Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

390 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45)
for the antiaircraft guns protecting their ships; another, nonrotating, for
Army and Air Force weapons, specifically for bombs and rockets and, later,
for mortars. The radio fuze for rotating projectiles was assigned to a group
headed by Merle A. Tuve and Lawrence A. Hafstad in the Department of
Terrestrial Magnetism. Its final development was carried out at the Johns
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. That for nonrotating projectiles was
transferred to the Bureau under ElIett, where Diamond and Hinman's group
worked on the nonrotating radio fuze, a group under Dryden investi-
gated an accoustic fuze, and Mohier began studying components of a
photoelectric fuze.72
By early 1941, through the application of radioteletnetering tech-
niques, Lauriston S. Taylor and Astin had demonstrated that acoustic fuzes
were not practicable. They then joined the photoelectric fuze group under
Dr. Joseph E. Henderson at the Carnegie Institution, and upon transfer of
that group to the Bureau, Astin took over as director. The transfer was ef-
fected with the creation of OSRD in June 1941, when Diamond became chief
of the radio and photoelectric fuze groups at the Bureau and Ellett the NDRC
contracting officer.73
The basic principles of the rotating and nonrotating fuze were similar
except that the antiaircraft shell fuze had to withstand being fired from a
gun. Its stability in flight resulted from its rotation, whereas the bomb and
rocket fuze produced at the Bureau had to depend upon fins. And unlike
the shell fuze, the bomb fuze had to operate at wide ranges of temperature,
including the extreme cold (down to F) encountered at high altitudes.
The group of eight that began work on the fuze on December 28, 1940,
was to draw on staff members from many of the other Bureau laboratories
and on scientists and technicians from university and industrial laboratories
all over the country. In the last 2 years of the war, with the assignment of
Army and Navy groups for testing and production, over 400 persons were
engaged in the Bureau project alone.74
The original assignment of the Bureau was to develop a fuze that
would set off a rocket attached to a bomb when the bomb had fallen within
several hundred feet of a battleship. By this means, the bonTb was expected
to attain impact velocities high enough to penetrate and sink the ship. Much
too complex and specific for the state of knowledge at the time, this require-
ment gave way to design of a general purpose proximity fuze.75
Rinehart MS, pp. 200—204: Baxter, pp. 226—227.
Rinehart MS, p. 15.
Hinman, pp. 41—47, has a roster of all who worked on the NBS fuzes.
Hinman, p. 9. Essentially the same account of NBS fuze research as in Hinman ap-
pears in Joseph C. Boyce, •ed., New Weapons for Air Warfare (OSRD, Science in
World War II, Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), pp. 176—224.