OGALLALA, Neb. — Nebraskans have long known that a Nebraska-built World War II bomber — the Enola Gay — released the world’s first atomic bomb over Hiroshima 79 years ago today.
But even here, history seems to have forgotten Nebraska’s other link to that terrible moment that hastened the war’s end as it launched the Nuclear Age.
It was partly known, soon after the fact, in nearby Sutherland and North Platte. Some of their residents, too, contributed to that moment.
But only once, and only at the End of the Texas Trail where it originated, has the story ever been told in full. Then it faded away so completely that later generations in Ogallala never knew it.
Bellevue’s Martin Bomber Plant, now Offutt Air Force Base, built the B-29 “Superfortress” that carried the “Little Boy” uranium-235 bomb that wiped an entire Japanese city off the map.
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But it was a top-secret part, one of millions produced by Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co., that made that first atom bomb go off.
A born inventorCuriosity defined Robert Aldrich Goodall, the “Edison of the Plains.”
Ogallala inventor Robert A. Goodall is shown here with an example of World War II’s top-secret VT proximity fuze.
KEITH COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Born in nearby Grant on Oct. 8, 1891, he graduated in 1913 from Crete’s Doane College (now Doane University). He bought an Ogallala jewelry shop and proceeded to revolutionize his trade with machines to clean watches and weld broken rings and other jewelry.
Good-All Electric was born in 1923 to produce those machines. They spread across the nation and into Europe.
Then Goodall, whose shop sold record players, devised a way to synchronize recorded sounds with then-silent films. His Good-All Orchestrolas led him to develop low-cost movie projectors and equipment for small-town moviehouses.
Robert Goodall’s first inventions in his 1920s Ogallala jewelry shop included an electric soldering machine that welded together broken rings. Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co., which he founded to produce that and an equally revolutionary watch-cleaning machine in 1923, produced this version of the soldering machine for U.S. Army uses during World War II.
ASC CAPACITORS
They, too, sold across the U.S. and the world. His factories had spread across four downtown Ogallala buildings by 1940. He opened movie theaters in nearby Sutherland, Paxton and Elsie and bought the former State Theater in North Platte, which he leased out.
As many as 200 inventions were attributed to Robert Goodall, who died in 1953 with 500 people working for him in Ogallala and 500 more in Sutherland, Alliance and Scottsbluff.
He gave Ogallala a homegrown electronics industry even as the 1933-41 construction of Kingsley Dam was laying the foundation of Nebraska’s eventual leading outdoor tourist attraction in the form of Lake McConaughy.
He and his wife, Clarice, could have lived anywhere. They chose to stay.
“I like a small town,” he told The Rotarian magazine in 1949. “I know almost every family in this part of Nebraska. Most of my employees are my neighbors. They are loyal, and I share my success with them.”
After briefly studying law after his 1913 graduation from Crete’s Doane College (now Doane University), Robert A. Goodall bought an Ogallala jewelry shop that became the crucible for the first of his up to 200 inventions. This case for glasses is on display at Ogallala’s Mansion on the Hill museum.
TODD VON KAMPEN, THE NORTH PLATTE TELEGRAPH
As they drove around Keith County, author O.K. Armstrong wrote, Goodall looked out “toward a far horizon” and added: “Besides, out here a man has time and room to think!”
Goodall’s inventions, Armstrong added, resulted from his examining how things had usually been done. “Never a device invented but can be made to work a little better,” the inventor said.
The little things
Dec. 7, 1941, changed Ogallala as it changed the nation. It gave Bob Goodall, now 50, new reasons to tinker.
He formed a “war inventions department” three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Armstrong wrote. All Good-All employees were invited to offer ideas: What can we make to help the war effort?
Many involved the military.
Small-town factories couldn’t hope to supply every part for a big-ticket item, because most of the time firms specializing in a few parts “can do the job cheaper, faster and better than you can,” Goodall would tell the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce Secretaries in North Platte in December 1944.
But they could become one of those specialists. Good-All Electric did.
Goodall started with radio parts. The armed forces needed reliable two-way radios that wouldn’t be plagued by “fadeouts” breaking up transmissions between units.
Working in Good-All Electric’s lab, Goodall and his staff learned how to grind quartz crystals to maintain constant sound vibrations at a tolerance of one ten-millionth of an inch.
Fadeouts were conquered. And Good-All Electric landed a contract to produce crystals and their holders in bulk.
Robert Goodall’s first big World War II invention defeated radio transmission “fadeouts” with these components holding quartz crystals ground to tolerances of one ten-millionth of an inch. It landed Ogallala’s Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co. its first major military contract in late 1942.
TODD VON KAMPEN, THE NORTH PLATTE TELEGRAPH
“Many of you have expressed a desire to help us manufacture radio crystals for the Army and Navy,” a December 1942 Keith County News ad said. “Here is your chance to find out whether you are suited to this work.”
Good-All also built soldering machines for military welders and instrument cleaning machines for the Army Air Forces and the Army’s ordnance department.
But the small parts dominated Good-All’s production. Rectifiers, which converted alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC), were vital for military planes’ starting mechanisms.
Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co. of Ogallala began manufacturing electronic capacitors in 1943 for multiple uses, including inclusion in its top-secret radar device in the VT proximity fuse that set off artillery shells, conventional bombs and the world’s first atomic bomb. These Good-All capacitors, likely made sometime before the firm’s 1960 sale to TRW, show the two wire “tails” that, when soldered into a circuit board, receive and send along electronic charges temporarily stored in their tubular heart.
TODD VON KAMPEN, THE NORTH PLATTE TELEGRAPH
Goodall branched out in 1943 into capacitors, then known as “condensers.” These tubular parts, still made in Ogallala, are soldered into circuit boards to temporarily store electrical charges and release them when needed.
By 1943, Robert Goodall and Good-All Electric were go-to sources for military procurement. Both came to the Navy’s attention as it sought to make bombs and artillery shells explode at the precise moment they needed to.
Armstrong’s 1949 Rotarian article described a Navy official’s 1943 conversation with an executive of a large Ohio war plant.
“Find us a man who can make this part of the proximity fuze operate 100%!” the officer demanded.
“I already know the man,” the executive replied. “Bob Goodall, of Ogallala, can invent anything or fix anything invented.”
Armstrong continued: “The official wanted to know who was Goodall and where in thunder was Ogallala.”
He found out. Robert Goodall and his company plunged into what military experts later judged to be the Allies’ second-most secret project.
In time, their contribution also became part of the most secret one of all.
VT fuzes
The Allies had already begun relentless bombardment of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany as they worked to liberate occupied Europe. Imperial Japan would be bombed in like manner.
This cutaway example of a Mark 58 World War II-era VT (variable time) proximity fuze shows a row of cylindrical tubes near its top. They’re part of an “oscillator-detector amplifier thyratron bundle,” which contained a tiny radar sender and receiver that located a target and controlled the detonation of the fuze’s host bombs and artillery shells. Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co. of Ogallala invented and built millions of the radar devices for the VT fuze, which also was used in the first atomic bomb.
SMITHSONIAN AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Previous bomb and artillery fuzes worked most of the time. But the military told Robert Goodall: We need fuzes that never fail.
Goodall and his team figured out how within 90 days. The device they designed became the most critical part of the “VT” (variable time) proximity fuze, of which just over 22 million had been produced by war’s end with parts from multiple military contractors.
A portrait of Goodall at Ogallala’s 1887 Mansion on the Hill, which maintains a display on his life and inventions, shows him pointing with a pencil toward the general location of Good-All Electric’s component in the VT fuze.
This U.S. Navy depiction labels the various parts of a Mark 53 World War II-era VT proximity fuze.
UNITED STATES NAVY, PUBLIC DOMAIN
It utilized an early form of radar. Once the radio waves it emitted reached the intended target, they bounced back and triggered the electrical charges that would explode the bomb or shell where desired, according to a 1950 Navy report on the VT fuze’s operation.
Robert Goodall’s employees in Ogallala made the radar devices. What they were for, they couldn’t know.
But they required the capacitors Good-All already was building. And Goodall’s Ogallala plants couldn’t produce the entire large number of condensers needed.
He turned to John Galen Townsend Sr., whom he hired out of an Oklahoma moviehouse in 1934 to run his Sutherland and Paxton theaters.
Townsend
JOHN TOWNSEND JR.
“Goodall had sent down something that was a part or a mechanism that rewound projectors,” said his son, John Jr., now 76 and retired in North Platte.
“My father actually didn’t like it. It didn’t work very well. And he said he remodeled it, rebuilt it, and sent it back to Goodall and said, ‘I think we have a better idea.’”
Daughter Galen Britt, who turns 90 on Aug. 28, said John Sr. would spend part of his weeks working with Goodall in Ogallala while her mother, Dorothy, managed the movie theaters.
Robert and Clarice Goodall, who had no children, were “very kind and very thoughtful” when she would tag along with her father, she said.
“He was very warm and outgoing,” Britt said from her home in Katy, Texas. “We shared dinner together. He’d say, ‘Do you have everything you need? Is everything all right?’ He was very warm and considerate.”
Goodall asked John Sr. in 1944 to open and manage a Good-All Electric condenser factory in Sutherland. But “Dad said, ‘I’d rather have it be my company with my name and contract with you,’” John Jr. said.
Townsend Manufacturing Co. would occupy three downtown Sutherland buildings. Britt said condensers were produced above the main office in the current Longhorn Bar building; in the former post office one block north; and in the easternmost building on the Longhorn’s First Street block.
“Women are especially sought to fill the increasing demands of the Good-All Electric Manufacturing Co. of Ogallala,” the Sutherland Courier wrote July 27. “The company at the present time is operating under Navy contracts supplying much needed ordnance equipment for our boys at the front.”
“Help-Help-Help,” a Good-All ad pleaded in the Courier’s Aug. 3 edition. “We need 50 girls over 18 immediately. … The work is pleasant, it is not hard or heavy. You can have steady employment working with folks your own age.”
Goodall struck a deal that fall with Ralph McPherson, superintendent of the North Platte School of Commerce, for a similar satellite condenser plant.
McPherson Manufacturing opened on Halloween 1944 on the top two floors of the school’s three-story building at 721 W. Fifth St. It had been built in 1920 by Dr. J.S. Twinem and operated as a hospital for its first two decades.
Pay started around $20 a week and rose to $30 after eight weeks, based on an Oct. 28 Telegraph story and another Courier help-wanted ad Nov. 2 for Townsend’s plants.
The young women, who had to be older than 16, worked while seated. “They had to be very careful about the amount of solder that was on the wires so they would put them in (the capacitor tube) properly,” said Britt, who later worked at her father’s plants as a postwar teenager.
Road to victory
Good-All’s business demands and job ads accelerated well into 1945. Millions of U.S. and Allied troops served at the North Platte Canteen rolled by Sutherland and Ogallala on Union Pacific trains, oblivious to what was being built nearby to help them out.
The Allies had invaded France on June 6, 1944. A week later, Hitler started pelting London with the Nazis’ V-1 “buzz bombs,” the first cruise missiles and predecessor to their V-2 rocket-driven missiles. Neither derailed the path to victory.
With Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s armies at Germany’s doorstep, Hitler threw his last reserves into Belgium in the Battle of the Bulge. That, too, was beaten back as 1944 turned to 1945.
Half a world away, American soldiers, sailors, Marines and pilots were closing in on Japan’s home islands. Resolved to fight to the end, Japan sent its remaining pilots and planes to crash into U.S. vessels on “kamikaze” suicide missions.
Like Hitler’s flying bombs, they wreaked havoc but couldn’t avert the all-but-certain bloody invasion of Japan’s home islands.
Two things did: the atomic bombs let loose over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on the 9th.
Japan gave up on the 14th, 3½ months after Hitler killed himself and Germany surrendered.
The veil lifted
Six days later, Robert Goodall disclosed astonishing news: Good-All Electric, for more than a year, had been making parts for the atomic bomb.
Even he hadn’t known that, he said.
“We didn’t know we were on the atomic bomb project until press dispatches referred to the atomic bomb project as the ‘Manhattan Project,’” he said in an Aug. 23 Keith County News story and an Associated Press story that The Telegraph ran in its Aug. 22 issue.
Goodall smiled as he continued: “We’d been making parts for the ‘Manhattan Project’ but thought it was something to keep the (Japanese) out of Manhattan — and I guess it will for all time to come.”
With Japan’s formal Sept. 2 surrender still 10 days away, he didn’t disclose what Good-All had built. “Our secret was well kept, and we aren’t talking too much about it.”
That changed six weeks later.
The News wrote on Oct. 4, 1945, that the Navy was awarding Good-All its coveted “E” pennant as it honored all the U.S. firms involved in devising and building the VT proximity fuze.
Goodall’s hundreds of direct and indirect Ogallala, Sutherland and North Platte employees learned that some 200,000 VT fuzes had been quickly flown to England in 1944. They helped shoot down some 2,000 V-1s.
Later, Eisenhower demanded and got thousands more VT fuzes to beat back the Bulge’s Nazi offensive in Belgium’s frozen, snowy Ardennes Forest.
And VT fuzes allowed Navy crews to stop 96 of every 100 Japanese suicide planes from crashing into U.S. ships near the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Adm. William F. Halsey, the News wrote, said the VT fuze “saved the fleet.”
But there was more, the News wrote: The VT fuze “also was used in the atomic as well as all other bombs dropped on Germany and Japan. …
“The Goodall company’s particular contribution to the VT fuze was the manufacture of the mechanism which ignites the TNT in a bomb or shell. Each fuze contained a complete five-tube radar sending and receiving set, so designed that when a missile passed within 70 feet of a target radio waves bounced back and set off the fuzes.”
Retired Navy Capt. Linwood S. Howeth confirmed the VT fuze’s use in the atomic bomb in his 1963 book “History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy.”
The VT fuze “was one of the major contributions of American scientists, engineers and manufacturers to the winning of the war,” he wrote.
But within a year of the VT fuze’s spectacular 1944 successes, its achievement “was dimmed by the development of greater and more damaging concentrated explosive power than the world had ever experienced” — the atomic bomb.
“Even this development,” Howeth concluded, “necessitated the continued use of the proximity fuze in the control of its point of detonation.”
Obscured by time
Everyone, or almost everyone, who built Robert Goodall’s radar devices or read those words is gone and can’t be asked how much they knew.
But Galen Britt, who turned 11 that summer of 1945, said she learned sometime that year what many of those millions of Good-All Electric condensers had gone into.
Around the time the Navy disclosed what the VT fuze did, “I was there when they were explaining it,” she said. “And Dad would explain to me that it would go off when it reached what they were aiming at.”
Some Nebraska newspapers picked up an Associated Press version of the October 1945 Keith County News story. But the AP’s rewrite didn’t say that the VT fuze, let alone Good-All’s secret device, had set off the A-bomb.
Robert Goodall kept inventing up until his death. But as Good-All Electric and its successors thrived over the decades, knowledge of its small but decisive role in the atomic bomb faded away.
Note: The writer’s father, the late Ted Von Kampen (1941-2023), designed capacitors for Good-All’s successor firm TRW Capacitor Division (later ASC Capacitors) in Ogallala from 1966 to 1989
Grateful thanks are due to North Platte historian Stephen Kay, who uncovered the initial connection of Good-All Electric to the Manhattan Project.
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Publish date : 2024-08-17 00:09:00
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