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Preface: World War II Ends and the Security Curtain is Dropped

On 13 August 1945 President Truman announced that the Japanese military had surrendered. World War II was over. I was in the Radiation Laboratory, a wartime only research laboratory organized to provide the latest in RADAR systems for carrying on the war. The top administrators of the Laboratory were aware of the progress on the fission bomb, and since May of that year they had been planning for the termination of employees and a ending of the laboratory's existence as soon at the Japanese military surrendered -- which they were sure had to be very soon. Some Rad Lab employees would stay on to terminate accounts and to document the work done by the Laboratory. I, and a few others, were to stay on in a Basic Research division, which, in June 1946, became the Research Laboratory of Electronics. My last project, an X-band narrow pulse Navy radar system was finished. On 4 September 1945 my section head, Edward Purcell, asked me to educate Life magazine editors about Microwaves for an article describing their properties. I accepted and thus I came to meet Fritz Goro, their science photographer. By 29 September 1945 I tell my diary that Fritz Goro is such a good guy. He and Bob Campbell, the writer for the essay, had given me a stack of 78 rpm recordings of classical music to play on the audio system I had recently built with the hope that I could get a realistic rendition of Beethoven's Ninth from it. In the early months of the following year, 1946, the system included a copy of the Klipsch folded horn that I had scaled from Klipsch's article about it in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 17, 254-258 (1946)

So during that month I was designing devices that could show the presence of microwaves in a manner that made photographic sense, and Goro shot endless numbers of rolls of film in 2 1/4 by 2 1/4 inch format with his German twin lens reflex camera. Ben Diver, the Radiation Laboratory photographer was kept busy developing and printing the pictures he took. Each setup was shot with a series of exposures starting from a few stops under the exposure meter reading to a few stops over the reading. The photos appeared in Life magazine in the 19 November 1945 issue on pages 93 to 98. That was volume 19. I ended up with glossy prints of many of the photo, most of which were not included in the published piece. So I am showing some of them in the following pages.

photo That was the second time that creative work with which I had been involved appeared in Life. As I recounted in the essay, Folk History, I worked at the Harvard Observatory for Professor Donald Menzel while in my upper three years of College. The first year at the Observatory I was engaged in drawing a sky map of the stars in a form Professor Menzel had deemed innovative. I constructed the orthogonal coordinate set for the projection and set to work laying out the stars on it. The Summer at the end of the sophomore year I stayed in Cambridge through July working on the maps. Then I went home to Tacoma for a month. A single panel of the map, for August and September, appeared in the 31 July 1939 issue of Life on page 38 of volume 7. More momentous was the fact that when I came out from camping on the eastern side of Mt. Rainier on the first of September, I learned that Europe was at war, an event that shaped the lives of the members of my cohort, to say the least.

The sky map that was printed in Life is shown here. I am truly impressed with my free hand printing when i view the drawing now. The set of maps that was published by Professor Menzel after the war had the lettering replaced by typeset or Leroy pen letters.

Left click on photo to see it in its actual size.


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Malcom W. P. Strandberg
2001-04-30