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Magicians of
Monmouth

Saturday Evening Post
by Shalett, S.

Aug. 23, 1952

pages. 34-35, 58, 62, 64, and 66 

 evans logo

Project Diana

 The Monmouth coup that most captured the public imagination was “Project Diana.”  It was announced in January, 1946, that Evans Laboratory scientists had made contact with the moon, using high-frequency radar beams.   History has become a little obscure on this point, but one story at Monmouth has it that the first successful moon-contacting experiment actually took place some months before the announcement; the absent-minded scientists at Evans were so engrossed in their work that they forgot to tell the SCEL public-information officer what they were doing.  “We had no idea,” research director Zahl innocently commented, “ that it was going to become such a news item.”   Even after everything was squared away, the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington was so leery about it that it throttled publicity until a skeptical major general came up and checked the experiment for himself.

 What Diana actually did was to shoot out a powerful fixed beam at the moon approximately 240,000 miles away, and receive back the “pip” from the moon contact some two and a half seconds later.  The absorption of the radar beam, as it traveled twice through the earth’s atmosphere was carefully was carefully measured.  More recently, the National Bureau of Standards, in collaboration with Collins Radio Company, staged a successful variation of the experiment.  From its plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Collins sent out a coded message via an ultra-high-frequency radio waves.  The message was bounced off the moon in such a way that it was deflected to a receiver at a Bureau of Standards receiving station near Washington.  If anyone on the moon was eavesdropping and could decipher Morse code, he -- or “it” -- would have read the same message that Samuel Morse flashed on his new telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore in 1844: “What hath God wrought!”


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