New Signal Corps Laboratory

Early in the Spring of 1934 at Fort Monmouth, N. J., four physicists and a handful of engineers, with a few military personnel, stood in the cold and watched the breaking of ground for a modest structure (the present Squier Laboratory) to be erected in the interest of military insurance should war ever threaten again. After the ceremony the engineers of the group returned to their World War I wooden shacks, to again tackle problems of military communications, while the physicists returned to their worries over submarine detection and the prognostication that someday aerial bombers would carry substantial explosives aloft and drop them on military targets. Months later the new building was occupied, partially completed, and never finished.