Western Electric, 1942–1945
Steven T. Usdin · Yale University Press eBooks · 2005
This chapter focuses on Barr's tenure at Western Electric. Barr was hired as an assistant engineer on March 16, 1942, and was assigned to work at Western Electric's Bayonne plant in Kearny, New Jersey, on airborne radar systems that incorporated some of the most highly classified, sensitive technologies in the American arsenal. He was quickly promoted to manufacturing engineer, a position that made him privy to the fruits of an extraordinary collaboration between the Signal Corps and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory. The chapter reveals that Barr, along with the other engineers working in the department, had complete freedom of the plant and were permitted to go into any other sections and to constantly check to see if there were any errors in the use of the computer or the Norden bombsight so that they might correct any of those errors.