The Radar Man
October 1960 Popular Electronics

October 1960 Popular Electronics Table of Contents Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Popular Electronics, published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.

Now here is a profound ode to one of the most noble of technician genres ever to tweak a receiver front end or to change out a transmitter magnetron - The Radar Man! It appeared in a 1960 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. Some of you know that I worked on airport surveillance and precision approach radar in the USAF, so my bias is established. Hmmm... now that I read the poem more carefully, I realize that it is not complimentary at all. It must have been one of those jealous TACAN or satellite communications technicians that wrote it! 

BTW, have you seen the très cool scale model of the MPN-13 GCA radar system that Elbert Cook built?

The Radar Man

If ever you saw upon the street

A man who walked with dipole feet

With a lagging train of pips behind-

He was a radar man with a micromind.

With microseconds and microwaves

And microvolts, he filled his days;

And thus in the course of passing time

His brain had shrunk to a micromind.

His eyes gave out with a neon gleam,

His nose lit up like a radar screen,

His ears worked like an electronic gate,

And his heart pumped blood at a video rate.

This man obtained, in passing years,

Infinite impedance between his ears.

At last he succumbed to a heavy jolt

When he probed what he thought was a microvolt.

The Doc looked up from his microscope

And said to the nurse, "Behold this dope!

Since of his brain not a trace can I find,

He was a radar man with a micromind."

- Educated G.I.

Posted Decmeber 24, 2021
(updated from original post on 5/14/2014)