Not just "Blind Faith"

CIX

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was, like Pan American Airways, a civilian company formed by covert agents of the United States government in order to create a nationwide radio network. 

 

The earliest RCA logo (1919)

During World War I, radio, then in its infancy but with many military applications, was handed over to the United States Army and the Navy, who ran it as a monopoly. In 1918, Congress decided to make radio a civilian enterprise once more, and directed the War Department to organize a monopolistic radio company to handle all U.S. transmissions, which it did by fusing elements of the prewar American Marconi, General Electric, and Pan-American Telegraph companies into what became known as RCA. (For broadcast purposes, RCA formed a subsidiary, the “National Broadcasting Corporation” or “NBC.”)  

The earliest logo of the NBC radio network. It was succeeded by the “Snake Logo” in 1959 when television began to dominate over radio broadcasting. The familiar peacock was introduced in 1962 with the start of television broadcasts “in living color”

At the same time, the Federal government formed American Telephone & Telegraph Company, better known as “AT&T”, which maintained a monopoly on telephone communications for decades.  

  

Like radio, telephone was nationalized during World War I. AT&T (1889 logo, top) was the original and largest telephone company. In 1921 (logo bottom) the government made it the only telephone company. In 1982, the government broke up the monopoly it had created  

Radio, and its precursor, wireless telegraphy, had been used aboard ships since 1903, but it had been poorly regulated. Sets had no standard power or standard range. Operators too, had few working standards, and the operators of various companies often tried to jam the signals of other companies’ operators. Wireless operators worked odd hours as well. Some vessels had only one operator, who worked a straight 12-to-18 hour shift. Other ships had two-man teams for ‘round-the-clock service.

The “Marconi Shack” (radio room) aboard the Titanic.  The White Star vessel had two radio operators,  the senior,  Jack Phillips (pictured) and the junior, Harold Bride, who earned the equivalent of $20 and $18 USD per month, respectively. Phillips was a radio wizard of whom was expected great things in broadcasting.  Phillips went down with the ship, but only after sending the CQDs (“Come Quick, Distress!”) that alerted the world to the sinking. He also transmitted the first SOS (“Save Our Ship!”) in history. It was the new call just adopted by international agreement, and as Bride joked, “It might be your last chance to send it.” Bride survived

A one-man wireless station had no way of collecting or hearing messages if the operator was off duty. This may have contributed to the Titanic disaster. Since the night of the sinking in 1912, it has been believed that the liner S.S. Californian lay only a few miles across the ice field from the doomed Titanic and that Californian’s watch officers actually saw the ship go down without realizing what they were seeing. Californian’s Captain, Stanley Lord, was not an ambitious man, and did not awaken the ship’s one radio officer to listen for messages, even after rockets were sighted over the oddly-behaving vessel just on the edge of the horizon. Whether Californian could have rescued Titanic’s passengers is a great unknown. In any event, the loss of the Titanic spurred better regulation and standardization of radio use. 

The S.S. Californian lay stopped by the same pack ice that claimed the Titanic. During that night, the deck watch reported seeing rockets fired over a “queer-looking” vessel on the horizon, but Captain Stanley Lord neither moved his ship to investigate, nor woke his wireless operator Cyril Evans to listen in to hear what, if anything, was going on.  The two ships were anywhere from ten miles to twenty miles apart. Captain Lord and his crew suffered permanent opprobrium for their seeming ineptitude. Whether they could have saved anyone is unknown, but there is no question they should have investigated the rockets

Radio sets aboard ship were bulky. Like the earliest computers of the 1940s, they could barely fit inside a single room. Deutsche Telefunken designed lighter weight equipment for use aboard zeppelins in the 1920s, but it was still far too large for use in airplane cockpits. 

Airplane fliers were at a disadvantage. Once aloft, they had no way of communicating with the ground, nor of determining their position (a lone pilot could hardly take sextant sightings while operating his plane). When lost or socked in by bad weather, pilots had no option but to drop down to the deck below cloud cover (in fog this could mean risking a crash) to follow railroad tracks to a town or read road signs. It was a system that was no system. Clearly, airplanes needed radio. 

Juan Trippe became convinced of the need for radio aboard his aircraft when the plane he was on got lost flying from Havana to Key West in bad weather. The pilot missed the Keys entirely, but touched down safely in Miami. 

Pan Am was still tinkering with radio ideas when its first Trimotor, the Clipper General Machado was destroyed after the plane (again flying from Cuba to Florida in overcast weather) not only missed the Keys, but flew 300 miles in the opposite direction into the Gulf of Mexico before ditching with no fuel left aboard. The plane broke up during its water landing, and a passenger lost his life. 

Getting lost was one thing, irritating enough, but losing lives, and particularly passenger lives, was another thing, and one that could write finis to Pan American completely. 

Trippe asked his Chief Engineer, Andre Priester, to find a radio wizard who could design a radio direction finder (RDF) for Pan Am’s remaining two planes. Priester hired a young man, Hugo Leuteritz, who was an RCA employee on sabbatical (not coincidentally, Priester and the Leuteritz family were all Dutch). With no room left in the tiny New York office, Leuteritz was given a chair alongside Priester’s desk, and sketched designs for an RDF on scratch paper he found in Priester’s desk drawers. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning but it yielded results. 

Leuteritz’s RDF was small and simple. It received beep signals from ground stations which the co-pilot then plotted on a chart. It also broadcast a beep signal to alert the ground to the plane’s course. Several early Pan Am pilots disliked the gizmo and ignored it. Andre Priester fired them unceremoniously when he discovered that they were dead reckoning instead. Pan Am rules allowed DR only if the RDF failed in flight

Leuteritz’s first RDF was crude but it worked well. It consisted of a mile of wire wrapped around a small rectangular wooden framework that was mounted on the aircraft. The unit was powered by a small windmill unit (perhaps, again, not so coincidentally, given Leuteritz’s Dutch roots).  Multiple ground transmitters sent regularly-scheduled beeping signals to the plane. The pilot then triangulated the plane’s position according to the various signal strengths.  

The transmitter / receiver Leuteritz designed was a masterwork of 1930s miniaturization. Built of light metals and simple wiring, it was a compact unit that could fit right beneath a cockpit’s control panel without consuming space, and above all, it was easy to repair, even in flight. A co-pilot could make repairs or adjustments to the unit with not much more than a screwdriver.  

  

In the 1930s Sperry was to reinvent Leuteritz’s RDF as the ADF, or Automatic Direction Finder, which can lock in on the strongest nearby signals and calculate the triangulation variables automatically.

A typical Sperry ADF of the 1930s  / 1940s was designed to lock in on the most powerful radio signals available and to compute the plane’s position automatically. When a signal began to fade, the ADF would search out a more powerful signal and recompute the data. As a result, rather than doing math in his head, a Navigator had only to scan the ongoing readouts from his equipment to plot a ship’s course. Dead Reckoning, however, was a skill still taught, and it served well during World War II. Although most warplanes had ADF installed (note the bulb on the bottom of this B-17G’s fuselage) it was sometimes disabled by battle damage. A good Dead Reckoner could save a ten-man crew’s collective life. Many were the men who found their way home with pencil and paper