WWII secret weapon - TV guided cruise missile!

[evanflys]

I got to interview a WWII marine who worked on the Navy TDR-1 project. They had TV guided remote control flying bombs! I knew about project Aphrodite but this was news to me.

Here's my interview. Hope you like it!

http://evanflys.com/tdr-1

Evan

[Jeff E]

Re: WWII secret weapon - TV guided cruise missile!

Very Nicely Done Evan.. Very cool..

Jeff

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: WWII secret weapon - TV guided cruise missile!

Hey Evan.. Thanks for doing your part to keep the memory of our WWII (and other conflicts) heroes alive!

We lose these men and women at such a rate, it will not be very long at all before they are all off to the big blue sky. If not for those who document their thoughts, we'd be forever without them someday. With your interest and efforts, they will live on as long as you can propagate the electrons to keep their words alive...

[evanflys]

Re: WWII secret weapon - TV guided cruise missile!

Sagar,
That's why I'm doing this. These guys are amazing and their stories should be told. Plus, I love doing it!

Evan

[AlisoBob]

Re: WWII secret weapon - TV guided cruise missile!

Thats nothing.... we almost had " Pigeon Guided Missles"....

One of the most bizarre stories of WWII that I have encountered was of Project Pigeon: psychologist B.F. Skinner’s government-funded project to develop a pigeon-guided missile during WWII.

At the time, Skinner was still early in his controversial career as a pioneer of behaviorism, and Skinner had developed ways to “shape” an animal’s behavior by giving it food rewards. He thought he could harness the navigational abilities of birds to his own purposes—namely, designing missiles that could be guided directly to a target. In 1940, Skinner bought some pigeons and began training them. He found that if they were restrained in tube socks, the birds could learn to peck a visual target on a screen in order to receive food. His idea was to put a pigeon into a missile and have the birds guide it to a specific target they had been trained to recognize beforehand.

Persisting in the face of skepticism from colleagues, Skinner secured a private grant from General Mills—along with some lab space in an old flour mill. Eventually he won a government contract to develop an “organic homing device.”

Amazingly, there was some merit to his scheme. Skinner managed to develop a simulator in which he tested the pigeons’ performance. If properly trained, the birds would steer toward their targets with machine-like consistency even if exposed to extreme noise or pressure

Skinner even developed an apparatus that employed three pigeons pecking at once, to build some redundancy into the system. In the end, however, Skinner was unable to convince his funders that pigeons could truly be trusted as pilots—the sight of a jacketed pigeon pecking its target was just too silly.