The Harry Diamond Laboratories (HDL) was a research facility under the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and later the U.S. Army. It conducted research and development in electronic components and devices and was at one point the largest electronics research and development laboratory in the U.S. Army. HDL also acted as the Army's lead laboratory in nuclear survivability studies and operated the Aurora Pulsed Radiation Simulator, the world's largest full-threat gamma radiation simulator. In 1992, HDL was disestablished, and its mission, personnel, and facilities were incorporated into the newly created U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). As part of this transition, the Army designated the HDL building as the site of ARL's new headquarters. The installation was named in honor of pioneer radio engineer and inventor Harry Diamond, who led the Ordnance Development Division during World War II. Diamond contributed greatly to the fundamental concept and design of proximity fuzes.
History
Under the National Bureau of Standards The origins of the Harry Diamond Laboratories trace back to the development of the radio proximity fuze at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). During the 1930s, British military researchers investigated the feasibility of a proximity fuze, a device that would detonate an explosive charge only when it approached the immediate vicinity of its target. At the time, conventional artillery and antiaircraft shells very rarely hit their target, especially a moving one, because their detonation either required direct contact or relied on accurate predictions with an altimeter or a timer set at launch. In 1939, British researchers William Butement, Edward Shire, and Amherst Thomson at the Air Defense Experimental Establishment conceived of a proximity fuze that used radio waves to sense the proximity of the target. While Butement and his team were able to construct and crudely test a prototype fuze in 1940, the high production demands of World War II ultimately stalled its development. As a result, the British decided to share their research on the project with the United States in hopes that the U.S. could complete the technology. In September 1940, Sir John Cockcroft delivered all available information about the radio proximity fuze to the newly formed National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) as part of the Tizard Mission. The chairman of NDRC, Vannevar Bush, appointed Merle Tuve, the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, to lead the U.S. research on proximity fuzes.
By November 1940, Tuve recognized that two types of radio proximity fuzes were needed: one for rotating projectiles and one for non-rotating projectiles. The former was sought by the U.S. Navy for anti-aircraft guns, while the latter was best suited for U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force weapons such as bombs, rockets, and mortars. The team headed by Tuve at the Carnegie Institution, which later moved to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in 1942, took on the development of the radio proximity fuze for rotating projectiles. Meanwhile, the development of the radio proximity fuze for non-rotating projectiles was assigned to Harry Diamond and Wilford Hinman Jr. at the NBS and overseen by Alexander Ellett of NDRC. Diamond, who was the chief of NBS's radio and photoelectric fuze groups, determined that utilizing the Doppler effect would provide the best results for a proximity fuze in a non-rotating projectile. Diamond and Hinman subsequently developed a diode detector system that activated when the amplitude of the reflected radio waves exceeded a predetermined value. In April and May 1941, Diamond's group tested a series of crude box models based on this principle in successful bomb drops against water targets. While only a third of the models functioned properly during the tests, the experiment demonstrated that Diamond and Hinman's idea had potential. Diamond and his team spent the next several months working on the fuze's electronic circuits and safety mechanisms.
In May 1942, the U.S. Army made its first urgent request for a proximity fuze for the new 4.5-inch airborne rocket against the German Luftwaffe. Once the dimensions for the fuze were decided, Diamond's team completed the fuze design in 2 days. After testing was conducted in June 1942, NBS constructed more than a thousand fuzes based on this design using the small-scale production lines in its model shops. The U.S. Army later produced almost 400,000 of NBS's fuzes in 1943 and an additional 400,000 were made before the end of the war. Due to the expansion of fuze-related activities at NBS, the Bureau established the Ordnance Development Division in December 1942. The new division initially consisted of 200 people working on proximity fuzes for rockets and bombs with Diamond acting as the division chief. By the end of the war, the size of the division had doubled. After the war, a large laboratory complex designed to house the Bureau's Ordnance Development Division, Ordnance Electronics Division, and Electromechanical Division was established in 1946. Meanwhile, Diamond continued to lead the Ordnance Development Division until his death in 1948. In honor of his work, the laboratory complex was renamed to the Harry Diamond Ordnance Laboratory in 1949.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
