84 Dahlgren 



sponsibility for the Navy range tables, gun tables, and later bombing tables. 

 This went on, and the Bureau of Ordnance supported the mission which led to 

 the development of the digital computer. 



There were only two groups of people in those days who were interested in 

 large-scale computers. One was the astronomers — they never had any 

 money — and the other was the ballisticians. As soon as the ballisticians got 

 money at the beginning of World War II, the computer was developed. The 

 time was about right, but money was also needed. If the war hadn't come along, 

 we wouldn't have anything like the computers we have now. 



So here we were at Dahlgren with a rather healthy, although not terribly 

 large, ballistics and associated computational operation. We had also a fair 

 amount of development work in the gun area because between World War II 

 and the Korean War there was a fair amount of money put into that. You know, 

 "We've been through the Manhattan Project, and we've been through the 

 development of radar, and we've been through all the wartime weapons de- 

 velopment. Now let's put some of the real technical push and money into 

 improving the more or less conventional weapons like guns and ammunition 

 and explosives and see what we can do." We did. 



Then along came the Korean War and the guided missile. It became increas- 

 ingly obvious that the missile was the place to put money, and money began to 

 get short in the areas in which Dahlgren had a real advantage in the sense of an 

 established competence as well as facilities. However, with the Korean War, up 

 went the burden of proof and test again. So proof and test was competing for 

 the same facilities as the experimental work, and proof and test had to win. It 

 always does. "You've got to fight this war, so we'll be here tomorrow to do our 

 R&D on a reasonable kind of time scale." 



Those were the principal reasons Dahlgren began to get into difficulties, and 

 the difficulties kept increasing in the early 1950's. We probably hit our low 

 watermark about the mid- 1950's. It became ever more apparent that Dahlgren 

 was going to have to find something else to do because its old sources of funds 

 were simply drying up. For example, there just wasn't any money to go out and 

 develop a better rotating band for a projectile. 



Let me go back to World War II for a moment. As I said, Dahlgren had a 

 small civilian staff, probably on the order of a dozen professionals with a good 

 number of reserve officers plus 40 or 50 USN types and a very large staff of 

 blue-collar workers, because proof and test makes blue-collar employment 

 rather than white. You have one firing officer and a tradesman staff of 20 or 30 

 people to support him in getting the test set up. There were lots of riggers and 

 ordnancemen and all the other kind of trades work to conduct one of these 

 proofs, and the test facilities in those days were really not so enormously 

 different from what we have now. About 1942 we built the addition onto the 

 Ordnance Office [Building 218]. Practically all the technical work was done 



