Talk:Russell and Sigurd Varian/Archives/2014

Careers section and Cavity magnetron article
In the careers section, don't you think we should put this sentence into perspective :

The US and Britain were able to use this technology to create radar equipment light and compact enough to fit into aircraft,[10] which was credited with helping the Allies win the war.[2]

using the history section in the Cavity magnetron article :

While radar was being developed during World War II, there arose an urgent need for a high-power microwave generator that worked at shorter wavelengths (around 10 cm (3 GHz)) rather than the 150 cm (200 MHz) that was available from tube-based generators of the time. It was known that a multi-cavity resonant magnetron had been developed and patented in 1935 by Hans Hollmann in Berlin.(21) However, the German military considered the frequency drift of Hollman's device to be undesirable, and based their radar systems on the klystron instead. But klystrons could not at that time achieve the high power output that magnetrons eventually reached. This was one reason that German night fighter radars were not a match for their British counterparts.(22)

[...]

Because France had just fallen to the Nazis and Britain had no money to develop the magnetron on a massive scale, Churchill agreed that Sir Henry Tizard should offer the magnetron to the Americans in exchange for their financial and industrial help (the Tizard Mission). An early 6 kW version, built in England by the General Electric Company Research Laboratories, Wembley, London (not to be confused with the similarly named American company General Electric), was given to the US government in September 1940. At the time the most powerful equivalent microwave producer available in the US (a klystron) had a power of only ten watts. The cavity magnetron was widely used during World War II in microwave radar equipment and is often credited with giving Allied radar a considerable performance advantage over German and Japanese radars, thus directly influencing the outcome of the war. It was later described by America as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".(24)

Trebucher (talk) 09:06, 23 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I'd actually like to take this article to GAN, so if you have some good, solid sources for the above and want to move it over-but a summary - edit it down a bit, though, keep it tight), I'm supportive of the idea of doing so!  Montanabw (talk)  20:58, 23 August 2014 (UTC)