Real Engineering – The Secret Invention That Changed World War 2
An evening pause: How old fashioned Yankee ingenuity helped win the war, in a way you would not expect.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
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Chain Home meant the Brits could see them coming. Turing’s work of course.
At the end of the documentary, the author, during a promotion for his streaming platform, states that in the video you just watched he had to tipoe around certain words and subjects in order to avoid youtube restrictions!
And that is about wwii history of 80 years ago!
GeorgeC–
Thanks for spotting that and bringing it to everyone’s attention.
I consume a lot of WW2 video and YouTube in particular has been on a campaign to age-restrict a whole lot of it, for dubious reasoning, and it’s getting worse. (And I refuse to get an account at YouTube.)
Tangentially– highly recommend the folks at “TimeGhost History: WW-2 in Real Time.”
A weekly series following WW2 in real-time. (They just did a 24 hour special on D-Day in June. They also have
an extensive series called “Between the Wars,” which covers 1920-1939.)
https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
“Chain Home meant the Brits could see them coming. Turing’s work of course.”
It was not, Turing had nothing to do with Chain Home and radar in general. CH was due to Sir Robert Walson Watt
“Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt KCB FRS FRAeS (13 April 1892 – 5 December 1973) was a British pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology.
Watt began his career in radio physics with a job at the Met Office, where he began looking for accurate ways to track thunderstorms using the radio signals given off by lightning. This led to the 1920s development of a system later known as high-frequency direction finding (HFDF or “huff-duff”). Although well publicized at the time, the system’s enormous military potential was not developed until the late 1930s. Huff-duff allowed operators to determine the location of an enemy radio in seconds and it became a major part of the network of systems that helped defeat the threat of German U-boats during World War II. It is estimated that huff-duff was used in about a quarter of all attacks on U-boats.
In 1935 Watt was asked to comment on reports of a German death ray based on radio. Watt and his assistant Arnold Frederic Wilkins quickly determined it was not possible, but Wilkins suggested using radio signals to locate aircraft at long distances. This led to a February 1935 demonstration where signals from a BBC short-wave transmitter were bounced off a Handley Page Heyford aircraft. Watt led the development of a practical version of this device, which entered service in 1938 under the code name Chain Home. This system provided the vital advance information that helped the Royal Air Force win the Battle of Britain.”
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing – Not a word about radar
Is there a way to pay to view nebula videos on an iPad without paying the Apple tax?
Great info. Very interesting. I can’t help myself tho’
“Voroutis” ???? Is that a combination of the words Ferocious and Voracious?
Other than that, This was very interesting.
By the by. Out in Brownsville this week. Drove by SpaceX. ALWAYS impressed with the pace of operations.
I didn’t mean to infer he worked on radar.
Proximity fuse, radar, Turing, etc. all part of the Wizard’s War.
Hey Wayne, there are youtube video downloaders that can get you past the age restriction. MacX is an option if you have a mac. I guess some communist state decided for everyone minors can’t even see a gun, history not withstanding.
“Chain Home meant the Brits could see them coming. Turing’s work of course.” – How is that NOT claiming he worked on radar? And you can’t lump it all together as Wizard War, there were too many projects, too many researchers in too many countries. Contrary to the myth, it was the Poles that broke enigma by January, 1933 and the British used their methods and equipment.
“Gordon Welchman, who became head of Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, has written: “Hut 6 Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use.” The Polish transfer of theory and technology at Pyry formed the crucial basis for the subsequent World War II British Enigma-decryption effort at Bletchley Park, where Welchman worked.
Around December 1932 Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician and cryptologist at the Polish Cipher Bureau, used the theory of permutations, and flaws in the German military-message encipherment procedures, to break message keys of the plugboard Enigma machine. France’s spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt obtained access to German cipher materials that included the daily keys used in September and October 1932. Those keys included the plugboard settings. The French passed the material to the Poles, and Rejewski used some of that material and the message traffic in September and October to solve for the unknown rotor wiring. Consequently the Polish mathematicians were able to build their own Enigma machines, dubbed “Enigma doubles”. Rejewski was aided by fellow mathematician-cryptologists Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, both of whom had been recruited with Rejewski from Poznań University, which had been selected for its students’ knowledge of the German language, since that area was held by Germany prior to World War I. The Polish Cipher Bureau developed techniques to defeat the plugboard and find all components of the daily key, which enabled the Cipher Bureau to read German Enigma messages starting from January 1933.
On 26 and 27 July 1939, in Pyry, just south of Warsaw, the Poles initiated French and British military intelligence representatives into the Polish Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, including Zygalski sheets and the cryptologic bomb, and promised each delegation a Polish-reconstructed Enigma (the devices were soon delivered).
In September 1939, British Military Mission 4, which included Colin Gubbins and Vera Atkins, went to Poland, intending to evacuate cipher-breakers Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski from the country. The cryptologists, however, had been evacuated by their own superiors into Romania, at the time a Polish-allied country. On the way, for security reasons, the Polish Cipher Bureau personnel had deliberately destroyed their records and equipment. From Romania they traveled on to France, where they resumed their cryptological work, collaborating by teletype with the British, who began work on decrypting German Enigma messages, using the Polish equipment and techniques..”
Sorry for the long post, but as someone who has taught history at the college level, I think it necessary to correct the record.
Col Beausabre-
Pivoting back to RADAR for a moment– what was the big difference between British and German radar?
John–
Thanks for that– I have a PC with Windows.
I do utilize Internet Download Manager, but it doesn’t have the functionality you describe. (it respects copyright as well, and here I thought everything on the interweb was free…. {sarcasm alert} )
Col Beausabre: Thank you for this information. I had known the Poles had contributed actual captured German equipment. I had not realized they had done so much more.
Wayne, Originally, the British (Chain Home), German (Seetakt and Freya) and (CXAM and SCR-268) were all meter wavelength sets. The British made the breakthrough with the cavity magnetron, which allowed centimetric sets with much finer target discrimination. (instead of a formation, the operator saw distinct targets) This was standard in British and US sets from mid-WW2 on.
“The improvements to the cavity magnetron by John Randall and Harry Boot of Birmingham University in early 1940 marked a major advance in radar capability. The resulting magnetron was a small device that generated high-power microwave frequencies and allowed the development of practical centimetric radar that operated in the SHF radio frequency band from 3 to 30 GHz (wavelengths of 10 to 1 cm). Centimetric radar enables the detection of much smaller objects and the use of much smaller antennas than the earlier, lower frequency radars. A radar with a wavelength of 2 meters (VHF band, 150 MHz) cannot detect objects that are much smaller than 2 meters and requires an antenna whose size is on the order of 2 meters (an awkward size for use on aircraft). In contrast, a radar with a 10 cm wavelength can detect objects 10 cm in size with a reasonably-sized antenna.
In addition a tuneable local oscillator and a mixer for the receiver were essential. These were targeted developments, the former by R W Sutton who developed the NR89 reflex klystron, or “Sutton tube”. The latter by H W B Skinner who developed the ‘cat’s whisker’ crystal.
At the end of 1939 when the decision was made to develop 10 cm radar, there were no suitable active devices available – no high power magnetron, no reflex klystron, no proven microwave crystal mixer, and no TR cell. By mid-1941, Type 271, the first Naval S-band radar, was in operational use.
The cavity magnetron was perhaps the single most important invention in the history of radar.”
The Germans finally got a cavity magnetron set into production way too late in 1945.
This is a good introduction to an amazingly broad subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II
I come by by my interest through my father whose primary job as an Electronic Technician’s Mate aboard the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) in WW2 was working on radar.
This is a good intro to US WW2 radar. I have it in hard copy that Dad brought home after the War. It addresses all types, land, sea and airborne used by the USA. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/operational-characteristics-of-radar-classified-by-tactical-application.html
Wayne, OH, MAN, I could go on and on and on….Anyway, all the original sets – German (Seetakt and Freya), British (Chain Home) and US (SCR-268 and CXAM) – were meter length sets. The big breakthrough came with the invention of the cavity magnetron by a team in the UK. This allowed centimetric sets with much finer discrimination (instead of a formation, the operator saw distinct targets). By mid WW2, all new Allied sets were centimetric. The Germans never caught up, just making a few centimetric sets in 1945.
“The improvements to the cavity magnetron by John Randall and Harry Boot of Birmingham University in early 1940 marked a major advance in radar capability. The resulting magnetron was a small device that generated high-power microwave frequencies and allowed the development of practical centimetric radar that operated in the SHF radio frequency band from 3 to 30 GHz (wavelengths of 10 to 1 cm). Centimetric radar enables the detection of much smaller objects and the use of much smaller antennas than the earlier, lower frequency radars. A radar with a wavelength of 2 meters (VHF band, 150 MHz) cannot detect objects that are much smaller than 2 meters and requires an antenna whose size is on the order of 2 meters (an awkward size for use on aircraft). In contrast, a radar with a 10 cm wavelength can detect objects 10 cm in size with a reasonably-sized antenna.
In addition a tunable local oscillator and a mixer for the receiver were essential. These were targeted developments, the former by R W Sutton who developed the NR89 reflex klystron, or “Sutton tube”. The latter by H W B Skinner who developed the ‘cat’s whisker’ crystal.
At the end of 1939 when the decision was made to develop 10 cm radar, there were no suitable active devices available – no high power magnetron, no reflex klystron, no proven microwave crystal mixer, and no TR cell. By mid-1941, Type 271, the first Naval S-band radar, was in operational use.[9]
The cavity magnetron was perhaps the single most important invention in the history of radar”
It’s an immensely broad and fascinating subject. I come by my interest through my father, who as an Electronics Technician’s Mate, job aboard the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) was to work on radar. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_in_World_War_II
I have a copy of this manual which dad brought home
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/operational-characteristics-of-radar-classified-by-tactical-application.html