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A Physicist with the Air Force

Posted by michael on from the meet-new-and-interesting-people,-and-kill-them dept.

An anonymous submitter - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh - sent in this tale about the duties of a physicist during World War II.

1 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Payment: Old Granddad! by hyrdra · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is an article which really makes me appriciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.

    My favorite line of the entire article (in reference to the fabrication of slide rules used in the missions):

    But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.

    Yep, things we're certainly different back then!

    --


    "I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95