Nelson Magor Cooke died of leukemia at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in November 1965; his home at that time was in Great Falls, Virginia.
Without funds for studying engineering at a university, he turned to the navy for obtaining a technical education and entered military service at age 16.
After passing a rigorous admission examination, in 1928 Cooke attended the six-month Radio Materiel School (RMS) at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Bellevue, District of Columbia.
[1] In July 1938, Cooke was assigned to the staff of the Radio Engineering School; here he served four years as the Senior Instructor and also as a special advisor and lecturer at the companion RMS.
The navy had, or had in production planning, hundred of ships with advanced electronics (radar, sonar, and high-frequency communications), but qualified personnel for maintenance were almost non-existent.
The ad hoc committee, coordinated by William C. Eddy and with Cooke, several other leaders from existing schools, and BuNav training specialists as members, developed plans for a training program that would, in 10 months of 12-hour study days, cover all of the key topics in a normal college EE curriculum, as well as having laboratories involving the most current hardware.
In a published paper by Cooke, it was noted that persons passing the test had an average of 1.5 years of prior college and were in the top two percent on the intelligence-quotient scale.
Of the estimated 500,000 persons who took the Eddy Test, only about 30,000 passed, entered the navy or Marine Corps, and eventually graduated from the ETP.
Further promoted to lieutenant commander on 3 October 1945, he remained the leader of RMS Bellevue until late 1946; at that time, the activities were transferred to the Naval Training Center, Great Lakes.
[12] Cooke also formed a Medical Research Division that designed and built microtitration devices (microplates) that were widely used in virological, serological, and immunological laboratory analysis.
[13] Although lacking a college education, Cooke, through self-study and Navy schools, had acquired considerable mathematical and technical knowledge and a skill for writing about complex subjects in a very readable manner.
After designing a new slide rule for Keuffel and Essel (K&E) in 1942, he wrote the detailed booklet, “Instruction Manual for the 4139 Cooke Radio Slide Rule.” Cooke's first book specifically for the public was Mathematics Essential to Radio and Electronics: Including Principles of Direct-Current and Alternating-Current Circuits; co-authored by Joseph Orleans; it was published by McGraw-Hill in 1943.