It is the physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride, who have left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets, who have had to devise new methods for their unanticipated assignments. They have done their part on the devices that made it possible to turn back the enemy, have worked in combined effort with the... See more

For more than a decade, we had very little defense work and certainly no awareness that we would one day be the world’s largest private producer of military “hardware”. This unexpected distinction was achieved during the second period — the years just before and during World War II. In this period we produced an incredible $12 billion of military

... See more

This was the legacy of the Second World War. Take the world’s most advanced economy, cut it off from most tropical trade, and send it into overdrive—it was the perfect recipe for a synthetic revolution. The replacements came regularly and rapidly. A writer in 1943 giddily described “a regiment of new man-made materials” that was “turning old

... See more