OSA. He was also active in the International Commission for Optics, and he
was a vice president of ICO from 1959
until 1962. In 1948, he was awarded
the Presidential Medal for Merit, the
highest civilian award, for his efforts in
designing the optical system for the U- 2
spy plane.
After the war, he advised the Air
Force Photographic Laboratory and
refined his work on high-altitude optical
systems. He designed the lenses used by
the U- 2, which flew at 70,000 feet to
escape detection and capture images of
Soviet troops and missiles. (That statement is perhaps not completely accurate:
At the time period of the U- 2 overflights,
the Soviet military could surely detect
the airplane at 70,000 feet altitude, but
did not yet have a surface-to-air missle
capable of reaching that altitude.) Intelligence derived from flights of the U- 2 was
credited with helping to temper concerns
about Soviet military efforts during the
Cuban missle crisis.
In the late 1950s, with the launchings
of the first satellites, Baker, in collaboration with Joseph Nunn, developed the
Baker-Nunn satellite tracking camera,
which allowed observers to follow the
course and trajectory of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957. The camera uses
an expansive field of view to photograph
large swaths of sky and record the progress of satellites and other objects.
Baker later helped to create the camera
systems used in the Air Force’s high-speed reconnaissance plane, the SR-71
Blackbird, in use from the 1960s until
the 1990s. As an independent contractor
to Polaroid, Eastman Kodak and other
companies, he also applied his research
to consumer products. In the late 1960s,
at the invitation of Edwin Land, the Polaroid chairman, Baker designed the optical system for the folding SX-70 Land
Camera, which instantly developed
its images and became internationally
popular in the 1970s.
In earlier work in astronomy, Baker
improved the accuracy of existing tele-
scopes and designed the Baker Super-
Schmidt camera, which he developed
to photograph meteors. With George
Dimitroff, he wrote the 1945 book Tele-
scopes and Accessories.
Wallace Reed Brode, 1961
Brode (1900-1979) was OSA President in
1961. For the previous 10 years, he had
served as editor of JOSA (1950-1960).
(A longer biographical sketch of Brode
can be found in the April 2010 OPN.)
Brode had served as the associate director of the National Bureau of Standards
and later as the science advisor for the
U.S. Department of State. He was also
elected to the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences. A detailed biography is also
available on the NAS web page.
In OSA, he was particularly active
in securing office space in Washington,
D.C., for the new Executive Office in
1959. That office space was a small,
one-room office on the first floor of the
new building of the American Chemical
Society. There was barely enough room
for two filing cabinets and four desks—
two for Mary Warga, the OSA executive
secretary, and her clerk-secretary; and
the other two desks for Paddy Wakeling,
the assistant executive secretary and her
clerk-secretary. t
John N. Howard (johnnelsonhoward@gmail.
com) is the founding editor of Applied Optics
and retired chief scientist of the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory.
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