66 Dahlgren 



they've got electricity on them." I said to Kiland, "Maybe we'd better test it." We 

 got a firing squib, put it behind something and connected it, and it went 

 "Whoo!" And we were getting ready to hoolc it up to a 500-pound bomb! When 

 we went back to find out what was going on, there were two Hues back there. 

 The guy back at Plate Battery was holding up the wrong one. You come away 

 and you just say, "Well, I suppose the Lord has been using a little extra time 

 taking care of people today." I know a lot of that kind of thing happened that I 

 never knew about, but there were extremely few serious accidents, and I think 

 we were very fortunate. 



Were there any people who were particularly sigtiificant in developing and maintaining 

 the Dahlgien range? 



For years, Roger Dement looked after the range, and it was after he retired 

 that the Range Section, which had been under him, came over as one of my 

 branches — we called it a branch then — in what was then the Ballistic In- 

 strumentation Development and Services Department. I would say that, up 

 until that time, Roger had pretty well taken care of the range, seeing that we got 

 new stations put in where they were needed, and so forth. Then, when we got 

 into some bombing work. Bill Kemper put in some special stations down there 

 for bombing, on which they could use the Askania theodolites. Then we found 

 some interesting things happening. They started using the theodolites for 

 airbursts of antiaircraft projectiles and then checking them with surface projec- 

 tiles. Then we made a very interesting discovery. The positions on the range as 

 computed for the old stations and the new ones that Kemper put in did not 

 agree. They were systematically off by something like 5 or 7 yards. So we went 

 back and checked on this. 



We used the Coast and Geodetic primary survey points in putting in the 

 range. National Coast and Geodetic Survey has a series of assigned triangles 

 that they use to cover the whole United States, and that's the way they get the 

 distances to positions of every thing in the United States. Locally, when they put 

 in the range, they started with the Coast and Geodetic points that they had 

 located with their long-range operation. Dahlgren set up a 90-foot tower above 

 each one of these points and then they did all their trianguladon at night when 

 the refraction, the heat wave in the air, is least significant. So they started at 

 those stations to triangulate and determine the positions of all the stations 

 established along the range. It turned out that the Coast and Geodetic Survey 

 made a new survey of the United States sometime after our range was estab- 

 lished, and they referred to these as datums and gave them a year number like 

 there might be a 191 1 datum and then there could be a 1923 datum. It turned 

 out that Kemper put them on an up-to-date datum, and the old stations were all 

 on the old datum, so things got a little confused there. 



