more at http://quickfound.net/links/military_news_and_links.html 'This is the story of the United States Army Signal Corps. An Army has been compared with a man, responding the way a man responds to danger. And it has nerves -- an intricate but vast sensory system spreading throughout the entire body, giving it sight, the ability to hear and the power to communicate. This complex nervous system which sensitizes the Army has a name. It is the Signal Corps. Throughout the world, wherever the Army stands, the Signal Corps keeps it alert. In making this picture, the camera crews visited Signal Corps engineering laboratories at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and the Army Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Television audiences will look at a simulated battlefield of the future, and see how some Signal equipment, and how communications systems developed at the proving grounds, would be employed. The operation of the new 100-inch camera with its infra-red lens, capable of penetrating 26 miles through haze, will be shown in reconnaissance missions. This is a new form of reconnaissance -- under atomic or non-atomic conditions. Its potentialities are unlimited.' "The Big Picture" episode TV-287 The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_hX5wLdhf_Jwfz5l_3NRAcCYURbOW2Fl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Corps_(United_States_Army) The United States Army Signal Corps develops, tests, provides, and manages communications and information systems support for the command and control of combined arms forces. It was established in 1860, the brainchild of United States Army Major Albert J. Myer, and has had an important role from the American Civil War through to the current day. Over its history, it had the initial responsibility for a number of functions and new technologies that are currently managed by other organizations, including military intelligence, weather forecasting, and aviation... Early history... While serving as a medical officer in Texas in 1856, Albert James Myer proposed that the Army use his visual communications system, called aerial telegraphy (or "wig-wag"). When the Army adopted his system on 21 June 1860... For nearly three years, Myer was forced to rely on detailed personnel, although he envisioned a separate, trained professional military signal service. Myer's vision came true on 3 March 1863, when Congress authorized a regular Signal Corps for the duration of the war. Some 2,900 officers and enlisted men served, although not at any single time, in the Civil War Signal Corps... The electric telegraph, in addition to visual signaling, became a Signal Corps responsibility in 1867. Within 12 years, the Corps had constructed, and was maintaining and operating, some 4,000 miles of telegraph lines along the country's western frontier. In 1870, the Signal Corps established a congressionally mandated national weather service. Within a decade, with the assistance of Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, Myer commanded a weather service of international acclaim. Myer died in 1880, having attained the rank of brigadier general and the title of Chief Signal Officer. The weather bureau became part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1891, while the Corps retained responsibility for military meteorology... On 1 August 1907, an Aeronautical Division was established within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (OCSO). In 1908, the Wright brothers made test flights of the Army's first airplane built to Signal Corps' specifications. Reflecting the need for an official pilot rating, War Department Bulletin No. 2, released on 24 February 1911, established a "Military Aviator" rating. Army aviation remained within the Signal Corps until 1918, when it became the Army Air Service. The Signal Corps lost no time in meeting the challenges of World War I. Chief Signal Officer George Owen Squier worked closely with private industry to perfect radio tubes while creating a major signal laboratory at Camp Alfred Vail (Fort Monmouth). Early radiotelephones developed by the Signal Corps were introduced into the European theater in 1918. While the new American voice radios were superior to the radiotelegraph sets, telephone and telegraph remained the major technology of World War I. A pioneer in radar, Colonel William Blair, director of the Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, patented the first Army radar demonstrated in May 1937. Even before the United States entered World War II, mass production of two radar sets, the SCR-268 and the SCR-270, had begun. Along with the Signal Corps' tactical FM radio, also developed in the 1930s, radar was the most important communications development of World War II... In 1948 researchers at Fort Monmouth grew the first synthetically produced large quartz crystals... In 1949 the first auto-assembly of printed circuits was invented...

• published: 15 Jun 2015
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