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This Week’s Issue
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The rat hunters who put a man on the Moon
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You think you know this story. Not yet.
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Picture a handful of tired engineers in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wrapping up a sixteen hour shift sometime in the 1930s. They grab a case of beer, some hamburgers and a few .22 rifles, and head to the city dump to shoot rats until sunrise.
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Now picture 1969. A man steps onto the Moon and says the words the whole planet is waiting for. Those words travel 240,000 miles home on equipment built by that same company. Some of it built by those same rat hunting engineers.
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That is the distance Arthur Collins traveled. A teenager who beat the United States Navy at its own game. A company nearly killed by an RCA lawsuit and saved by a forgotten 1912 patent from the father of American rocketry. A secret radio room in Iowa that carried the country’s most urgent communications on its darkest day. And a private, difficult, brilliant man who spent his last weeks in a hospital bed still trying to build the future.
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Nobody put his story on a plaque. I put it in this week’s issue.
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Read the Full Story
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And if you’d rather listen, this week’s Director’s Cut goes even deeper. Same man, a completely different story, about the night a four star general used a radio he wasn’t supposed to have to wake up an admiral at two in the morning.
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Listen to the Director’s Cut
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73 de N2LEE
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