Loonshots

The Radar That Arrived Too Late

On the morning of December seventh, nineteen forty-one, a single radar operator on the north shore of Oahu watched a swarm of dots crawl across his screen. He flagged it. He was waved off. A few minutes later, three hundred and fifty-three Japanese aircraft put two thousand four hundred and three people in their graves and changed the course of the twentieth century. The technology that could have prevented the disaster had been sitting in a Navy filing cabinet for almost twenty years. In nineteen twenty-two, two engineers named Leo Young and Hoyt Taylor had stumbled onto the principle of radar while testing radios from a truck across the Potomac. A passing ship, the Dorchester, doubled their signal, dropped it to nothing, then doubled it again. They wrote up what they had found and described, in plain English, an early-warning system that worked through fog, smoke, and the dead of night. The Navy ignored them. A second proposal in nineteen thirty went nowhere. A request for five thousand dollars was rejected as a "wild dream." It took five years for anyone in uniform to assign a single full-time person to the project. Pearl Harbor was the bill.

This is the book Safi Bahcall opens with, and he opens it that way for a reason. The most consequential breakthroughs of the last century did not arrive trailing red carpets and brass bands. They arrived through long dark tunnels of skepticism, dismissed by experts, championed by people their bosses thought were unhinged. Bahcall calls them loonshots, and his argument is that whether they live or die has almost nothing to do with the brilliance of the idea or the grit of the inventor. It has to do with the structure of the organization around them. A few millimeters of difference in how a team is wired determines whether the next radar is built in time or whether the next Pearl Harbor is unavoidable. The good news, Bahcall says, is that those millimeters are knowable, measurable, and adjustable. The bad news is that almost no one is paying attention to them.