Henry Booker and Alfred Loomis: Winning the War With Radar
by John Lawrence, March 3, 2018
Radar was critical to winning World War II. The two men most responsible for its development were Alfred Loomis and Henry Booker. Booker was in charge of the British laboratory, and Loomis made the critical American contribution. Loomis was the subject of a recent Frontline American Experience program on KPBS. Before this development British anti-aircraft guns could only fill the skies with lead hoping they'd hit something. Radar enabled them to lock on to a single airplane and gun it down. Thus a lot of bullets were not wasted and the accuracy was greatly improved. This saved Britain from total destruction.
Hitler made the mistake of taking on Russia, which theretofore had been an ally, instead of turning his attention toward Britain. If he had successfully conquered Britain, the outcome of the war would have been different. It would be too late for the Americans to get involved. As it turned out the Russians defeated the German troops, and this was the turning point in the war. The German bombing of Britain was successfully fended off with the just developed radar.
Henry Booker emigrated to the US as a professor at Cornell. He was then hired by UCSD to start a new department called Applied Electrophysics around 1967. When I was a young guy working at General Dynamics, I had an interview with Dr. Booker and eventually enrolled in his fledgling department. There was only one other professor there at the time - Kenneth Bowles - and a few students. Booker and Bowles were it. The department eventually split into an applied physics department and a department of Information and Computer Science. My first year there I took courses from Professor Booker. He was a good teacher and an easy grader. When I took the oral exam for my MS degree, Booker was on the committee along with Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm fame and Professor Pieter Schalkwijk who was my last advisor there.
Other students had told me that Booker would ask me to write down Maxwell's equations so I dutifully prepared. Interesting how I was able to interact with these guys who had played such a crucial role in US and world history. I got my degree in Information and Computer Science. After I left UCSD I had a paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory: "“A New Universal Coding Scheme for the Binary Memoryless Source”.
It was based on Schalkwijk's theory and later became known as the Lawrence algorithm.