(3 of 9)
Radio for Cannon. For a while, he did basic physical research on terrestrial magnetism, which influences cosmic rays. But World War II had begun, and weapons came first. Van Allen was put to work on the development of proximity fuses, which called for something almost inconceivable in 1940: a radio transmitter-receiver that could stand being fired out of a cannon in the nose of a shell. At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md., just outside Washington, Van Allen was a junior scientist in the proximity fuse business, but it made him an expert on how to pack complex circuitry into a small space and make it rugged enough to survive abuse. Working closely with the Navy, Van Allen was commissioned as a Lieutenant, j.g., made two trips to the Pacific to instruct gunnery officers in the use of proximity fuses.
Dirty Looks. Back at Silver Spring he was driving to work one morning when he stopped at a traffic light behind a young woman driver. The light turned green; her car went unexpectedly into reverse. Bumpers met with a small crash. Jim, a noncombative man, pulled around the flustered girl and gave her a slightly disdainful look. A few minutes later, walking into the laboratory, he met the same girl.
"Who do you think you are?" she demanded. "Giving me dirty looks!"
Jim blushed and retreated without a word, but he soon found out that her name was Abigail Fithian Halsey II. She worked as a mathematician at the laboratory, lived in Bethesda with four Navy WAVEs, and would be delighted to go bicycling with him.
"When he came to see me," Abbie Van Allen says now, "he dreaded having to talk to my roommates while he waited for me. He'd walk in, look wildly around for a magazine, and bury his face in it just to avoid making small talk. When we finally decided to get married, the girls thought I was crazy. They asked: 'How can you marry a guy like that?' "
White Sands. Jim and Abbie were married in the fall of 1945 and settled down in suburban Silver Spring. With war's end, Van Allen had no further interest in fuses or weapons. He wanted to get back to studying cosmic rays. He learned that the U.S. Army had captured nearly 100 German V-2s and was planning to fire them at White Sands Proving Ground, N. Mex., with sand instead of explosives in their warheads. Van Allen, along with several other scientists, was offered the privilege of substituting instruments for the sand.
Until then, cosmic rays had been measured only to 80,000 ft. by balloon. The V-2s carried cosmic-ray instruments up 100 miles, measuring cosmic rays and making Van Allen, incidentally, an authority on instrumentation of rockets. They also brought him into close contact with nearly all of the pioneer U.S. rocketmen, especially William Pickering, soon to head the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena.