Synopsis
Recalls the small group of scientists whose invention of radar during World War II contributed to the Allied victory, as well as chronicling their significant post-war achievements. 20,000 first printing.
Reviews
As the former technology editor for Business Week, Buderi understands his complex subject well enough to render it clear without oversimplifying it. The first half of his book makes a strong case that the atomic bomb only ended WWII?it was radar that won it. Radar tipped the balance in the Battle of Britain, at Midway and in the Solomons. Radar haunted the U-boats and helped control the V-1 attacks of 1944-45. Meanwhile, radar countermeasures and navigation systems set the stage for the D-Day landings. Buderi tells this story well, with an unusual ability to describe technical subjects in language a nonspecialist can comprehend. In the second half of the book, he devotes half a dozen chapters to biographical sketches of key, albeit little-known, participants in the wartime radar program. Finally, the author brings to center stage radar technology's contributions to the Cold War and to space astronomy. While this concluding discussion is informative, it scants other areas influenced by radar. Subjects such as air-traffic control and weather reporting deserve better than relegation to an epilogue. Overall, this is a vigorous history, but an unfocused one. Photos, not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In a narrative that often reads as compellingly as the best spy fiction, freelance science writer Buderi tells the story of how British and American scientists developed microwave radar, a device that helped win WW II and spurred a transformative postwar technical revolution. In Liverpool in August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, British scientists secretly accompanied a mysterious black box aboard a Canadian liner bound for the US. Inside was one of Britain's most closely guarded military secrets: a cavity magnetron, a radar transmitter that made the precise identification of military targets possible--even at night and during inclement weather. Brushing aside American prewar isolationism, American and British scientists, working under the aegis of American government and industry, formed the Radiation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for exploring scientific applications for Britain's microwave research. Buderi tells the riveting story of the ``wizard war,'' as Allied and German scientists attempted to trump each other in horrific technological gadgetry and electronic measures and countermeasures. The ultimate triumph of the Anglo- American scientists was a key to Allied victory in the air and U-boat wars. Aided by excellent British intelligence, including now-famous intercepts of the German Enigma encoding machine, British scientists were able to disrupt radar guiding German bombers over England, prevent German electronic devices from detecting British planes over Europe, and jammed German broadcasting. American refinement of a British radar invention resulted in the disruption, and ultimately the cessation, of German V-1 rocket attacks on London. After the war, Buderi points out, the work of the microwave radar pioneers resulted in a potpourri of technical advances in engineering that transformed American life, including transistors, microwave ovens, and computers, and in advances in astronomy, including radiotelescopes. A fascinating story, well told. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Radio Detection and Ranging, to spell out one of the best acronyms to come out of World War II, would superficially appear to be an important but unexciting story. Fortunately, Buderi makes it interesting, even dramatic, by embedding radar's technical development into its military contribution to two of the war's turning points: the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. Buderi recounts the personalities of and the rivalries between the radar scientists, centered in MIT's famous Rad Lab. There, with a boost from Britain's supersecret cavity magnetron, radars were designed and tested in a crash program to defeat the rampaging U-boats. Following the war, Buderi narrates, came the realization of the new technology's usefulness in planetary astronomy, in which, enhanced by the inventions of the maser and the transistor, radar has made seminal discoveries. For readers of war or space technology, Buderi puts plenty of flesh on the story's physical framework of wavelengths and azimuths. A diligent, deserving work. Gilbert Taylor
Much of our view of the technological achievements emerging from World War II is driven by nuclear fetishism, but a more fundamental truth is revealed in the subtitle to this remarkable book. Buderi, former technology editor for Business Week, traces the radiation revolution from its earliest beginnings to today. This captivating tale of a dedicated group of scientists and engineers begins with a small box carrying all of Britain's wartime secrets on its mythiclike journey to MIT. Gizmos, glitches, and gadgets that eventually won the war for the Allies are then introduced. That's only half the story: Buderi then pursues the unlikely heroes and their creative energies into postwar inventiveness. Through extensive interviews and impressive bibliographies, the author has produced a fascinating history. If the rest of the "Sloan Technology" series is like this, interested readers will want to read them all.?John J. Yurechko, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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