42 Research and National Purpose 



sponsor, but also to stimulate the thinking of their contractors 

 and carry ideas from one to the other. 



Perhaps nowhere has the value of the listening post type of 

 commitment been better exemplified than in ONR's long 

 standing participation in the support of nuclear research. The 

 benefits to the Navy from nuclear research have come not so 

 much from the research results themselves as from the deriva- 

 tive technology, which has resulted from the fact that accel- 

 erator design and particle detection instrumentation have 

 continually pressed the state of the art in areas of technology 

 which have proved important to the Navy and to the military 

 services generally. 



For example, the first high power klystrons were designed 

 specifically to power the Mk III linear accelerator at Stanford, 

 increasing by a factor of 1,000 the power available from such 

 microwave generators when the development was first started 

 in 1947. In the meantime the linac itself has become a com- 

 mercial device of considerable importance both for medicine 

 and for industrial radiography, including incidentally the 

 radiography of very thick objects such as missile propellants in 

 situ. The electron linac development also provided an impor- 

 tant impetus to the more general development of microwave 

 technology. A variety of microwave components, such as atten- 

 uators, phase shifters, and high power windows, and new micro- 

 wave measurement and calibration techniques, were developed 

 in connection with these machines. All of this microwave tech- 

 nology has been of great significance in connection with mod- 

 ern high power radar. Of course, this technology didn't emerge 

 from Navy supported work alone, but the fact that the Navy 

 was one of the earliest in the field undoubtedly contributed to 

 the rapid importation of these techniques into defense 

 technology. 



Nuclear physics early generated exacting requirements in 

 the area of fast pulse electronics, and the demand for extremely 

 short resolving times in coincidence counting of particles has 

 stimulated many circuit developments which have interacted 



