Word: cosmic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Working eagerly with Professor Poulter, Jim tracked meteors, made a magnetic survey of Mount Pleasant, and measured cosmic rays at ground level. He moved on to the State University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City, to do post-graduate work in nuclear physics. In 1939 he got a job with the Carnegie Institution of Washington...
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...
...Allen was temporarily diverted from Rockoons to a project at Princeton University to develop thermonuclear power. But his Iowa graduate students carried on the Rockoon firings off the coast of Newfoundland. One day the students put in an excited call to Van Allen in Princeton. The cosmic rays near Newfoundland, the students reported, seemed to rise to incredibly high intensity above 30 miles...