Range Operations 61 



I also remember when the Bureau of Standards came down and wanted us to 

 fire a rubber duck out of a 5-inch gun. What had happened was that a couple of 

 commercial pilots were flying along, fortunately on automatic pilot, when they 

 were rudely awakened and found their windshield had been broken out and 

 they had a wild duck in the cockpit. Well, the Bureau of Standards came down 

 with partially cured rubber balls to fit in a 5-inch gun that we were to shoot at 

 low velocities up to about 250 feet per second against certain windshield 

 material to see if it would withstand impact of a wild duck. We called this our 

 "rubber duck project." 



I was in the Experimental Department for a long time, and anything crazy 

 that came to Dahlgren went to Experimental. I was a physicist, too, and 

 anything that came to the Station that they didn't know where else to put it, they 

 said, "Give it to the physicists; they can do anything." The first job they gave me 

 when I came aboard was to go downrange and, with an old camera, get up there 

 within 150 yards of the point of impact of 14-inch projectiles to take pictures 

 and see how much the projectiles were yawing. That was awfully near the point 

 of impact, and if it hadn't been for Captain McLaren back there supervising the 

 firing, 1 would never have gone down on that job. Captain McLaren was 

 Experimental Officer, and 1 had enough confidence in him to know that he 

 would see to it that things were done right up there. What they did was fire 

 three shots and plot those, and then we'd come in 150 yards from the mean 

 point of the impact of those first three rounds. The nearest one that came to 

 us, 1 think, was about 75 yards. The projectiles impacting were beautiful. They 

 had dye in them, and then when they hit the water, the cap would break and the 

 dye would come out — a beautiful orange and green and white. 



1 also recall one time when somebody made a mistake and shipped some 

 50-ton armor plates on a barge, not on railroad cars. If they had shipped them 

 on a railroad barge, we had a tidal bridge that had rails on it and the train could 

 have run right out on our railroad and taken the plates up to where the big 

 cranes could unload them. However, these they put on a plain barge, so to get 

 them off, we had to run oneof our big cranes and a locomotive and a flat car all 

 out on our dock and then lift the 50-ton plates off the barge and put them on 

 the flat car. 1 remember Commander Davis coming in and talking this over with 

 Dr. Thompson, and the question was, "Would this collapse the dock?" They 

 didn't know whether the dock was strong enough to withstand the load, so they 

 said, "This must be a job for a physicist." Anyway, what happened was Mr. 

 George Jones, our civil engineer, and 1 went down to the dock, got in a rowboat, 

 and went all around under the dock poking penknives into the pilings and 

 timbers to see how rotten they were. The trouble was they had three sets of 

 piling in there. When the first one looked like it was bad, they didn't take it up. 

 They just put in the second one and let the first one stay there for what it was 

 worth. Then they put in the third set of piling, so we had three sets of piling. We 



