Radar Detection & Their Electronics
October 21, 2024
There’s a Keystone in every great invention.
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Radar: From Enemy Detection to Pitch Perfection
In September, Ben Joyce added his name to the Major League Baseball history books with a 105.5 mph fastball to strikeout Tommy Edman. The ability to accurately track pitch speed in America’s favorite pastime was quite literally borrowed from America’s highways with a wartime innovation.
Before radar was used in baseball, measuring pitches in-game was pure guesswork, measuring the time between two points to produce a rough average speed. A 1939 publicity event in Chicago saw Bob Feller race his fastball against a motorcycle traveling at 86 mph, with the ball comfortably crossing the finish line first.
The modern accuracy in recording pitch speed stems from decades of work leading up to the Second World War.
The Development of Radar
Two names more commonly heard in weather forecasting and radio broadcasting played a large role in the mid-nineteenth Century technologies that led to modern radar.
Austrian physicist Christian Doppler theorized the Doppler Effect in 1842. A name most commonly associated with developing weather patterns, Doppler described the change in frequency of waves in relation to objects approaching and passing by.
Forty five years later Heinrich Hertz devised a way to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves that bounced off solid objects. The German expressed his belief that his work served no purpose, unaware of the impact it would have on technologies such as radio and television, medical imaging, and radar.
In 1935, the British government hired Scottish physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt to investigate reports of a radio-based death ray developed as part of the rapid armament of the Third Reich. Watson-Watt determined that the technology of the time made it simply impossible to harness radio waves in such a way. Their attention instead turned to the detection of aircraft, recognizing the heightened aerial threat in warfare.
Watson-Watt’s team utilized the work of Doppler and Hertz, proving that the speed, direction, and altitude of aircraft could be determined by bouncing pulses of radio waves and measuring the reflected waves. The work led to Britain’s first Radio Detection and Ranging system, ‘Chain Home’. The series of installations dotted along the coastline of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was completed in 1940, in time for the Battle of Britain. With the ability to detect Luftwaffe 100 miles off the coast of Britain, the RAF gained a crucial advantage that prevented a Nazi invasion.
Several nations produced competing technologies in the years leading up to the Second World War. In 1940, the US Navy gave us the common name radar, an acronym of Radio Detection and Ranging.
From the Battlefield to the Ballpark
Following the war, the Automatic Signal Company - a Connecticut-based company that developed automated traffic signals - returned to civilian-focused duties after being contracted to work on American radar applications during the war.
In 1947, the company unveiled its groundbreaking Electro-Matic Radar Speed Meter. The work of Vice President John Barker, the portable radar gun was soon put into practice in Glastonbury, CT with the first radar-detected speeding ticket issued in 1949 following two years of testing.
Step forward Danny Litwhiler. A World Series champion during the 1940s, Litwhiler always looked to innovate both in his playing and coaching careers. While coaching Michigan State University in 1973, Litwhiler noticed campus police using radar guns to catch speeding motorists.
Borrowing one of the radar-enabled cars, Litwhiler conducted tests measuring the speeds of his pitchers at the plate.
Litwhiler worked with John Paulson to develop the handheld JUGS Gun and soon approached Major League Baseball looking to expand the availability of this technology. As with all innovation, there was a healthy level of skepticism at the accuracy, value, and best practice of measuring pitch speed. Ultimately, practices were standardized, the devices became more manageable for traveling scouts, and teams became invested in the information radar guns could provide.
Today, the speeds and trajectories broadcast across the world use a camera-based system, but you’ll still see scouts at all levels of the game pull out their radar guns when watching a pitcher.
A wide range of Keystone products are utilized in modern radar applications. As the World Series draws closer, consider some of the Keystone products that have played a part in the progression of the sport, including Anti-vibration grommets, Battery clips, Contacts & Holders, Key Pad Dome Switches, LED spacers and lens caps, Mounting brackets, Pins, Plugs, Jacks & Sockets.
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