Catseye: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1955

 

This cover is credited to Richard M. Powers, and is so beautiful that I decided that I couldn't just stick the credit in a subtitle. Cat's Eye is a 1961 Andre Norton novel, relatively early in Norton's career, and the first appearance of The Dipple, the sprawling refugee camp from which many of Norton's socially alienated protagonists originate. It has been a very long time since I read the novel, but as far as my limited recollection go, the title isn't a reference to cat's night vision, but the cover art is another matter. 

The crucial thing about cat's eye vision is that, in contrast to the night vision equipment of the 1950s that turned infrared input into visible-light images, cat's eyes work by focussing ambient visible-spectrum radiation to give better imaging, at the expense of loss of losing the kinds of visual information that are less relevant to crepuscular predators. People like cats, so there are lots of explanations and reconstructions on Youtube. Here's an older one that doesn't have AI narration. 

 

The various press stories generated by the Wright Field press conference reference an  image intensifier, in contrast to existing "black light" equipment. (This was back when "black light" referred to infrared and ultraviolet.) Being of precisely the right age to really appreciate technology like this, I can tell you with absolute confidence that black light is enormously cool. I don't mean blacklight posters,  mind you. That was for the slightly older siblings of my tween years, who had blacklit posters of unicorns and rock bands and stuff. Those kids came of age in the fabulous Sixties, not the second-rate Seventies. The one thing I did have was massive DC anthologies with reprinted Golden Age stories, thanks to which I knew all about the cool things that  Dr. Mid-Nite and Phantom Lady used to do with black light. 

https://sakhalianet.x10.mx/militaryhistory/articles/sakhal/optics_
and_electronics_for_tanks.php#google_vignette

As far as history goes, Kalman Tihanyi built an electronic television camera that could pick up infrared specifically in 1929. The various Wiki entries seem diffident to varying degrees about pressing the claim that he invented the technique, but he did license it, and there was some minimal use of military equipment built by his German licensees in WWII, while, as Wiki notes, "parallel development occurred in the U.S." I bet there is some intellectual property litigation in the background here! The U.S. Army issued "sniperscopes" in WWII and Korea, while British development culminated in "Design E," used in PLUNDER, the 23rd March amphibious assault across the Rhine, and specifically noted as using a  spicy 7000v power supply. This sort of thing implies somewhat impractical hardware, although the consolidated list of American military equipment shows a series of night vision aids issued through the Fifties into Vietnam.  On the British side, scholarship is predictably quite excited by the American sniperscopes issued to Commonwealth troops during the Korean War, some of which are still held in UK museums, and archival documents showing the puttering progress of infrared vision from the war years through Korea. It is equally predictably uninterested in the infrared sights installed in the Centurion, which seems to have been the Royal Ordnance's main focus, perhaps because they were focussing on an equipment that would assist drivers and gunners simultaneously and work with the gun stabiliser, which sounds much more technically ambitious than a sniperscope, and also a safer environment in which to operate a  high voltage power supply. It is bizarre that you can buy Centurion sights on eBay but not find someone discussing them in detail. Sakhal, who posted the above at a grognard site, describes the inset picture as showing products offered by Astronautics CA including a fire control system of the Centurion, the display and control panel for a Merkava driver, the fire control system of an M-48, computer and control units for the Centurion and Merkava, sensors and meteorological mast, and video display unit for weapon systems installed in vehicles. This is all modern stuff, with very little attention to the optics, which are evidently not the blogger's main interest. I find a walkthrough on Youtube here:

Still not much interest in what's in the optronic black box!

Black light bracelet aside, Phantom Lady is famous because
of a moral panic over good girl art that we seem to have
skipped right over on the blogging, although the mainstream
press did catch up with the horror comic side of things.

Having done infrared previously, the focus here is the image intensification technology announced in December, 1955. Wiki describes it in not much more detail than its initial introduction in Fortune, but goes on with an historical account, which skips right over whatever was going on in 1955. Apparently image intensifiers are divided in the general era between "Generation 1," using the S-11 cesium-antimony photocathode (materials that kick out an electron when pumped by a photon of specific wavelength) with quantum efficiency in the 20% range, this  required an infrared spotlight for illumination. That is, until A. H. Sommer developed bialkali antimonide photocathodes into the S20, which was "discovered in 19565 by accident," and had a militarily useful degree of infrared sensitivity and visible spectrum amplification. The S-20 could be used without infrared illumination, at least in moonlight. Sommer appears to be an honoured pioneer of the technology, but their fame does not reach to the heights required for a Wiki biography, or, even, really, much of an Internet trail at all. (I assume that they are not the same person as the man who was president of the Peoria Redwings in 1950.) They do have a biography, and the earliest publication (1934) is in German, so perhaps  they were a Nazi-era refugee. 

It is also possible that the press conference was announcing cascade intensifiers, which feed a third tube with the output of a regular and inverting tube. These are deemed to have been militarily useless because of their bulk until the development of fiber optic bundles in the 1960s, leading to the Vietnam-era Starlight scope, "developed in 1964." The Wiki cruelly taunts us with a hotlink, but in the end all I can tell you is that this was designated the AN/PVS-4 in U.S. service. Fortunately, the AN/PVS-5 does have an (unhotlinked) entry that links to a .S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory report commissioned when air crew safety issues were raised.  Thanks to it I learn that the AN/PVS-5 was adopted in 1973. Twenty years? I'm pretty used to the new technology two step from reading Aviation by now ("This new hot technology is ready for service;" Two years later: "This hot new technology is ready for service;" Two years later: "This hot new technology is entering service;" Two years later: "The problems that made this new technology useless have now been overcome and it is now entering service!" To be fair, we get a fuller account of earlier versions of the Starlight Scope (AN/PVS-2, AN/TVS-4), so it isn't really a twenty year delay. The 1973 date is salient because that was when Army pilots began flying with the AN/PVS-5 headset, leading, twenty years after that, to the Laboratory being asked if helicopters being flown into the ground by blinded pilots was really such a good idea, what with OPERATION EAGLE CLAW (Hey! Relevance!) and also people dying, which is bad.

So here is a reconstruction of what might  have happened: In the course of WWII, all the money and effort put into wacky secret weapons included optronic devices to amplify ambient visible and infrared light so that tank crews could drive and fight at night. Among the problems with this early technology was low efficiency, requiring the use of infrared searchlights. Researchers at a British defence establishment sought a higher efficiency optronic material, and shared that research with the United States, where it was announced in December 1955 in a military application well after commercial use i colour television was mooted. These announcements lacked any any historical context that would have required violating a British D-notice. Subsquently, a German-born scientist in American employ clamed to have made the discovery accidentally at some point in 1956. The vagueness suggests oral history, and it will probably be traced to a textbook written by one of the worker's students. The sole interesting upshot in this hypothetical scenario is the obscuring of, once again, the role of the British defence establishment and the British taxpayer in technological progress in the first  half of the Twentieth Century, about which at this point I hardly need to lay on more speculative claims. Presumably just on dating it didn't and it work originally focussed on either the 20pdr or the L1 120mm gun on the Conqueror heavy tank, which was introduced into service in 1955. The Conqueror had a wacky director tower-sort-of-thing on top of the turret to allow the tank commander to lay the gun with a coincidence rangerfinder, and I can just seem some inveterate gadgeteer looking at it and thinking, "Oh, wouldn't this be a lovely place for a night sight?"  World of Tankcraft players really love them some Conqueror, but I don't see any walkthroughs of Conqueror optics online, so call this more speculation. 

By DAVID HOLT - Flickr: Bovington Tank Museum 301, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19919087