Baldwin, Ralph (Interview transcript and video), 2007

Boring, Frank (Interviewer)

Ralph Baldwin was an astronomy instructor at Northwestern University in 1941 who volunteered for service after Pearl Harbor. He was initially assigned to teach navigation, but lobbied for a more important assignment. He was sent in 1942 to a secret program in Maryland being run by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Here he helped to develop the proximity fuse, a device that enabled anti-aircraft shells to sense when they were near targets and explode. By the end of the war, the fuse had become highly effective, and aspects of the technology developed for it are still used today.

2007-11-12

Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives

Veterans History Project (U.S.)

BaldwinR

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