carl noden

7/27/2019 Carl Noden

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/carl-noden 1/7

Transcript for Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden

bombsight

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I last did a TEDTalk I think aboutseven years ago or so. I talked about spaghetti sauce. And so many people,

I guess, watch those videos. People have been coming up to me ever since

to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in

the short term -- (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven

years. And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce

behind me.

(Laughter)

The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. And so I thought I

would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious

objects of his era. And the man's name is Carl Norden. Carl Norden was

born in 1880. And he was Swiss. And of course, the Swiss can be divided

into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive

objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite,

expensive objects. And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. He'san engineer. He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. In fact, one of his

classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small,

expensive, exquisite objects.

And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. And I mean that in its fullest sense of the

word. He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important

mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an

extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strongfeelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of

moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work

sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with

nothing but a slide rule.



In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First

World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan.

And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an

airplane. Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, thatwas obviously a really difficult problem. It's a complicated physics

problem. You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, going at

hundreds of miles an hour, and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb,

towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud

cover and all kinds of other impediments. And all sorts of people, moving

up to the First World War and between the wars, tried to solve this

problem, and nearly everybody came up short. The bombsights that were

available were incredibly crude.

But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. And he comes up

with this incredibly complicated device. It weighs about 50 lbs. It's called

the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. And it has all kinds of levers and ball-

bearings and gadgets and gauges. And he makes this complicated thing.

And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this

particular object, visually sight the target, because they're in the Plexiglas

cone of the bomber, and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, thespeed of the plane, the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target.

And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. And as Norden

famously says, "Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely

miss their target by a mile or more." But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden

bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft.

Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the

news of the Norden bombsight. It was like manna from heaven. Here wasan army that had just had experience in the First World War, where

millions of men fought each other in the trenches, getting nowhere, making

no progress, and here someone had come up with a device that allowed

them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy



whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy.

And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars -- billion dollars in 1940

dollars -- developing the Norden bombsight. And to put that inperspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion

dollars. Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was

spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era.

And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely

thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between

defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against

the Japanese.

And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance,

because Norden was a committed Christian. In fact, he would always get

upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in

his eyes, only God could invent things. He was simple the instrument of

God's will. And what was God's will? Well God's will was that the amount

of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as

possible.

And what did the Norden bombsight do? Well it allowed you to do that. It

allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and

wanted to bomb. So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the

U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000

each -- again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. And they trained 50,000

bombardiers on how to use them -- long extensive, months-long training

sessions -- because these things are essentially analog computers; they're

not easy to use. And they make everyone of those bombardiers take anoath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single

detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the

enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology.



And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted

there by a series of armed guards. And it's carried in a box with a canvas

shroud over it. And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. It's never

allowed to be photographed. And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way

the enemy can ever get their hands on it. The Norden bombsight is the

Holy Grail.

So what happens during the Second World War? Well, it turns out it's not

the Holy Grail. In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a

pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions. And of course,

in wartime, conditions aren't perfect. First of all, it's really hard to use --really hard to use. And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men

who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog

computer. Secondly, it breaks down a lot. It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes

and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as

they ought to in the heat of battle.

Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a

plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. Well in areal war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down. So they started flying

them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. And the Norden

bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions.

But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make

visual contact with the target. But of course, what happens in real life?

There are clouds, right. It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. Well

how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945? Not a lot.

And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight

was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical



plant in Leuna, Germany. And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres. And

over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs

on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight. Well what

percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acreperimeter of the plant? 10 percent. 10 percent. And of those 10 percent that

landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. The Leuna chemical

plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war,

was up and running within weeks.

And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of

the hands of the Nazis? Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper

Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers. So in the 1930s, he hired awhole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in

1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the

Nazis. So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war

-- which also, by the way, didn't work very well.

(Laughter)

So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? Well because we live inan age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. We live in a

time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running

around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our

world. They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. They've

invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make

our world forever better.

If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. If you goto the Pentagon, they will say, "You know what, now we really can put a

bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft." And you know what, it's true; they

actually can do that now. But we need to be very clear about how little that

means.



In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the

air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert

equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see

the entire desert floor. And their mission was to find and to destroy --remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the

Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? The mission of the two squadrons was

to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. And so they flew missions day

and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired

thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.

And after the war was over, there was an audit done -- as the army always

does, the air force always does -- and they asked the question: how manyScuds did we actually destroy? You know what the answer was? Zero, not

a single one. Now why is that? Is it because their weapons weren't

accurate? Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. They could have destroyed

this little thing right here from 25,000 ft. The issue was they didn't know

where the Scud launchers were. The problem with bombs and pickle

barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it's knowing how to

find the pickle barrel. That's always been the harder problem when it

comes to fighting wars.

Or take the battle in Afghanistan. What is the signature weapon of the

CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? It's the drone. What is the drone? Well it

is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. It is this weapon of

devastating accuracy and precision. And over the course of the last six

years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone

missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and

Taliban militants. Now what is the accuracy of those drones? Well it'sextraordinary. We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to

drone strikes. 95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? That

is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare.



But do you know what the crucial thing is? In that exact same period that

we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of

attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in

Afghanistan has increased tenfold. As we have gotten more and moreefficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more

and more motivated to kill us. I have not described to you a success story.

I've described to you the opposite of a success story.

And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. We

think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are

much more complex than that. The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs

you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly,whether you ought to use bombs at all.

There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous

bombsight. And that is, on August 6th, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the

Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very

large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima. And as was typical

with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft.

But of course, it didn't matter. And that's the greatest irony of all when itcomes to the Norden bombsight. the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight

was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a

bombsight at all.

Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight

was used over Hiroshima. He was a committed Christian. He thought he

had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. It

would have broken his heart.

(Applause)

carl noden

Documents