John William Marchetti (June 6, 1908 – March 28, 2003) was a radar pioneer who had an outstanding career combining government and industrial activities.
[1] In 1937, Marchetti obtained a civil service position in the Signal Corps Laboratories (SCL) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
In early 1938, the RPF activities were moved to a more secure location at Fort Hancock in Sandy Hook, a peninsula reaching into the New York Harbor.
At 7:20 a.m., the operators reported detecting a flight of planes due north, but the Duty Officer dismissed it as "nothing unusual" and the alarm went unheeded.
Following the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was a crash program to obtain radars to protect the Panama Canal Zone from a similar attack.
To detect low-flying aircraft at a range allowing sufficient warning, a high-frequency radar system for picket ships stationed 100-miles offshore was needed.
[4] As U.S. troops began the recapture of islands in the Pacific Theater of Operations, there was an urgent need for a portable radar to provide medium-range early-warning against aircraft.
In only a few days, Marchetti and his team converted the picket-ship radar into the AN/TPS-3, a lightweight, transportable system that could be assembled and placed into operation by a small crew in 30 minutes.
One of the largest activity was his support to the Rad Lab at MIT in developing a mobile, gun-laying, microwave system, eventually designated the SCR-584.
Undoubtedly the best-known radar system of the war, this included the M-9 analog computer that set the stage for great post-war advances in this field.
In November 1946, Marchetti, having received an honorable discharge from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, was named Chief of the Research Division, encompassing all of the technical activities of the CFS.
Primary projects under Marchetti's responsibility at that time included the continued development of an experimental air-traffic control system (started at the Rad Lab); experimental launching of German V-2 rockets at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; and the development of VOLIR (Volumetric Indicating Radar), an automated scanning radar for the VolScan (Volume Scanning) air- traffic-control system.
Marchetti and George E. Valley, a former Rad Lab scientist who had joined the MIT physics faculty, established the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee.
Coupled with the related developments from AFCRL (modems for transmitting radar signals and the light gun for handling displays), this eventually became the SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system for North America.
In March 1952, radar data was sent from Bedford to the Whirlwind computer at MIT over an 8-digit telephone link developed by the ERD, allowing the first fully automated aircraft interception using SAGE.
Other major activities in 1952-1953 included completing the VolScan air-traffic control system with the computer containing the first desktop graphical user interface (GUI); establishing an Upper Air Observatory in New Mexico; opening an Arctic research station on Fletcher's Ice Island (T-3); participating in Project Buster-Jangle atomic tests in Nevada; conducting Project Moby Dick, a record-setting balloon flight for high-altitude research; and developing a high-performance analog computer for Tactical Air Traffic Control.
[14] Based on his early relationships with Watson Laboratories and experience on SAGE, Marchetti was able to obtain a contract from RADC for Avco RAD to design and build an experimental phased-array antenna system for allowing wide scanning on Pinetree and other future radars.
Called the Steerable Array Radar and Communications (SARAC), the project was successfully completed, with a 15-by 15-foot prototype antenna having hundreds of transmitter and receiver elements that allowed multiple beams to be electronically scanned.
Avco Everett Research Laboratory, also located in the Boston area, had contracts with AFCRC that involved studying the plasma generated by re-entry vehicles.
For this effort, Marchetti, at Avco RAD, developed a 30-MHz pulsed radar that was set up at San Salvador Island to observe the ionized trail from a NASA Mercury capsule.
[16] Another early contract from RADC was for developing a radar facility at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, for re-entry measurements.
For this, a 100-MHz AN/TPQ-20 radar was rebuilt with five Yagi antennas to receive vertically and horizontally polarized signals reflected from a test vehicle.
[18] Although his firm had been reasonably successful in obtaining and performing advanced radar work, Marchetti was disappointed with the profitability of defense contracting and decided to change his field to rapid transportation.
Although the main office for Marchetti, Inc., remained in Natick, the primary Metroliner activities were in Wilmington, Delaware, at the Penn Central (later Amtrak) maintenance yards.