Signal Corps: "Nerves of the Army" 1954 US Army; The Big Picture TV-287

more at http://quickfound.net/

'This is the story of the United States Army Signal Corps. An Army has been compared with a man, responding the way a man responds to danger. And it has nerves -- an intricate but vast sensory system spreading throughout the entire body, giving it sight, the ability to hear and the power to communicate. This complex nervous system which sensitizes the Army has a name. It is the Signal Corps. Throughout the world, wherever the Army stands, the Signal Corps keeps it alert. In making this picture, the camera crews visited Signal Corps engineering laboratories at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and the Army Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Television audiences will look at a simulated battlefield of the future, and see how some Signal equipment, and how communications systems developed at the proving grounds, would be employed. The operation of the new 100-inch camera with its infra-red lens, capable of penetrating 26 miles through haze, will be shown in reconnaissance missions. This is a new form of reconnaissance -- under atomic or non-atomic conditions. Its potentialities are unlimited.'

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Corps_(United_States_Army)

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The United States Army Signal Corps (USASC) is a division of the Department of the Army that creates and manages communications and information systems for the command and control of combined arms forces...

While serving as a medical officer in Texas in 1856, Albert James Myer proposed that the Army use his visual communications system, called aerial telegraphy (or "wig-wag"). When the Army adopted his system on 21 June 1860, the Signal Corps was born with Myer as the first and only Signal Officer...

Myer's vision came true on 3 March 1863, when Congress authorized a regular Signal Corps for the duration of the war. Some 2,900 officers and enlisted men served, although not at any single time, in the Civil War Signal Corps.

Myer's Civil War innovations included an unsuccessful balloon experiment at First Bull Run, and, in response to McClellan's desire for a Signal Corps field telegraph train, an electric telegraph in the form of the Beardslee magnetoelectric telegraph machine. Even in the Civil War, the wigwag system, restricted to line-of-sight communications, was waning in the face of the electric telegraph...

On 1 August 1907, an Aeronautical Division was established within the Office of the Chief Signal Officer (OCSO). In 1908, on Fort Myer, Virginia, the Wright brothers made test flights of the Army's first airplane built to Signal Corps' specifications. Reflecting the need for an official pilot rating, War Department Bulletin No. 2, released on 24 February 1911, established a "Military Aviator" rating. Army aviation remained within the Signal Corps until 1918, when it became the Army Air Service.

During World War I. Chief Signal Officer George Owen Squier worked closely with private industry to perfect radio tubes while creating a major signal laboratory at Camp Alfred Vail (Fort Monmouth). Early radiotelephones developed by the Signal Corps were introduced into the European theater in 1918. While the new American voice radios were superior to the radiotelegraph sets, telephone and telegraph remained the major technology of World War I.

During World War I, women switchboard operators, known as the "Hello Girls", were sworn into the U.S. Army Signal Corps...

A pioneer in radar, Colonel William Blair, director of the Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, patented the first Army radar demonstrated in May 1937. Even before the United States entered World War II, mass production of two radar sets, the SCR-268 and the SCR-270, had begun...

In 1941, the laboratories at Fort Monmouth developed the SCR-300, the first FM backpack radio. Its pioneering frequency modulation circuits provided front-line troops with reliable, static-free communications...

The Signal Corps' Project Diana, in 1946, successfully bounced radar signals off the moon, paving the way for space communications.

In 1948 researchers at Fort Monmouth grew the first synthetically produced large quartz crystals. The crystals were able to be used in the manufacture of electronic components, and made the United States largely independent of foreign imports for this critical mineral. In 1949 the first auto-assembly of printed circuits was invented...