 on the morning of December 7, 1941. Private Lockhard (now 

 Lieutenant Lockhard, wearer of the D.S.M.) was getting in 

 some extra practice on the Radar equipment when he spotted 

 a large flight of planes more than half an hour's flying time 

 from Pearl Harbor. He reported this information to his supe- 

 rior. But the officer knew (as the Japs probably also knew) 

 that a large number of American planes were due, so he sus- 

 pected nothing. The rest of the story is well known. 



What is Radar? Radar uses a principle which is as familiar 

 to us as an echo. Radio waves at very high frequencies, called 

 U.H.F. for "ultrahigh frequencies," travel in a straight line 

 and behave like a beam of light. They cannot be reflected 

 back from the ionosphere, as can the longer waves of our 

 everyday broadcast band. But they can be reflected back from 

 a metal object. Therefore, if they hit a metal object, such as a 

 ship, a plane, or a submarine, they will bounce back in a 

 straight line toward the transmitter which shot them out into 

 space. If there is a receiver located at the point of the trans- 

 mitter, these radio waves can be picked up when they bounce 

 back. And by timing the return in millionths of a second, the 

 receiver equipment can tell just how long it took the radio 

 waves to go out, strike this object, and bound back, and, con- 

 sequently, just how far away the object is. 



Radar is not so "new" a discovery as the layman might 

 think. Twenty-one years ago Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor and Leo 

 C. Young, now superintendent and assistant superintendent 

 of the radio division of the Naval Research Laboratory, dis- 

 covered that high-frequency waves would bounce back from 



