She held a suspicion that it was no accident when her father lost his finger in a lathe “operated by another person". This event was reported to have happened at the Wise Foundry in Zanesville, on Christmas Eve of 1936. The Foundry specialized in building components for manufacturers of large electrical engines, but all that is known about Townsend’s activities there is that he was doing some experimental work for the US Navy.
The firm headquarters had burned down in February of that year, and intentionally, or unintentionally. the paper trail for this project was lost. (Intentionally, perhaps, because In addition to protecting all signals and codes, the Navy Security Command, created in 1935, was responsible for taking any steps needed to deny intelligence to enemy agents.)
In other news, from February, radium had been synthesized in the lab, for the first time ever, when Radium e (Bismuth 210) was created by the bombardment of bismuth with atomic particles.
Time Magazine, February 17, 1936. https://time.com/archive/6820798/science-radium-e/
Radium and its many isotopes would go on to play an outsized role in modern health care. Eldridge Johnson would fund a research center for their study at the University of Pennsylvania and John Trump would build a career on them.
On a lighter note, Townsend, too, seems to have been “playing around” with radium in 1935 and ’36. With Josephine as the producer of the Musical Revue Hospital Fundraiser, the Jorg Fasting dancers astounded the audience when the lights went down. All that could be seen of them were their hands and feet, glowing in the dark.
Townsend and Fasting, a Norwegian-American WW I Vet, may have also been part of an intelligence network with tentacles reaching into Norway, and Germany. The sole supplier of the heavy water necessary for the production of fissile atomic was a Norwegian hydroplant and it was important to know where the shipments went.
But side from its uses in health care and entertainment, somewhere along the line, someone discovered that radium-beryllium isotopes emitted a neutron particle stream with enough energy to split an atom. The challenge would be to apply this into a detonation device.
Fast forward to 1939:
As part of a major intelligence coup, the Allies received a inside information about the most advanced research projects being funded by the Wehrmacht. This was haul was achieved with the assistance of Norwegian intelligence, and the resulting Oslo Report is said to have played a significant role in the outcome of the war. The operation also landed a proximity switch from one of the German mines then wreaking havoc on commercial shipping.
Smyth/Smythe (Gone Dark) says that in 1939, Townsend organized a secret mission to retrieve a German mine. I think these two accounts are describing the same thing. Linda has told me that the man Townsend was to vet in Germany was someone he knew from a prior covert mission overseas. For this reason, I also believe that it was during this 1939 mission that Townsend first met the scientist he would see again in 1945..
We do not know who that man was, but a case can be made that it was Georg Otto Erb. Erb was a tremendously important player in Nazi science. He was a physicist with his own instrumentation design lab before the war, and his work at the time included “high tension apparatus” or electrical equipment designed to handle or generate very high voltages, typically exceeding 1,000 volts AC or 1,500 volts DC.
He was inducted into the military in 1940, but subsequently released and directed to focus his work on armaments, which he did, developing a great many types of detonation devices, using a variety of of proximity switches and batteries. He contributed to the V-2 rocket program, and had come up with the design of the two stage rocket motor, when he was arrested in 1944 on suspicion of favoring the enemy and sabotage. He managed to escape in April, 1945, in the pandemonium created by the advancing Russian troops.
Interrogation of Dr. George Otto Erb: Maria Veen A 5660 Near Coesfeld
Electrical Detonators-types of Fuzes
By D. Carmichael · 1945
https://www.google.com/books/edition/In ... CAAJ?hl=en
He is known today as the father of the thermal battery which is widely used in the manufacture of munitions warheads, and of the molten salt battery which may provide grid level energy storage. But I find no record of his activities after his initial interview at Coesfeld. Nor does his name appear in the roles of the Paperclip scientists who were brought to the United States.
It is possible that he was ultimately captured by the Russians. It is also possible that he was killed in the attack which resulted in Townsend’s wounding. For now he remains a mystery man.
But, In the weird shadow language that haunt this story, one of Erb’s assistants was named Charles Buhler. Yes, the same name, but unless he has found the fountain of youth, not the same Charles Buhler of recent fame for creating an electrocstatic, propellantless propulsion drive.
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Jan
