Word: thaler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Tepee is the brainchild of young (33) Physicist William John Thaler (pronounced Thayler) of the Office of Naval Research. Thaler's primary field is nuclear weapons effects. But two years ago, he had a sudden notion that certain characteristics of the behavior of radio waves might be the key to a simple and reliable long-range detection system. Since both the ionosphere and the surface of the earth will deflect radio signals, a transmitter can angle its beam upward and the broad waves will carom back and forth between ground and sky as they proceed to circle the earth...
Personal Project. Thaler, then 31, did not wait for official encouragement, or even ask for it. Instead, he went ahead on his own. He borrowed radio equipment from a colleague, set it up and trained it in the direction of Nevada, where the AEC was about to fire a series of atom bombs. To his delight, the oscilloscope showed telltale wiggles. Two months later, he picked up the trail of the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik I. Enlisting the aid of other colleagues, he turned his attention to missile launchings at Cape Canaveral. There he ran into bureaucracy. None...
Soon Project Tepee was soaking up all the back-scatters it could handle. With experience. Thaler found he could distinguish and identify the special characteristics of everything from summer lightning to Polaris missiles, thermonuclear detonations and the aurora borealis. Last summer, in the line of his regular duty, Thaler directed the Navy's Argus Project, in which atom bombs were exploded 300 miles above the South Atlantic (TIME, March 30). In Washington, some 7,000 miles away, a Project Tepee set picked up the shots. The same set had also successfully registered the Teak and Kettle high-altitude thermonuclear...