Word: radars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fighting men, radar by now is as routine a war tool as a rifle, but it has rewritten the textbooks of warfare. It has also given man a sharp sixth sense which projects him into a world where almost any fantasy seems possible...
...Beam That Sees. An electronic supergadget which "sees" as well in the dark as in the light, radar projects a radio beam which, on striking an object near or far, returns an echo that is translated into a visual image on the radar screen. Radar can see the flight of a shell, the wake of a ship, the explosion of a target, the fall of a hit plane. At sea, it can detect buoys, reefs and other ships more than 20 miles away...
From the air, by night or day or through the thickest cloud, it lays open the terrain below like a relief map, showing coastlines, ships, harbors, jetties, mountains, lakes, rivers, bridges, cities. At close range, with the narrowest radar beam, it is possible to see a city's river fronts, avenues, even buildings...
Normally the screen shows the size but not the exact shape of the detected object. Occasionally it may get an effect of almost photographic sharpness (the screen in Artzybasheff's drawing, though an exaggerated animation, is based on a ''shadow effect" actually caught in one freakish radar picture of a plane a couple of hundred yards away...
Battle Results. Radar's fantastic capabilities have been dramatized again & again in battle. It was radar that enabled a .U.S. warship to smash the battleship Jean Bart at Oran with one salvo from 26 miles away. German radar-directed fire sank the British battle cruiser Hood, and British radar in turn tracked down the Bismarck. It was a radar operator who gave the tragically ignored warning of approaching Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor...