Word: allens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Radio for Cannon. For a while, he did basic physical research on terrestrial magnetism, which influences cosmic rays. But World War II had begun, and weapons came first. Van Allen was put to work on the development of proximity fuses, which called for something almost inconceivable in 1940: a radio transmitter-receiver that could stand being fired out of a cannon in the nose of a shell. At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md., just outside Washington, Van Allen was a junior scientist in the proximity fuse business, but it made him an expert...
...When he came to see me," Abbie Van Allen says now, "he dreaded having to talk to my roommates while he waited for me. He'd walk in, look wildly around for a magazine, and bury his face in it just to avoid making small talk. When we finally decided to get married, the girls thought I was crazy. They asked: 'How can you marry a guy like that...
White Sands. Jim and Abbie were married in the fall of 1945 and settled down in suburban Silver Spring. With war's end, Van Allen had no further interest in fuses or weapons. He wanted to get back to studying cosmic rays. He learned that the U.S. Army had captured nearly 100 German V-2s and was planning to fire them at White Sands Proving Ground, N. Mex., with sand instead of explosives in their warheads. Van Allen, along with several other scientists, was offered the privilege of substituting instruments for the sand...
Until then, cosmic rays had been measured only to 80,000 ft. by balloon. The V-2s carried cosmic-ray instruments up 100 miles, measuring cosmic rays and making Van Allen, incidentally, an authority on instrumentation of rockets. They also brought him into close contact with nearly all of the pioneer U.S. rocketmen, especially William Pickering, soon to head the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena...
...Juice Victory. The first balloon rose properly to 70,000 ft., but the rocket hanging under it did not fire. The second Rockoon behaved in the same maddening way. On the theory that extreme cold at high altitude might have stopped the clockwork supposed to ignite the rockets, Van Allen heated cans of orange juice, snuggled them into the third Rockoon's gondola, and wrapped the whole business in insulation. The rocket fired...