Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report

Chapter 4 - Cultural Resources Report - 1996

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EVALUATION OF SELECTED CULTURAL RESOURCES
AT FORT MONMOUTH, NEW JERSEY:
CONTEXT FOR COLD WAR ERA,
REVISION OF HISTORIC PROPERTIES DOCUMENTATION,
AND SURVEY OF EVANS AREA
AND SECTIONS OF CAMP CHARLES WOOD
by
Mary Beth Reed
Mark Swanson
NEW SOUTH ASSOCIATES
Stone Mountain, Georgia
Subcontractor for Geo-Marine, Inc.
and
Rebecca Procter
Marsha Prior

June 1996

MISCELLANEOUS REPORT OF INVESTIGATIONS
NUMBER 125
Geo-Marine, Inc.
550 East Fifteenth Street
Plano, Texas evans logo

for
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Fort Worth District
819 Taylor Street
Fort Worth, Texas

Achievements of the 1950s

It was during the McCarthy era, in April of 1953, that Dr. Stanley Kronenberg first came to work at Evans in the new Nucleonics Branch. Kronenberg was brought to the United States as a part of Operation Paper Clip, a program to recruit German and Austrian scientists for U.S. Army research in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kronenberg, a native of Poland, had just finished a doctorate at the University of Vienna when he was asked by Army officials to work for the U.S. government (at the time, Vienna was still an occupied city, like Berlin). He accepted the offer and entered the country as a “classified parcel” (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995).

In addition to Kronenberg, Operation Paper Clip recruited some 25 German and Austrian scientists to work at Fort Monmouth, most of whom worked under the direction of Harold Zahl in the Signal Corps Electronics Laboratories (Shalett 1952:13). It was in the middle to late 1950s, after the McCarthy disruptions, that Kronenberg and other scientists made their greatest achievements at Fort Monmouth. The groundwork for these achievements was laid by a new round of construction at Fort Monmouth. Initiated by Commanding General Kirke Lawton during and after the McCarthy period, most of this new construction occurred on the Main Post or in the adjacent Camp Charles Wood area. Demolition began on the World War II temporary buildings and this work continued through the 1980s. The new construction that replaced the temporary buildings included a new administrative building, an auditorium, new Signal Corps School buildings, and new permanent barracks for enlisted personnel. Single-family housing units, like Wherry housing and later Capehart housing, were also begun during this period (Bingham ca. 1990; CECOM Historical Office 1985:37; Buchanan and Johnson 1984:64-75).

By far the largest of the new buildings was the Albert J. Myer Center (Building 2700), the new Signal Corps laboratory that was commonly called the Hexagon, although two of its planned six sides were never constructed (Figure 11). Built in the Charles Wood Area as the new Signal Corps research and development center, the Hexagon was begun in 1952 and dedicated in September of 1954 (Bingham ca. 1990; Dr. Richard Bingham, personal communication 1995; CECOM Historical Office 1994:5; U.S. Army Signal Training Command and Fort Monmouth, New Jersey 1961:28).

It was during this same period, in 1953, that the Deal Test Site was acquired by the Army through lease agreement. In previous decades, research had been conducted at Deal by both Western Electric and Bell Laboratories, and this work was now assumed directly by the Signal Corps. For the next 20 years, until 1973, the Deal Test Site served as an integral part of the Fort Monmouth operations (Deal Test Site ca. 1982).

Although little new construction was done at Evans, there was one major exception, Building 9401. Officially listed as built in 1942, Building 9401 was almost completely overhauled in the early 1950s to house the new nucleonics facilities clustered in the area between the “H” radar buildings and the southernmost Testing and Training Area (Figures 12 and 13). The overhaul began in 1952, and Stanley Kronenberg arrived in time to help design part of the structure. Upon completion, Building 9401 was transformed into a concrete structure with walls 1.5 feet thick.

The center for Fort Monmouth’s radiation testing, Building 9401 has been dubbed “The Shield” by those who worked there. Kronenberg put his office at the front of the building in the early 1950s, and has worked there for over 40 years, even when he had other offices and other responsibilities (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995). The rest of the building consists of at least four testing labs that have held a wide array of instruments used to measure radiation effects on Signal Corps components and equipment.

Working in Building 9401, Kronenberg and other researchers discovered new ways to measure radiation dosages. Called “dosimetry,” the science of measuring radiation was essential for the protection of military personnel and equipment in the event of a nuclear disaster. Signal Corps equipment was tested in the dosimetry labs for radiation effects of all kinds: alpha, beta, and gamma rays; blast shock; and even some nuclear fall-out. Methods were sought to make Signal Corps equipment and components more resistant to the effects of such radiation (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995).

In the 1950s, one lab in Building 9401 contained a Van de Graaff Accelerator, believed to be the second commercial machine produced by the High Voltage Engineering Corporation, headed by Robert J. Van de Graaff. Generating up to two million volts, the Van de Graaff Accelerator was used to accelerate atomic particles studied in nuclear research (Fred Gentner, personal communication 1995; Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995). The underground lab, known as the basement vault, has also been dubbed “the sarcophagus.” Here, Kronenberg covered one wall with the text from an ancient Egyptian papyrus. The “Egyptian wall” was later photographed and popularized by Life photographer Tom Alexander in the mid-1960s (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995).

One of the few buildings still open is the Shield Machine Shop immediately west-southwest of Building 9401. In operation since at least the 1950s, this shop contains, among other things, a heavy lathe, a precision lathe, drill press, milling machines, and a Do-All Saw. For more than 40 years, this was where Kronenberg built his equipment prototypes, many of which garnered lucrative patents for the Army (Fred Gentner, personal communication 1995; Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995).

Despite the disruption of Korea and McCarthy, the 1950s was a decade of unparalleled achievement at Fort Monmouth. The Signal Corps Electronics Laboratories, under the direction of Harold Zahl, continued and widened the research avenues opened in the late 1940s (Shalett 1952:3). By the 1950s and early 1960s, those avenues had expanded to vast proportions. The demands of the Korean War and new improvements in radio led to the Army’s “Global Signal Systems,” based on the radio interconnection of U.S. troops around the world (Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories 1952).

Figure 11. The Hexagon, Charles Wood Area, ca. 1960 (Courtesy, CECOM Historical Research Collection, Fort Monmouth).

Figure 12. Evans Area, looking northeast.

Figure 13. Evans area, looking southwest.

Even greater improvements were made in the area of components, where emphasis was placed on development of smaller, standardized parts. The auto-sembly system of circuit production, first done in 1949, was perfected in the 1950s. Using the photo-etching process to mass-produce wiring circuitry, auto-sembly reduced the space needed for electrical wiring in radios and other electrical devices (Shalett 1952:9). Much of this work was done at Squier Hall and, later, the Hexagon; results were tested at the Evans dosimetry labs. This work led to the micromodule circuit assembly, perfected in 1958. Wafer-thin, the micromodule circuits were uniform microelements joined together by peripheral wires to form a circuit module (ERADCOM 1960s).

The demand for smaller radio components led to the first transistors in the late 1940s and 1950s. Transistors represented a tremendous leap in the development of radio equipment (Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories 1952:33-36). Although Bell Laboratories is generally credited with the first success in transistors, the Signal Corps labs at Fort Monmouth did much of the preliminary work (Dr. Stanley Kronenberg, personal communication 1995; Sam Stine, personal communication 1995).

The miniaturization of circuits and the development of transistors were probably the greatest achievements of the Fort Monmouth labs during the 1950s. Even in the early 1950s, these developments led to vast improvements in the early “mechanical brains,” or computers, that had previously required vast numbers of electron tubes and personnel to operate (Shalett 1952:7-9). With every year, computers became smaller and more powerful, until, in the late 1970s, small “personal computers” were finally introduced to the market and simply revolutionized the world. Fort Monmouth played an early and important role in this development, and there were few achievements out of a Signal Corps laboratory greater than this.

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