i think most of us at some point have had someone say to us you know we went to the moon with less computing power than your iphone or something to that effect what you may not know though is that less than a century ago a 2000 piece mechanical computer that lacked a single transistor or chip was the most closely guarded military secret of the allied war effort or at least the second most before being overshadowed by the manhattan project the u.s navy spent billions helping carl norton develop a mechanical computer with one job and one job only to determine the point at which a level flying bomber would need to drop its bombs to achieve a pinpoint accuracy on an intended target when it was completed mr norton famously claimed that the site was so accurate that it was capable of putting a bomb inside a pickle barrel and if it could then war would be revolutionized or so the powers that be thought the idea was simple fly your bombers above the enemy's air defenses above the reach of their flak batteries faster than their fighters could fly and drop your bombs with pinpoint accuracy on crucial industrial sites robbing the enemy of their ability to manufacture the equipment they need to wage a war in the first place the only problem was that everything about the northern bomb site turned out to be a myth not just the obviously mythical bits like the fact that the crosshairs in the site itself were actually webs from a black widow or that instead a reticle was made from the strains of hair of a young midwestern girl but everything the accuracy the secrecy and even the fact that it was the only bomb site used in the war so how can this be until two weeks ago i believe that norton bomb site was an ingenious piece of equipment that more than any other singular device changed the tides of world war ii in favor of the allies so why do we still believe in the northern bomb site because as it turns out myths are useful not just to the army air corps the carl norton company and hollywood but to us the public as it turns out they can help us swallow hard truths about the war we'd prefer to avoid mechanical computing bomb sites were the direct response to problems that emerged in world war one naturally as early bombardiers had little more than their own senses and a simple crosshair to drop their bombs it was quickly determined that two major problems needed to be solved before aerial bombing could be anywhere near accurate the first problem was determining an accurate wind drift angle which proved to be difficult as pilots were forced to coordinate with their bombardiers verbally or by using hand gestures as they lined up on the target the second problem was that a simple bomb site mounted to the fuselage of the aircraft was insufficient as any small movement of the aircraft resulted in huge angular changes in the site rendering it useless while norton was not the only engineer working towards solving this issue he would eventually become the most closely associated with instruments designed to solve the problem of precision aerial bombardment his first site the norton mark 11 was essentially a flop developed alongside the navy which was the first to investigate precision bomb sites the results of its first tests were disappointing hitting a 110 foot target only 50 of the time from an altitude of only 3000 feet also bombardiers claimed that the site was complicated and difficult to use shortly after these early tests in 1927 the us army air car also gained interest in precision bomb sites after an embarrassing bombardment trial on the pd river bridge in north carolina after flying 100 missions between six and eight thousand feet over five days the air corps had expended thousands of pounds of explosives to destroy a bridge that would have taken a battlefield engineer a few hundred pounds of explosives and an afternoon after finally getting a hold of the mark 11 which took some doing due to the secrecy surrounding it the army came to the same conclusion as the navy it was too complicated and not that accurate not until norden developed the mark 15 the legend we know today began to form to solve the issue of operational complexity the norden designed the mark 15 around a synchronous method for determining the target angle which we'll touch on later to put it simply though the new site could be operated with just two knobs and took only six seconds to synchronize compared to the 11's 50. results were much more impressive than the 11 showing a 50 error rate on a 75 foot circle which was a 32 improvement not only was the 15 simpler and more accurate but it was also coupled with a mechanical autopilot dubbed the stabilized bombing approach equipment that solved the issue of precise aircraft control while on a bombing run with the mark 15 making significant improvements it was no surprise that both the navy and the army air corps were filling their order books perhaps unsurprisingly considering that devices were still being hand-assembled by a small number of specialists supply issues quickly developed by this time during the late 30s and early 40s the royal air force had gotten wind of the norton and expressed interest in obtaining one the royal air force had actually been working on their own bomb site dubbed this stabilized automatic bomb site but it was still in development and didn't feature a coupled autopilot unfortunately for the raf permission was never granted to release the secrets behind the bomb site until much later in the war to try to persuade the americans the raf even offered information about their coveted radar technology but it was no use fortunately as we'll see in a minute and we shared the norton it likely wouldn't have made much difference seems few people know about the bomb site war the war in which the sperry gyroscope company built a superior bomb site to the norton but through clever salesmanship and political dealings was eventually bested by the norton company despite the norton being an inferior product you see to resolve the supply issues they faced the army asked the sperry company to develop its own bomb site which would eventually become the sperry s-1 the sperry company was not a complete beginner to the bomb site design as they had previously submitted a few other designs but these designs even by sperry's own admission were garbage however by this time the company had made many improvements and designed a winner the only problem as we'll see is that the earlier bombsite's performance had somewhat ruined its reputation now the s-1 featured an all-electric servo system which responded faster than the norton's electro-mechanical controls and furthermore it was more ergonomically designed featuring a knob on the opposite side that allowed a bombardier to adjust both course and range simultaneously which was an impossible task on a norden while the norden used a dc powered 7200 rpm gyroscope to stabilize its platform sperry had recently unveiled its 30 thousand rpm ac powered variant also the use of three-phase ac power and inductive pickups eliminated the need for a dc motors carbon brushes which had proved to be a messy problem on the nortons another advantage was that the s-1 had eliminated the need to spend time aligning the gyros which should then become a huge time sink for bombardiers and then there was the autopilot which sperry had already been designing for some time the successor to the heading only a3 model currently in use in mini b17s the a5 autopilot was an all-electric model that stabilized yaw pitch and roll coupled with the s1 the results were impressive enough for the army to authorize the construction of a 2 million square foot factory stating that quote in the future all production models of bombardment airplanes will be equipped with an a5 automatic pilot and will be provisioned such that installation of either the m series or the s1 is possible end quote so sperry was so great why isn't this an s1 video well the answer comes down to nepotism tragedy and good old-fashioned marketing you see as soon as the norden learned of the s1 site the norton company held an emergency meeting with both the navy and the air corps according to the records of the meeting the company's president theodore h barth heavily disparaged this berry company and even offered to build the air corps its very own factory to alleviate issues with demand the army seemed interested but the navy wouldn't allow it varying issues with their own supply the rivalry between sperry and norton eventually became so severe that later when the air corps asked the norton company to cooperate with sperry to make their bomb sites compatible with the sperry a5 autopilot the norton company just refused and as a result the air corps contracted the honeywell regulator company to produce their own autopilot compatible with the northern sites gyros for all intents and purposes the honeywell was a copy of the a5 and even used the a5's electric raid circuits and servos but the fact that it wasn't a sperry product had placated norton and the resulting c1 autopilot later became a success meanwhile the president of norton company had begun laying the groundwork for the myth behind the northern bomb site that endures today norton's president theodore barth was a military man himself and had many military contracts who he fostered good relationships with furthermore he had also begun cultivating a legendary status around the bomb site by requiring superfluous security protocols for bombsite handling specifically during wartime the top portion of the bomb site which was called the football was removed from the aircraft and stored in specialized norton lockups on each base additionally a bombardier using the norton site was required to take an oath that they would sacrifice their life to protect the secrets of the northern bomb site should they be captured as it turned out most of this was probably propaganda used to reinforce the myth that northern bomb sites were infallible and the biggest wartime secret the united states possessed but more on that in a bit after the insane secrecy there was the legendary pickle barrel myth as the story goes someone whether it be carl norton himself or just a bombardier using the norton site had said not only could they put a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20 000 feet but they were disappointed they weren't told which pickle to hit as we'll see in the after action reports this was a bit of a stretch after the pickle myth the tales of the norden grew even wilder including again that the crosshairs were either made from the silk of a black widow or the especially fine hair of a woman named mary babnick known as arcadia mary who taught dancing to soldiers in the uso's arcadia ballroom at a pueblo army air base in colorado weird while the northern company was busy myth-making the sperry company on the other hand was carrying on in relative silence while the technology behind the norton was only classified the sperry remained top secret in fact nobody really knew the sperry company even made bomb sites at all which while great for wartime security turned out to be a disadvantage in terms of military procurement as it turns out good old-fashioned marketing works the same way on the military as it does on the rest of us what also proved tragic for the sperry company was the fact that their primary military procurement relationship between their military marketing representative fred voss and major general andrews ended abruptly after vose was killed in an aircraft accident also there was the fact that the sperry company was a multinational corporation that had contacts in both germany and japan which obviously didn't gain them any favor with the us military at the time especially when theodore barth reminded them that norden was entirely owned and operated by the u.s which made it possible to divert their entire company's attention to maintaining security which by the way they would ultimately fail to do additionally on top of their other advantages the norton company was enjoying a 10-year head start in developing procurement contracts with the navy for sperry it was simply an uphill battle even with a superior product to sell the fact that norton had a better relationship with the military better marketing and a better reputation made it their their battle so when it was determined that there was a surplus of bomb sites in 1943 and standardization was needed the norton coupled with the honeywell c1 autopilot became a standard issue by the end of the war perhaps ironically the primary purchaser of the norton became the u.s army air corps as the navy who had initially funded the research and designed for the norton bomb site abandoned level bombing altogether due to its poor accuracy in favor of dive-bombing tactics however even without the navy the northern company's factories were booked solid by the war's end they would produce 72 000 bomb sites purchased for 8 800 each and adjusting for inflation that means the air corps purchased 18.7 billion dollars worth of norton bomb sites to put that in perspective the manhattan project cost u.s taxpayers the equivalent of about 30 billion today bomb sites were no small business but as we'll see there's a serious argument that they probably should have been put simply then norden used a mechanical computer mounted inside the bombsite to calculate the required range angle of the bombs when the bombardier would fine-tune the aircraft's attitude altitude and course alongside the wind speed and direction the computer would automatically calculate the bomb's release point while solving the range an angle problem was not a novel way to determine an accurate bomb release point the way in which the norton calculated it was unique instead of a typical site in which a fixed angle was used and the target approached the bomb site's crosshairs from the front moving rearward through the site the norden used a synchronous method of error correction what this means effectively speaking is that none of the mathematics are handled by the bombardier himself rather after first calibrating the gyros setting the initial altitude on the rate knob and setting the trail distance with the trail arm to tell the computer the distance the bomb will travel across the ground based on its weight and air resistance the bombardier only has to keep the target stable in the telescopic site and the bomb will automatically be released on target at least in theory the site does this by solving two problems the course problem and the range problem to solve the course problem the bombardier and the bomb site first work together to neutralize wind drift by turning the entire aircraft with the course knob through the autopilot while maintaining the sighted target in the telescope which moves independently the bombardier can find the aircraft's wind drift angle by simply finding the course that neutralizes the target's drift in the site once this angle is determined the norton will automatically compare this wind drift angle to the settings configured on the trailing arm specific to the bomb's specifications and pivot the telescopic site so that in order to maintain the target in his site the bombardier will now without even knowing it steer the required distance upwind to hit the target by doing this the site is accounting for what is referred to as cross trail distance or the distance the bomb will fly left or right after the bomb is released due to cross winds by accomplishing both these tasks that is determining the wind drift angle required to fly a direct course toward the target and the distance the course must be upwind of the target both the bombardier and the bomb side collectively solve what is referred to as the course problem however we still don't know when precisely to drop the bomb that is where the range problem comes in to solve the range problem the bombardier must simply neutralize the vertical drift in the telescopic site having already set a starting point on his range knob based on the aircraft's altitude a spinning disc will be clutched in and fine-tuned to match the non-linear exponential change in relative vertical angle to the sided target the bomb site does this by pivoting a mirror underneath the telescope that is directly connected both to a protractor and a spinning wheel that rides an adjacent disc as the wheel follows the disc from the interior rings of the disc to the exterior opposite the way a needle on a record player travels it will move faster this function as it turns out changes at the same rate as the change in the relative angle to a target as it passes underneath an airplane if the bombardier can find the correct disk speed that represents the current conditions based on the aircraft's altitude and airspeed the bomb site can determine automatically when to release the bombs so they will hit and sounds like a lot but once again all the bombardier must do is stop the relative vertical motion in the telescopic site with the range wheel by doing this without performing any math whatsoever he's telling the computer all of the required variables to solve the range problem specifically he's telling at the trail distance again set by the trail arm the current angle to the target set with his sight the required range angle to the target determined by the computer with the trigonometric function and the rate of change between the two once all of this is done bombs away in terms of drawbacks one of the biggest limitations of the norton was the configuration or writing process i mentioned before you see before the bomb site could be used the gyros needed to be configured to ensure the telescopic site was maintaining a truly vertical orientation because gyros as they do will slowly drift over time to fix this error the telescopic site needed to be compared to bubble levels that could be seen in small windows on the stabilization platform of the bomb site this whole process was time consuming sometimes taking almost 10 minutes also in heavy turbulence the entire gyro platform could tumble which would ruin the configuration and require the process to be restarted as you might imagine turbulence was quite common and so probably were quick maneuvers by the pilots especially when they were being shot at by flak because of this tumbling issue when the raf finally got a hold of the norton in 1942 they rejected it based on this frustrating problem alone unsurprisingly perhaps despite the obvious ingenuity incorporated into the design the results upon implementing the jordan were less than ideal soon after the war started the navy quickly abandoned the bomb site altogether and later the us army air corps determined that they had similarly poor performance but refused to stop their bombing campaign for a host of reasons we'll touch on in a bit by 1943 though it was determined that on average only 16 percent of bombs fell within a thousand feet of their target so i guess if the pickle barrel is 10 000 feet across yeah you'll hit it every time to combat the poor accuracy the combat box was developed and instead of each bombardier using their own norton the lead aircraft of the formation of bombers would sight the target while the other bombardiers would simply release their bombs manually when they saw the leeds bombs being released conveniently this also solved the issue of bombers drifting into one another while bombardiers all individually attempted to synchronize their sights this too however proved to be not much more accurate than the previous method and when jimmy doolittle eventually took command of the eighth air force from ira eaker in 1944 precision tactics were dropped in the favor of area bombing like the royal air force these raids mostly targeted marshalling yards airfields oil refineries and military installations but as the idea of precision itself had been abandoned the bombers were primarily thought of as bait during the late war drawing up the last of the luftwaffe fighters so they could be gunned down by squadrons of long-range fighter escorts such as the p-51 so that the allies could finally gain total air superiority ironically despite precision bombing being abandoned to the bomb site's credit once air superiority was finally achieved accuracy steadily improved by 1945 60 of the bombs fell within 1 000 feet of the intended target what do you know when you're not being shot at it's a lot easier to use your norton but even though accuracy improved the early days were so bad that they really deserved to be examined further to do this let's take a look at the raid of the yowata steel works in 1944. in 1944 47 b-29s dropped their bomb load on yawata only managing to score a single hit representing a quarter of a percent of the total 376 bombs dropped in another example 108 b-17s writing a german power generation plant dropped 648 bombs achieving only two direct hits on the target this performance was not only bad it was unjustifiably bad considering the loss of life incurred especially in europe to put it simply the primary issue was the early tests of the mark 15 bomb site were done at lower altitudes and much lower air speeds the site was never intended to be used so far from its target but neither nordin nor the army air corps was willing to admit this as the successful propagation of the myth behind the bomb set meant a bright future for both the northern company and what would become the future united states air force however despite this and the eventual release of these after action reports the norton's reputation as an accurate instrument endured not only during the war but in the decades since let's talk about why to understand why this myth has endured for so long we have to look at several factors the fact is that several parties were responsible for propagating the myth and all of them had differing motivations the first party responsible for creating the myth surrounding the northern site was the northern company itself pressured by the competition from sperry and interest in procuring future contracts the company began sensationalizing the required secrecy surrounding the device as well as its capabilities namely the pickle barrel myth in fact prior to the attack on pearl harbor theodore barth is quoted as saying quote we do not regard a 15 foot square as being difficult to hit from an altitude of 30 000 feet provided the new army m4 bomb site together with the stabilized bombing approach equipment is used end quote considering as we said that the post-war data shows that just after this statement was released bombers over europe were only hitting 1 000 foot targets 16 percent of the time i think it's safe to call this one an exaggeration under normal circumstances such hyperbole would probably end there lost to the annals of history but another party namely the us army air corps needed not only the rest of the us government but the rest of america to believe that the northern was something special why because it justified their existence at the time the us army air corps had aimed to become its own individual branch of the military and as such they needed a war doctrine unique enough to warrant an individual identity you see if the norton was truly the game changer it was touted to be it would justify the use of precision daylight bombing doctrine giving the air corps exactly what it needed because of this what the air corps soon realized was that to become their own branch of the military they would need the public's unwavering support and how do you get the public support well it's simple what you do is make propaganda fortunately for the air corps the american public was already programmed to equate the country's progress and superiority with advances in technology hell just a few years ago none of them even had tbs and now look there's a fella in your living room telling you about how the norden is going to revolutionize warfare and save countless lives the fact is in american culture technology is still often seen as the answer to the most intractable problems and the norton bomb site was no different if the stories were true the site promised cleaner wars by reducing the potential for unwanted civilian casualties and as the us army air corps began touting its new precision strike capabilities it was easy for the public to latch on to the idea that a war operated within the us army air corps new potential daylight precision bombing doctrine would obviously be more humane considering only five years later the air corps would be firebombing japanese cities indiscriminately and shortly thereafter leveling two of them entirely with atomic bombs in retrospect this rhetoric can be used as naively idealistic at best and perhaps pretty insidious at worst nonetheless it was the angle the air core used to sell their new war doctrine and as we all know it worked so the air corps had their message precision daylight bombing is the future because it would save lives but they needed a way to get this message out as it turned out this wasn't too difficult for britain magazines and government-funded films to aerial demonstrations america would eventually come to discover the new innovation the big brand engineers at norton had cooked up but that's not where the propaganda train started remember when we mentioned that norton had likely created an environment of unneeded secrecy around the bomb site to hype up its importance in performance well the first people who were subjected to this propaganda were the bombardiers themselves specifically throughout their training bombardiers were not allowed to take notes and the information was required to be memorized and then of course there were the canvas bags and the norton specific vaults on each airbase in which the sites were meticulously covered and guarded by the time a bombardier was ready for war why wouldn't he believe that the northern bomb site was a wonder weapon just look at how much effort was being put into preventing it from falling into the enemy's hands what they didn't know however was that the site had already fallen into the enemy's hands and that they really didn't think it was so great more on that in a bit eventually after the army air corps had gained the reputation it so desired and no small part due to the northern bomb site becoming public knowledge and the american public's overly simplistic predisposition towards viewing new technologies as evidence of unquestionable advancement and superiority other groups soon realized that they could exploit the northern bombsite's fame for capital gain when this happened the myth of the northern bomb site was no longer in the hands of its creators but rather the american zeitgeist which as we know is usually a wild ride unsurprisingly at this point any association whatsoever with the device could enhance a company's ability to sell newspapers magazines films or adding machines the thing is though you have to remember that these groups weren't necessarily being disingenuous they believed the propaganda that the air corps had spread so much so that even film directors who flew on missions themselves maintained their opinions about the bomb site for example in the film memphis bell william weiler narrates quote who can tell the number of german torpedoes that will not be fired the number of our own convoys that we'll get through now the soldiers and seamen's lives that will be saved or the battles that will be won instead of lost because of what these bombers and their airmen did today end quote so it's not even like this myth at this point was spread in a malevolent way the fact was nobody really knew the norton was a lie and because everyone truly believed it was the amazing piece of tech they thought it was the media continued the associations no matter how remote for example in one august 1943 ad of fortune magazine an ad shows a picture of a bombardier stuffed into the plex-glass nose of a bomber beside the image the caption reads quote carl l norton incorporated manufacturer of the famous norton bomb site used dictograph intercommunication as an essential war production tool what this as does through the placement of the caption is fool the reader into believing that the association relates solely to the norton bomb site itself however the small print of the ad clears up any confusion reading quote the highly secret nature of the administration planning and production of the famous norton bomb site requires unquestioned privacy end quote as you can see even the fact that the factories producing the norton bomb site used dicta craft company products was seen as an exploitable connection also now is as good of a time as any to discuss the fact that in 1938 a set of norton bombsite plans were sent to the luftwaffe from a nazi spy in the u.s which should have completely and totally ended any notions that the bomb site was still a secret during wartime yet the power of the norton's mythos endured and in december 1944 issue of time magazine the writer claims that the famed norton bomb site quote was perhaps the most closely guarded u.s military secret of the war to their credit though they later justify the obvious lie by claiming that quote the bomb site is so complex that although a number of sites have fallen into enemy hands its inventors are confident that the enemy technicians cannot duplicate in time for world war ii the fact was however that the luffa had tested norton and found that while early results were promising when compared to their bomb sites the small increase in accuracy wasn't worth the trouble of re-engineering their own sites so there you have it norden knew the nazis had the plans the air corps knew they had the plans yet they stuck to their guns and kept doing the secrecy dance even so far as denying the royal air force's request to study the bomb site because they claimed they were worried it might fall into the enemy's hands all smoke and mirrors by the war's end countless adds had made loose connections with the norton bomb site simultaneously building the reputation of their own product while contributing to the larger than life myths surrounding the northern bomb site itself eventually the northern bomb site's reputation had become a part of the zeitgeist taking on a life of its own and as such the truth didn't matter much so much so that when after the war the united states strategic bombing survey revealed that daylight precision bombing had proven largely ineffective nobody seemed to notice even after it was reported that general spatz himself had admitted that the us army air corps was unable to achieve accurate bombing on some of their top priority targets and that 95 of all bombs dropped on japan were dropped after general lemay abandoned daylight precision bombing altogether the perception that the northern bomb site was an incredibly accurate war changing technology remained you see at this point in history the public's perception of the bomb site had been so heavily influenced by the media that had become fixed in our minds and no information to the contrary could change it which is still somewhat true today and honestly it's not that surprising really if you think about it if we all believed that the norton bomb site was hopelessly inaccurate then we might also be forced to call into question some of the sacrifices these airmen were forced to make which is an uncomfortable proposition to say the least of the 405 000 total americans killed during the war 20 percent were airmen flying in either b-17s or b-24s which frankly is an incomprehensible cost that was directly paid in human lives as a result of the decision to attack strategic targets in the daytime made wholly under the pretense that the northern bomb site was so accurate that it made the whole horrible affair worthwhile the fact is today the air corps strategic bombing campaigns are viewed as a success and it is my opinion that they were however what actually happened should be remembered as a far a far cry from the bill of goods the american public was sold we were told that precision bombing and the northern bomb site would save not only the lives of our own airmen but the lives of the non-combatants on the ground not only was this not true in practice but it was so untrue that these bombing campaigns eventually abandoned all pretenses and began area bombing entire cities that being said did the eventual area bombardment help contribute to ending the war in europe despite being a humanitarian atrocity yes and because of this it can be stated that the air corps was doing what it had to do for the greater good of the allied cause however what cannot be said was that the northern bomb site was so effective that the air corps was able to stop their enemies war production through coordinated precision strikes on industrial centers because accurate they were not