MIT Radiation Laboratory

Ernest Lawrence's laboratory at UC Berkeley, now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was also known as the Radiation Laboratory.

The Radiation Laboratory or often Rad Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in operation from October 1940 until December 31, 1945. It was one division of the National Defense Research Committee, a commission established by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the leadership of MIT President Karl T. Compton and Dean of Engineering Vannevar Bush. Lee A. DuBridge was appointed director of the laboratory. (Other Radiation Laboratories were established by the NDRC at Harvard University, at Columbia University under I.I. Rabi, and at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.)

The lab was initially set up as a joint Anglo-American project, largely inspired by the British development of simple radar and that of the cavity magnetron pioneered by John Randall and Harry Boot at the University of Birmingham in 1940. After the Tizard Mission in 1940, the technology of radar was exported to the United States for further development and production. A wealthy amateur scientist, Alfred Lee Loomis, funded the laboratory initially.

The name Radiation Laboratory was intentionally deceptive^[1], albeit obliquely correct insofar as radar depends on a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was chosen to imply that the lab's mission was similar to that of the Ernest O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley, i.e., that it empoyed physicists to work on nuclear physics research. At the time, nuclear physics was regarded as relatively theoretical and inapplicable to the war effort, as this was before atomic bomb development had begun.

Starting in 1942, the Manhattan Project absorbed many of the Rad Lab physicists into Los Alamos and Lawrence's facility. This was made simpler by Lawrence and Loomis being involved in all these projects.^[2]

The lab's activities eventually encompassed physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles, and the lab made fundamental advances in all of these fields. Half of the radar deployed during World War II was designed at the Rad Lab, including over 100 different radar systems (such as the SCR-584 radar), and $1.5 billion worth of radar. All of it improved considerably on systems such as Robert Watson-Watt's Chain Home. At the height of its activities, the Rad Lab employed nearly 4,000 people working on several continents. The Rad Lab constructed and was the initial occupant of MIT's famous Building 20, the longest-surviving World War II temporary structure (since demolished, with the Stata Center built on the site), at a cost of just over $1 million.

When the Rad Lab closed, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development agreed to continue funding for the Rad Lab's Basic Research Division, which officially became part of MIT on July 1, 1946 as the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE). Other wartime research was taken up by the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, which was founded at the same time. Both labs principally occupied building 20 until 1957, and maintained space there until the building was closed.

Most of the important research results of the Rad Lab were published in a twenty-eight-volume compilation entitled the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series between 1947 and 1953, which is no longer in print. The series was rereleased as a two-CD-ROM set in 1999 (ISBN 1-58053-078-8) by publisher Artech House.

With the cryptology and cryptographic efforts centered at Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall and the Manhattan Project, the development of microwave radar at the Radiation Laboratory represents one of the most significant, secret, and outstandingly successful technological efforts spawned by Anglo-American alliance in World War II.

References

• MIT Archives' Celebrating the History of Building 20
• Radiation Laboratory of Electronics history
• IEEE Virtual Museum - MIT's Rad Lab
• 28 volumes list of MIT Radiation Laboratory Series