CHIPS Articles: Game-Changing Navy Technologies

Many of the Navy’s greatest innovations include nuclear power aboard submarines and aircraft carriers, and designing a ship that could catapult and land aircraft.

But just like the Navy’s force is global, so are the innovations, many of them created by the Navy Research Lab. So here are three blue and gold roots to some of those Navy Research Lab innovations that have gone global.

Did You Know… Radar?

“It was a nice, quiet night for a torpedo attack.”

Fans of Adm. Arleigh Burke may remember his infamous quote about the Battle at Cape St. George on Nov. 25, 1943.

Burke had the Naval Research Lab to thank for his ability to pull off that victory, the final surface battle that ended the World War II Solomon Islands Campaign. The 7th Fleet Destroyer Squadron 23, led by then-Capt. Burke, sank three and heavily damaged a fourth out of a five-ship “Tokyo Express” that was evacuating in the dead of night Japanese troops and aviation crew from Buka Island to Rabaul.

That was because each of the new Fletcher-class destroyers in DESRON 23 was outfitted with brand new technology called Radio Detection And Ranging, or radar.

“There may have been blacker nights than Thanksgiving Eve, 1943, in the South Pacific, but none could have been more completely blacked out with regard to information of the enemy,” the squadron’s commander noted. Then a clandestine tip gave Burke’s commander, Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, the heads-up the Japanese were making a run for it under the cover of darkness.

Newly installed radar on the American warships allowed Capt. Burke to earn his nickname “Thirty-One Knots” to give chase and enact an attack based on electronics rather than optics. It also allowed Burke’s destroyers to return home the following morning without a single loss. During one of Burke’s counter-attack maneuvers after firing torpedoes at the first two Japanese destroyers, it was radar that picked up the second Japanese column, giving him the advantage in both anticipating and countering their torpedoes and taking out the second threat.

Before the development of radar, Navy ships could track other ships or aircraft only by using optical techniques, sound ranging, or primitive radio direction finding. New methods of detection and ranging were necessary. In the autumn of 1922, NRL made the first detection of a moving ship by radio waves and, as a result, discovered the radar principle. Eight years after the initial discovery of the radar principle, NRL scientists noted that the reflections of radio waves from an airplane could also be detected.

From 1930 to 1940, NRL explored the use of radio for detection and ranging, and in 1935 the Committee on Naval Appropriations of the U.S. House of Representatives allocated $100,000 to NRL for the development of radar. This led to NRL’s invention and development of the first U.S. radar, the XAF (installed on the battleship USS New York in 1939), and led eventually to its commercial production form, the CXAM.

By the time of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, 20 radar units were in operation on selected vessels. These radars contributed to the victories of the U.S. Navy in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal, including those Fletcher-class destroyers during the Battle of Cape St. George.

Radars continue to be the eyes and ears of military ships, aircraft and vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles, providing valuable intel to the troops about to go into harm’s way.

And thanks to radar, Capt. Burke got his “nice, quiet night for a torpedo attack.”

Did you know… GPS?

Back in the day, when trying to navigate around new communities, it could get pretty dicey figuring out you need to take I-64 west to head east to Virginia Beach in Hampton Roads, or what to do once you’ve reached the infamous “spaghetti junction” in Northern Virginia.

But that all changed nearly 20 years ago, after something called the Global Positioning System became available to the general population. And after that, directions narrated by patient-sounding voices coming from little boxes on our dashboards or in our car’s console guided us through the road systems. Even if you didn’t make that right turn quick enough, “Jill” or “Stephanie” would simply state “recalculating” and get you back on track.

Today, most people couldn’t imagine their lives without GPS, either using it to find their way in unfamiliar territory, get directions to their favorite restaurant or pinging your children’s smartphones to make sure they are where they say they are. It is yet another example of how a Navy innovation was turned into something much bigger than its intended military use.

Way back during the Cold War era, the Navy needed to track their submarines in the event they would be called on to deploy their missiles. In 1960, the Navy Research Lab created a tracking program called Transit, which used a “constellation” of five satellites that provided a navigational fix once an hour. By 1967, when the NRL launched its Timation I satellite, they included atomic clocks that improved the timing and provided greater accuracy. A few years later, the NRL and the U.S. Air Force merged their similar programs to form the Navstar GPS program.

NRL’s Navigation Technology Satellite II, launched in 1977, was the first satellite in the Navstar GPS, which incorporated time range, range-rate navigation and a 12-hour orbit. In more than 700 air, land, and sea tests conducted between 1977 and 1979, the developmental satellites exceeded all performance requirements and affirmed the system’s extraordinary precision.

The Navstar GPS satellites transmit a constant signal generated by on-board atomic clocks that are so precise they gain or lose only one second every 3 million years. Users equipped with a receiver/processor simply lock onto the signals of four satellites, and then latitude, longitude, altitude, and velocity are automatically computed “within meters” by triangulation.

This remarkable precision proved invaluable during war-time applications in targeting pinpoint strikes and positioning troops in featureless terrain, or landing aircraft bringing relief supplies onto makeshift airfields. The system also serves numerous peacetime functions, such as air traffic control, scientific surveying, harbor navigation, and measurement of ocean waves. In 1995, it was made available for public use and GPS-guided navigational devices exploded on the market.

The system that began as a means to locate submarines nearly 60 years ago revolutionized the science of navigation, and keeping track of our children.

Did You Know… Mosquito Prevention?

They dive-bomb with abandon, sneak attacks that draw blood before we even realize it. And the aftermath can be just as deadly for people as a bullet. Residents of Minnesota joke the mosquito should be the state bird rather than the yodeling loon (although have you actually heard a loon yodel? Creepy!). As befit the state that boasts an 18-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan and sidekick Babe the Blue Ox, the Land of 10,000 Lakes is home to the world’s largest mosquito, which lives in Effie, Minn.

All kidding aside, mosquitos are the harbingers of deadly diseases, with nearly three million people a year dying from malaria alone. Add in Dengue fever and encephalitis, and the death count only goes up. Heartworms and a variety of equine encephalitis have resulted in the deaths of thousands of dogs, cats and horses. Even the World Health Organization calls the mosquito “the greatest menace, spreading malaria, dengue and yellow fever, which together are responsible for several million deaths and hundreds of millions of cases every year.”

So one might wonder if one of the NRL researchers hailed from the state that claims to export all of the rest of the nation’s mosquitos. Researchers at the NRL, understanding a good defense is often a better offense, determined to stop mosquitos from breeding. They created a thin surface film that coats stagnant water where mosquitos lay their eggs, but the film prevents the pupal and larval stages from attaching to the water’s surface where they breathe and feed, which in effect drowns them. All without the use of toxins or pesticides.

After getting the Environmental Protection Agency’s seal of approval in 1984, the NRL-created substance is being manufactured by a chemical company under license from the U.S. Navy patent, and is commercially available to mosquito control districts across the U.S., including Minnesota.

Original publication April 9 on Navy Live, the official blog of the U.S. Navy —http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/04/09/game-changing-navy-technologies/.

History fans can visit the Naval History and Heritage Command for more information about the U.S. Navy.