Open Secret

The famed Norden bombsight, perhaps the most closely guarded U.S. military secret of the war, last week had its first public showing. Anybody with 30-c- could have a look through it at Manhattan's Museum of Science and Industry (see cut), anybody at all could see it free behind a rope at a Wall Street War Bond show. But not even a spying engineer could learn much from this glimpse. The instrument, which contains some 2,000 parts and costs nearly $10,000, is so complex that, although a number of the sights have fallen into enemy hands, its inventors are confident that enemy technicians can not duplicate it in time for World War II.

The two chief components of the sight were revealed to be a stabilizer and the sighting mechanism, together weighing 90 lbs. The bombardier makes only three adjustments by hand: one for the weight of the bombs (which can be done before the flight), the others for altitude and sighting on the target. The bombardier's adjustments in lining up the target through the crosshair sight turn the plane in the right direction by means of an automatic pilot. Everything else--the bombing plane's speed, altitude, wind drift, etc. is registered automatically. The bombsight even releases the bombs, at the right, split-second moment.

This week the sight's inventor, Java-born Carl L. Norden, was to be awarded the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his invention. Meantime, the Navy announced that Inventor Norden had a collaborator, Captain Frederick I. Entwistle, assistant research chief of the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. Captain Entwistle, who joined Norden in his experiments in 1928, shares the patents and the credit for the final model.

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