[1] In 1936, he was named Chief Engineer of a Signal Corps research group at Camp Evans in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey tasked with developing a workable long-range radar for coast defense.
By 1937 Watson's team had developed a proto-type "Search Light Control Radar" (SCR-270) apparatus and successfully demonstrated it to the Secretary of War at Fort Monmouth.
Watson's team then became the "Radio Position Finding Section", and worked with the Westinghouse Corporation over the following year to develop an Early Warning Radar, which was successfully deployed at Highlands, New Jersey in August, 1938, and was capable of detecting incoming bombers at a range of 78 miles.
[2] Watson was made a U.S. Army major with the outbreak of the war in 1941, and had risen to the rank of colonel by his death of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 18, 1943, at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
Ironically, in the 1990s the U.S. Air Force would control the world's most powerful radar, designed to cover the entire Atlantic Ocean from Europe to Africa, from a headquarters in Watson's home town of Bangor, Maine.