March 1942 in the middle of World War II, Baldwin receives a life-changing phone call.
meanwhile, Despite working long hours at the Applied physics lab, Baldwin still managed to find time to research and feed his Lunar theory, which by this time could be called a full -blown obsession. Robley Williams! Of course I remember you from college.
I know nothing about
The U.S. Naval Observatory, established in 1830, is one of the oldest scientific agencies in the country, with one of the most complete collections of astronomical literature in the world
magnetism , Robley .
No matter. I’m calling from
the Department of
I can’t tell you
what the job is. All
Terrestrial Magnetism
I can say is that it’s
We have a job
help the war effort .
in Washington , D.C. to offer you.
import ant and will Are you
interested?
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, home to a team of scientists working on the Proximity Fuze, and where Baldwin took up residence as Senior Physicist.
June 19, 1942
bombing ranges and munitions testing facilities across american military bases supplied him with fresh data on highimpact craters.
the libraries of the U.S. naval Observatory and the U.S. Geological Survey gave baldwin access to historical field studies of Earth’s own moon-like craters.
and though Baldwin officially took his leave of the world of science to join the family business in Grand Rapids, Michigan...
...His work on the Moon was far from done. In 1948, Baldwin published The Face of the Moon, its pages a veritable goldmine of quantitative and testable impact theory. He outlined the exact relationship between the depth and width of a crater and the explosive energy that created it (the size-frequency distribution). Baldwin was handing the scientific world a radically different way to think about the moon and about geology in general.
And so it was that Ralph Baldwin packed his family and life into a two-year-old stick shift car and left chicago for Washington, D.C., and a job he didn’t know anything about. little did he know he was about to play a huge part in Bringing about the end of World War II.
Proximity Radio (VR) Fuze: A Bomb or artillery fuze composed of a tiny radio that transmits a signal to determine lethal distance for automatic detonation. First used in combat by the allied troops on January 5, 1943.
the immense explosion of a meteoric impact starts with a blinding spherical shock wave radiating up into the air as well as down into the ground. The tremendous pressure of the shockwave pulverizes the ground and launches fractured pieces of rock like bombs outward from the center of impact, creating the grooves that had first captured baldwin’s attention.
even more importantly, Baldwin dared to suggest that this could--and had!--happened on earth. He further speculated that terrestrial impacts had caused mass extinction of species.
The new shell with the funny fuze is
dev ast ating. It quite
frankly won the Battle of the Bulge for us.
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General George S. Patton
the Proximity Fuze that Baldwin helped develop proved to be a godsend against Japanese Kamikaze Planes. By almost all accounts it shortened World War II by at least a year.
baldwin wouldn’t be ignored this time. Although the astronomical community as a whole still wasn’t ready to accept his theory, discussion of the moon was reopened. his work eventually caught the attention of two very influential scientists.
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