[1][2] The installation was named in honor of pioneer radio engineer and inventor Harry Diamond, who led the Ordnance Development Division during World War II.

[1] The origins of the Harry Diamond Laboratories trace back to the development of the radio proximity fuze at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS).

During the 1930s, British military researchers investigated the feasibility of a proximity fuze, a device that would detonate an explosive charge only when it approached the immediate vicinity of its target.

At the time, conventional artillery and antiaircraft shells very rarely hit their target, especially a moving one, because their detonation either required direct contact or relied on accurate predictions with an altimeter or a timer set at launch.

[5][6][7] While Butement and his team were able to construct and crudely test a prototype fuze in 1940, the high production demands of World War II ultimately stalled its development.

In September 1940, Sir John Cockcroft delivered all available information about the radio proximity fuze to the newly formed National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) as part of the Tizard Mission.

[5][6] The chairman of NDRC, Vannevar Bush, appointed Merle Tuve, the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, to lead the U.S. research on proximity fuzes.

[3][8] The team headed by Tuve at the Carnegie Institution, which later moved to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in 1942, took on the development of the radio proximity fuze for rotating projectiles.

[3][4] Meanwhile, the development of the radio proximity fuze for non-rotating projectiles was assigned to Harry Diamond and Wilford Hinman Jr. at the NBS and overseen by Alexander Ellett of NDRC.

In April and May 1941, Diamond's group tested a series of crude box models based on this principle in successful bomb drops against water targets.

After testing was conducted in June 1942, NBS constructed more than a thousand fuzes based on this design using the small-scale production lines in its model shops.

As a result, the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment Research and Development Command's Electromagnetic Effects Laboratory was relocated from Fort Belvoir Engineer Proving Ground to Woodbridge in September 1971.

Consisting of 20 buildings, the Blossom Point facility was used by HDL to conduct field tests on HDL-developed fuzes, explosive and pyrotechnic devices, and electronic telemetry systems.

[20][23] At its inception, the Harry Diamond Ordnance Laboratory was originally established to further advance U.S. research and development in electronic fuzing for rockets, mortars, artillery, and missiles.

Over time, the laboratory's principal activities expanded significantly to include other ordnance specialties such as radar technology, integrated circuits, nuclear survivability, and basic research in the physical sciences.