1940's Science and Technology | Radar Electronic Fundamentals

Reference work

By: Bureau of Ships, U.S. Navy

Date: June 1944

Source: Bureau of Ships, U.S. Navy. Radar Electronic Fundamentals. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944, 1–4.

Introduction

The use of the airplane during World War I (1914–1918) led military planners to seek a way of detecting planes before they could attack troops and materiel. In 1930 Lawrence Hyland, a staff officer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, discovered that radio signals transmitted from the ground reflected back from airplanes to the ground, allowing troops to detect them while they were still miles away.

Another officer at the National Research Laboratory, Leo Young, modified Hyland's discovery by producing short bursts of radio waves at fixed intervals. Young conceived of high frequency radio waves clustered in short bursts and sweeping the sky in all...