Fort Monmouth

New Jersey

In 1946, an Army team on this New Jersey post bounced a radio signal off the moon and heard it come back.

historicalmilitaryengineeringracing

In 1946, a team here pointed a radar antenna at the moon and waited. The signal went up, hit the moon, and came back. Project Diana proved that communication across space was possible. The equipment they used came out of work done on the same ground eight years earlier. In 1938 the Army's first radio-based aircraft detection and ranging system was built on this post. The world later called it radar. A production model of that equipment picked up the oncoming Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor. The warning it gave was discounted. A decade before either of those, in 1928, the first radio-equipped weather balloon rose from here into the upper atmosphere, the forerunner of sounding techniques used everywhere today. The place is Fort Monmouth. It took its name from the soldiers who died at the Battle of Monmouth in the Revolutionary War.

This is the first of 4 parts. The rest runs about 4 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
In 1946 celestial communication was proved feasible, when the radar developed by the Project Diana team was used to bounce radio signals off the moon.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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