The Invention That Changed the World

How a small group of Radar Pioneers won the Second World War and launched a technological revolution

by Robert Buderi

Simon & Schuster, 1996, Trade Paperback, VG+ condition, no creases.

The story begins in September 1940 with the arrival in Washington of a team of British scientists bearing England's most closely guarded technological secrets, among them the cavity magnetron, a revolutionary new source of microwave energy that was to pave the way for radar systems small enough to fit on planes and ships. The magnetron's arrival triggered the most dramatic mobilization of science in history as America's top scientists enlisted in the "war within the war" to convert the British invention into a potent military weapon. Developed in a top-secret rush at the Radiation Lab on the campus of MIT, microwave radars eventually helped destroy Japanese warships in the Pacific, brought down Nazi buzz bombs over England, and enabled Allied bombers to "see" through cloud cover over Germany and Japan. 

Although the atomic bomb ended World War II, in many ways radar won it. Capturing all the drama and excitement of the race to develop radar, The Invention That Changed the World then follows the postwar careers of the radar scientists as they applied the knowledge gained from their wartime work in many different fields. The Rad Lab was an incubator for science and technology on a scale perhaps unprecedented in history. Among their many achievements, radar veterans were instrumental in creating the field of radio astronomy and discovering nuclear magnetic resonance, the transistor, and the maser, breakthroughs that led to the Nobel Prizes. In the continuing push to develop early warning systems during the Cold War, other radar men helped create the basis for digital computer memories. In very practical ways, radar and its spin-offs continue to evolve.

"A technological thriller better than the best of Tom Clancy" -- Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of  The Making of the Atomic Bomb

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Jam Sessions

In the desperate summer of 1940, when Luftwaffe bombers were softening up England for a German invasion, the British put almost all their secret military inventions into a black metal box and loaded it onto a Canadian ocean liner for a trip to the still-neutral United States. There, top British officials hoped, the Americans would manufacture the weapons needed to win the war.

''The Invention That Changed the World,'' by Robert Buderi, focuses on one of the secrets in that box, a ''resonant cavity magnetron.'' Invented more or less by accident a few months earlier and not well understood even by its builders, it produced radio energy thousands of times stronger than anything else operating at useful wavelengths. It would eventually form a backbone of the American and British radar systems.

In the popular imagination, the great technological breakthrough of World War II -- and its greatest legacy -- is the atomic bomb. But with an impressive level of detail, Buderi backs up the old saw of the electronic engineers: that while the atom bomb ended the war, radar won it.

Buderi, who was formerly the technology editor of Business Week, concentrates on the scientists in the Radiation Laboratory (the ''Rad Lab'') at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a powerhouse of radar engineering purposely misnamed to mislead spies. The lab did not invent radar (both the British and the Americans were using versions invented years before), did not work alone in improving it and did not last through the cold war period. But it was a nexus, an archway through which crucial ideas and people passed.

The book sets out to be a nonfiction technothriller on the order of Richard Rhodes's ''Making of the Atomic Bomb.'' It does not quite match the scope or verve of that work, and sometimes lacks its clarity too. But Buderi provides an impressive overview of his subject.

A torrent of modern technology runs through this book. ''We invented all kinds of things,'' said Robert R. Everett, one of the little-known scientists presented here, ''not because we were so smart, but because we were the first people who had the problem.'' Buderi traces many of those things, describing, for instance, the ever-accelerating game of measure and countermeasure during World War II: the development of radar, then the development of radar jamming and then the use of the jamming itself as a weapon. (Leading up to D-Day, boats towed big balloons that on radar would look like warships and troop transports.)

Buderi also lays out the accidental discoveries. In the early days of 1944, for example, Rad Lab scientists were using radar to detect a tower at a distance of six miles, but by spring, when humidity increased, the system did not work anymore. To their frustration, Buderi writes, scientists had developed a radar that was tuned to the natural frequency of water vapor, an annoyance that eventually led to the microwave oven.

The book, part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Technology Series, wisely does not limit itself to science and technology; it describes as well the sociology of science, so to speak. Unlike the atomic bomb, radar was not a single invention, and not something that the military was clamoring to have. Once radar was developed, there existed the separate but equally important task of persuading the armed forces to use it effectively.

Finally, Buderi explains that radar has been the root of a wide range of achievements since the war, producing a veritable family tree of modern technologies. Because of radar, astronomers can map the contours of far-off planets, physicians can see images of internal organs, meteorologists can measure rain falling in distant places, air travel is hundreds of times safer than travel by road, long-distance telephone calls are cheaper than postage, computers have become ubiquitous and ordinary people can cook their daily dinners in the time between sitcoms, with what used to be called a ''radar range.''

Radar, Buderi says, was the ''quiet revolution'' of World War II, and ''its pioneers experienced a largely silent glory compared to the Oppenheimers, Tellers and other nuclear bomb makers.'' With this book, their revolution may still be quiet, but their glory is no longer silent.