How Donald Trump’s Uncle Helped Win WW2

Donald Trump may have evaded the Vietnam War because of “bone spurs”, but his uncle played an important role in winning the Second World War.

The basic idea behind “radar” was known as early as the 1880s. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had already concluded on theoretical grounds that radio waves, being electromagnetic like light, could possibly be reflected from flat metal objects, and this was demonstrated experimentally in 1888 by the German scientist Heinrich Hertz. By 1904, another German named Christian Hülsmeyer had already patented a device that he called an “obstacle detector” which could be used on board ships to avoid icebergs, rocks or other vessels at a distance. Hülsmeyer approached the navies of several countries with his idea, but none of them were interested. That changed in the 1920s, as combat aircraft and naval guns became more sophisticated and capable. Now, targets could be attacked at long range, and by 1930, research on radar was being carried out, in great secrecy, in the US, UK, Germany, France, USSR, Italy, Holland, and Japan.

In the United States, this work was being done at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. In 1930, the Lab was carrying out experiments with a setup using two separate antennae, one for transmitting and one for receiving, and was able to successfully detect aircraft, but this system was large and cumbersome, which limited its usefulness. Things improved tremendously when the Lab figured out how to incorporate both sending and receiving in the same antenna. That caught the interest of military commanders, and by 1939 the US Navy had deployed a number of crude but effective radar sets to detect incoming aircraft and ships at sea.

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