The Asbury Park Press
March 13, 1992

Page C1 and B2

Radio

From Page C 1

Fort Monmouth that has been the site of radio work since the turn of the century, when the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America bought the land for its transatlantic radio opera-tion. Fast forward to Electronic Warfare/Reconnaissance Surveillance Target Acquisition (whatever the heck that is), the Army's terminology for what goes on here now.
    But today, driving up the small hill toward the camp, we're thinking more about what once happened - and what was left behind.
    A few hundred yards past the Marconi Hotel two plain buildings sit on a small lot. Pieces of a cement foundation, half-buried in the soggy turf, are all that remain of Diana, the first antenna to receive reflected signals from the moon. The Army has, as they are wont to do, left some wild-looking toys lying around. A few yards away, for instance, a large parabolic antenna stares skyward. Naturally, it draws some questions about what it does.
    Turns out it doesn't do anything any more. Unplugged.Hey, they had to put it somewhere.
    The real draw here on the Diana site, though, is stacked onto the shelves of a small one-story building. Here are the remnants of decades of radio work, decades of tinkering with tubes and wires and eventually computers and satellites.   Some of it ends up at Fort Monmouth, in the Communications Electronics Museum. Unlike the museum, though, this building is not open to the public.
    The place is full, chock full, of radio tubes, a signal corp wireless set made in Philadelphia for the Russians and an exact replica of the Vanguard 2 satellite. Launched Feb. 17, 1959, its inventory card describes it as "a 10 lb., gold-plated sphere with 4 metal antennas and two spherical openings." It orbited the earth 211 times, back when orbiting the earth was still a very big deal.
    Not to mention the Chinese type-writer, the Indian bells and the German buzzer. And the 1925 radio catalogs: "Entertainment and information come right to your home!" "Radio - The Modern Wonder! Instant contact with the entire country!" The place looks like a low-tech garage sale, a sel-

dom-seen, fascinating collection of communications flotsam and jetsam.
    Mindy Rosewitz, acting curator of the electronics museum at Fort Monmouth, is the lucky woman who gets to pore through the shelves of history, separating the exhibits from the dust-gatherers.   She is energetic, funny, with an obvious love for these abandoned relics.
    "We're in the process of taking inventory here," she says, peering through to the back of a well-stocked shelf of ancient field radios. "Basically, we take a look at everything. Those items that are in the best condition, and are pertinent to the history of Fort    Monmouth, can go into the museum "
    She picks up a rare, sapphire-faced cathode tube. Next to it is another German television tube, captured during the war.
    "Answering inquiries is a large part of this job. And we do allow serious researchers to come here to work with the museum."
    Back in November 1941, the Army purchased the site, naming it after well-known World War I signal officer Col. Paul Wesley Evans. Unfortunately, the people who lived around Evans at the time were under the impression the Army had in fact named the site for its previous tenant: the Grand Wizard of the KKK, whose name was also, of course, Evans.
    The camp's finest hour probably came on Jan. 10, 1946. On that auspicious day, Signal Corps scientists succeeded in reflecting electronic pulses off the moon using a specifically designed radar set, which they christened the Diana Tower. The event was a major advance in communications technology.
    "Up until that time," as Fort Monmouth's command historian Richard Bingham puts it, "it really was not clear that we could send radio messages through space. They weren't even sure it could be done. Diana proved not only that it could be done, but that we could get an answer. It established the feasibility of satellite communications."
    Driving around the perimeter of Evans, you can't help but think of the people who invested so much of their lives toiling away in these featureless buildings. They devoted themselves to a science that few understood, and fewer pursued.

*Some of the factual material for this story was taken from Harold A. Zahl's 1970 short history of the Evans
Area.

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The Asbury Park Press March 13, 1992

The Asbury Park Press
March 13, 1992