How the Allies Won the War But Lost the Child?

Radar

…But in the late 1930s the threat of air attack stimulated work on this technology, and research groups in at least eight countries—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—independently developed radar. Even before the outbreak of war Britain had built an air-defense radar system called Chain Home. In the United States, researchers at MIT’s Rad Lab and the U.S Naval Research Laboratory also hurried to develop radar.

During World War II

It has been said that radar won the war for the Allies in World War II. …Most of the air (and naval) actions in World War II fought with radar at UHF and below. Early U.S. radar equipment operated at 200 MHz. The XAF and CXAM search radars were designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, and were the first operational radars in the US fleet, produced by RCA. These were followed by large scale production of other 200-MHz systems, the SA, SK and SR. Other systems at 400, 600, and 1200 MHz became available by the end of the war.

Microwave radar made its appearance in 1943, after the magnetron was developed into a high-power, producible device. Low-power klystrons had long been used as local oscillators for superheterodyne receivers, as had parabolic reflector antennas. It required only a year to make the transition from the laboratory magnetron (mid-1940, in England) to the first 10-cm experimental tracker at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. Another year brought the field test model of the XT-1, and by mid-1943 the SCR-584 was being delivered from production. This radar had a beamwidth of 4 deg (70 mr), and could track aircraft with an accuracy of about 1.5 rnr, adequate for direct input to AA gun directors. Optical tracking continued to supplement the radar data, but the quality of automatic, servocontrolled tracking was such that radar-controlled guns were highly lethal within their design range. With the deployment of shells containing radar proximity fuzes, air defense reached a new high in effectiveness.

Leo Kanner

Leo Kanner’s 1943 paper on autism

Donald T. was not like other 5-year-old boys.  Leo Kanner knew that the moment he read the 33-page letter from Donaldʼs father that described the boy in obsessive detail as “happiest when he was alone… drawing into a shell and living within himself… oblivious to everything around him.” Donald had a mania for spinning toys, liked to shake his head from side to side and spin himself around in circles, and he had temper tantrums when his routine was disrupted.

When Kanner met Donald, his suspicions were confirmed. In addition to the symptoms the letter described, Kanner noted Donaldʼs explosive, seemingly irrelevant use of words. Donald referred to himself in the third person, repeated words and phrases spoken to him, and communicated his own desires by attributing them to others.

Kanner described Donald and ten other children in a 1943 paper entitled, Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact¹. In this initial description of ‘infantile autismʼ, which went on to become a classic in the field of clinical psychiatry, Kanner described a distinct syndrome instead of previous depictions of such children as feeble-minded, retarded, moronic, idiotic or schizoid. In the words of his contemporary Erwin Schrödinger, Kanner “thought what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

In the 1940s, researchers in the United States began to use the term “autism” to describe children with emotional or social problems. Leo Kanner, a doctor from Johns Hopkins University, used it to describe the withdrawn behavior of several children he studied. At about the same time, Hans Asperger, a scientist in Germany, identified a similar condition that’s now called Asperger’s syndrome.