Radio Research Laboratory
1942 - 1946
The Radio Research Laboratory was the name of the secret laboratory at Harvard where most of the American wartime development of radar countermeasures took place. It was housed in a converted wing of the Biological Laboratory, and employed more than 800 people through its lifetime.
The Laboratory was an offshoot of the Radiation Laboratory (RadLab) at MIT, where most of the radar development work took place. Originally, anti-radar operations were part of the RadLab, but it was determined that the two should be separated. A legendary rivalry between the two laboratories was maintained through the war, as researchers at Harvard pointed their jammers across Cambridge towards MIT.
Work at the Radio Research Laboratory included the development of equipment to locate and determine the properties of enemy radars, and also the development of active and passive radar countermeasures. Passive countermeasures included "window" or "chaff", strips of metal foil which, when thrown off a plane would resemble other airplanes. Active countermeasures were emitters that blinded or disabled radars they were pointed at.
The head of the laboratory was Frederick Terman of Stanford, appointed to the job by his former advisor at MIT and director of the OSRD Vannevar Bush. After the war, Terman would go back to Stanford and apply his wartime experience from the Radiation Laboratory to transform the Santa Clara Valley into one of America's main sites of electronics development of manufacture.
Monroe S. Singer, "Harvard Radio Research Lab Developed Countermeasures Against Enemy Defenses," The Harvard Crimsom, November 30, 1945 http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1945/11/30/harvard-radio-research-lab-developed-countermeasures/ (accessed 06/19/2015). This article in The Crimson described for the first time the Radiation Laboratory to the Harvard Community in November 1945.
For more information about the influence of the Radiation Laboratory in the Postwar period, see: Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1992), Chapter 2.