Magicians of Monmouth Saturday Evening Post by Shalett, S. Aug. 23, 1952 pages. 34-35, 58, 62, 64, and 66

Tickling clouds

 In Washington, Maj. Gen. G. I. Back, Chief Signal Officer, and his deputy, Brig. Gen. James D. O’Connell, are pleased with SCEL’s accomplishments in blending the talents of so-called long-haired scientists and military brass.  Neither species is exactly in the lamb category; yet, at Monmouth, they form a harmonious working team. Col. Edwin R. Petzing, a Regular Army officer, commands the SCEL organization, with three civilians, research director Zahl; E.L. Nelson, technical director; and Salvatore Petrillo, engineering director, as his principal lieutenants.  Though each laboratory has a military administrative director and project officers, 4600 of the 5000 persons on SCEL’s roster are civilians.  The officer contingent among the military personnel numbers only about seventy-five, and most have technical background so they can hold their own when their civilian colleagues start discoursing about thermionics and acoustical capacitance.  One high-ranking SCEL scientist with a pixy streak currently is tantalizing his uniformed associates by threating to invent a military dial telephone which will recognize rank; if circuits are busy when an officer dials a number, it automatically will cancel out a call being made by the lowest-ranking officer on the circuit.  Generals would cancel out colonels; colonels would cancel lieutenant colonels, and so on down the line.

 In years of service, research director Zahl, through only forty-seven, is the veteran of SCEL’s top civilian scientists.  “I came here twenty-one years ago, just after earning my doctorate from the University of Iowa, because someone told me Monmouth would be a good place to spend a winter,” Zahl said.  “I’ve been here ever since.”  One of his first assignments was in connection with a joint Signal Corps-Coast Artillery experiment on antisubmarine defenses.  It involved placing four buoys, anchored by the toughest existing steel cable, existing steel cable, off the Jersey coast.  “Naturally, we couldn’t tell the newspapers what we were doing, so one of the tabloids conceived the idea, which it luridly chronicled, that we were launching scientific warfare against the rumrunners of that era,”  Zahl related.  “It was supposed to be a device that would enable us to listen to conversations on rum boats fifty miles out.  The morning after that story appeared, we found our buoys missing.  Such was science in the early ‘30’s.”

 The Monmouth laboratories are accustomed to being handed tough, hurry-up jobs.  “In an emergency, it is the Signal Corps that is asked to pull the right rabbit out of the hat,” Harold Churchill, chief of technical information, observed.  Churchill recalled how, at the outbreak of World War II, the Secret Service called on the Monmouth laboratories to produce “immediately” a series of portable, special-duty FM radio sets that precede and follow President Roosevelt wherever he traveled.  It so happened that Monmouth and New York and Chicago manufactures were nearly ready with early models of new sets for the armed forces.  By working night and day, they were able to fill the White House order promptly.

 Then the Secret Service commandeered the services of a dozen Signal Corps personnel to operate them.  The “FDR” radios, incidentally, later were produced by the thousands and were produced by the thousands and were used in cars and tanks on the battlefield.

 During World War II it was necessary to sacrifice a great deal of long-range scientific research to the immediate job of producing needed hardware.  Today, the top military and civilian authorities say, that is not the case.  Even the demands of the Korean conflict have not crippled the program of research for the future.  “we try to keep at least five years ahead of the user, and in certain fields, our thinking is at least twenty-five years ahead .”  Doctor Zahl declared.  “At the same time, however, since funds are limited and demand for immediate items is great, the laboratories must maintain a delicate balance between the practical and the visionary.  We can’t throw away our dollars on the ridiculous.  I can predict a twenty-five-year goal, but I can’t tell you when will have a man-made satellite circling in the slipstream of gravity.”

 On the tangible side of today, SCEL can boast that, of 274 major items procured by the Signal Corps, only twenty-four are of World War II design.

 The Signal Corps, which celebrated its eighty-ninth birthday last March, is rugged duty, on both the soldiering and the scientific fronts.  Since communications equipment must be installed and operated close to the forward lines, Signal Corpsmen in Korea have won a high quota of Purple Hearts.  “It’s not only the bullets that bother us,” said Col. Emil Lenzner, recently returned form Korea, where he had served as 8th Army Chief Signal Officer.  “We slaved through incalculable difficulties, anchoring poles in the Korean rice fields and stringing wire to carry military messages.  When the soldiers marching along these roads were given rest periods, what do you think some of them did?  Used our insulators for target practice!”

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