The Farm Boy Who Built The Impossible Weapon | Merle Tuve and the Proximity Fuze

Описание: In 1910, two nine-year-old boys in Canton, South Dakota built a telegraph line between their houses. One would win the Nobel Prize. The other would build a weapon that military historians rank alongside the atomic bomb as one of the three most important inventions of World War Two.

This is the story of Merle Antony Tuve and the proximity fuze—the "impossible" weapon that Germany tried and quit, Britain couldn't solve, and American gunners initially refused to use. But when it finally proved itself in combat, it changed everything.

By the end of 1943, proximity-fuzed shells accounted for 51% of all aircraft kills despite being only 25% of ammunition. Against V-1 buzz bombs over London, kill rates jumped from 17% to 82%. At the Battle of the Bulge, Patton's artillery killed 702 Germans crossing a single river in one barrage. Naval anti-aircraft effectiveness increased sevenfold.

22 million fuzes. 87 firms. 110 factories. One billion 1940s dollars.

And almost nobody knows his name.

From the prairie childhood and the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed his father, through the physics breakthroughs at Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Institution, to the desperate Sunday afternoon in August 1940 when he conceived the "miniature radar in a bullet"—this is the complete story of how a farm boy solved the impossible problem and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING:

Primary Sources:
• "12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon" by Jamie Holmes
• "The Deadly Fuze: The Secret Weapon of World War II" by Ralph B. Baldwin
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir: Merle A. Tuve by Philip H. Abelson
• Library of Congress - Merle A. Tuve Papers (400+ archival boxes, some still classified)

Additional Research:
• Johns Hopkins APL institutional histories
• USNI Naval History Magazine articles on VT fuze
• "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary
• War Department technical reports on proximity fuze development
• German post-war technical intelligence reports


Licensing:
The portrait image of Merle Antony Tuve comes from the American Institute of Physics (AIP). AIP allows anyone to use it