MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on behalf of the United States Department of Defense. Located at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Massachusetts, it was established in 1951 to develop an air defense system for the United States.
An outgrowth of wartime radar research at MIT, the lab's first project produced the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), the first large-scale computerized command-and-control network. After SAGE, the laboratory's mission broadened into radar, space surveillance, satellite communications, and solid-state electronics. Among its largest spinoffs were the MITRE Corporation, spun off in 1958 to manage SAGE deployment, and Digital Equipment Corporation, founded in 1957 by former Lincoln staff. The laboratory's defense work has centered on sensor technology, signal processing, and system prototyping; it designs and tests advanced systems, then transfers the resulting technology to industry for production.
Lincoln also has significant non-defense research programs. Its early computing work produced Reed–Solomon codes and Sketchpad, a foundational program for computer graphics. Its solid-state research contributed to the development of the semiconductor diode laser. For the Federal Aviation Administration, it developed the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar and the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, both now standard in civil aviation. The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program discovered more near-Earth asteroids than any other survey.
The laboratory employs approximately 4,500 people and operates on an annual budget exceeding $1 billion, the majority of which comes from the Department of Defense. It follows a research-and-prototype model, distinct from defense contractors, and does not compete for production contracts.
History
Origins (1949–1951)
The Soviet Union's first atomic bomb test in August 1949 and the rapid development of long-range bombers confronted the United States with the prospect of a nuclear attack it was poorly equipped to detect. George E. Valley Jr., an MIT physics professor and member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, investigated the problem by visiting radar stations operated by Continental Air Command. He found obsolete equipment, undertrained operators, and high-frequency radios dependent on unpredictable ionospheric conditions. Valley organized the Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee (ADSEC), which reported in 1950 that U.S. air defenses were inadequate and recommended a centralized system using a digital computer to fuse radar data.
In December 1950, at the urging of Valley and Louis Ridenour, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board and a veteran of the wartime MIT Radiation Laboratory, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg wrote to MIT president James R. Killian asking the institute to establish a laboratory devoted to air defense. Killian had serious reservations. MIT had devoted itself to the Radiation Laboratory and other large defense projects during the war; taking on another such commitment, he later wrote, risked the institute's reputation if funding proved unstable. Killian asked to conduct a preliminary study first and insisted that any new laboratory operate under the joint sponsorship of the Army, Navy, and Air Force rather than serving a single branch. This arrangement would give MIT broader latitude and reduce dependence on any one patron.
The resulting study, Project Charles (named for the Charles River), ran from February to August 1951 under the direction of F. Wheeler Loomis, a University of Illinois physicist who had served as associate director of the Radiation Laboratory. Of the 28 members, eleven were affiliated with MIT, and the group was deliberately weighted toward individuals with ADSEC experience. The study concluded unequivocally that a dedicated laboratory was needed and endorsed the concept of a centralized computer-based air defense system. Ridenour, in conversations with Killian, also argued that the laboratory would seed an electronics industry in whatever state housed it, a prediction Killian found persuasive and which proved accurate.
Killian's reservations notwithstanding, the Institute had deep existing ties to defense research, its faculty held prominent advisory roles in the military establishment, and the project promised enormous federal funding at a time when government patronage was transforming American research universities. Killian continued to press for reassurance that MIT's involvement served the national interest, writing to Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter in December 1951 that MIT was operating "wholly on a no-gain, no-loss basis" and would withdraw if another contractor could serve better.
Project Lincoln was chartered on July 26, 1951, under a joint-service agreement with the Air Force as prime contractor. The site chosen was Laurence G. Hanscom Field, where the towns of Bedford, Lexington, and Lincoln meet. Project Bedford (on antisubmarine warfare) and a Project Lexington (on nuclear-powered aircraft) were already in use, so Major General Donald L. Putt named it for Lincoln. The original expectation was a five-year undertaking; new employees were told their moving expenses would be covered when the work ended. In April 1952, director Loomis wrote to Killian that the name "Project Lincoln" conveyed "unnecessary implications of impermanence" for an organization of its scale, and the enterprise became Lincoln Laboratory.
SAGE and the computing era (1951–1958)
Lincoln's first and defining project was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a computerized air defense network, which was "the natural culmination" of MIT's electronics research programs over the prior three decades, drawing together studies in long-range radar, communications theory, microwave electronics, and digital computing into the largest military research and development enterprise since the Manhattan Project. Over its first decade SAGE consumed most of Lincoln's budget and ultimately cost the government an estimated $8 billion.
The laboratory inherited Jay Forrester's Whirlwind, an experimental digital computer that had been under development at MIT since 1945, and transformed it into the prototype of a real-time air defense system. In April 1951, a joint ADSEC–Whirlwind team demonstrated for the first time that radar data could be sent over telephone lines to a digital computer, which almost instantly calculated intercept headings for a defending aircraft.
Whirlwind's greatest limitation was the unreliability of its electrostatic storage-tube memory. Forrester's development of magnetic-core memory solved this problem. The first bank of core memory was installed in Whirlwind on August 8, 1953; operating speed doubled, the input data rate quadrupled, maintenance time dropped from four hours per day to two hours per week, and the mean time between memory failures jumped from two hours to two weeks. Computer pioneer Herman Goldstine later called the achievement "one of the basic technological discoveries in the entire computer field."
The Cape Cod System, operational by 1953, demonstrated automated air defense in a realistic environment: radar data from multiple sites, processed by a central computer, generated a real-time air picture. By 1955, Whirlwind was operating on a 24-hour schedule with 97.8 percent reliability. Translating the prototype into a deployable system required industrial partners. Lincoln selected IBM to build the production computer, the AN/FSQ-7, a contract that played a significant role in IBM's transformation into the world's largest computer manufacturer. The RAND Corporation took on SAGE programming; the section responsible grew so rapidly that it separated from RAND in 1956 to become the System Development Corporation, the first organization devoted to software engineering.
Lincoln simultaneously pushed computing hardware forward. The TX-0, completed in 1956, was a transistorized experimental computer; its successor, the TX-2, pioneered interactive computing with displays and light pens. In 1957, Kenneth Olsen and Harlan Anderson, who had worked on core-memory switching and TX-series circuit design, left Lincoln to found Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
As SAGE moved from research toward deployment, the character of the laboratory's work shifted. Lincoln's director acknowledged that it had "gradually changed from that of a research organization to that of a technical support contractor." The tension between research and systems engineering would shape Lincoln's institutional identity for decades.
New directions and the MITRE spinoff (1958–1970s)
In 1958, at the suggestion of Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas, MIT spun off the Digital Computer Division and associated SAGE staff into the MITRE Corporation (from "MIT REsearch"), a new nonprofit with systems engineering responsibility for SAGE deployment. On January 1, 1959, 485 Lincoln employees transferred to MITRE under what all parties described as amicable terms. About a third of Lincoln's professional staff departed. MIT retained no formal connection with MITRE.
The spinoff left Lincoln smaller, its budget declining by nearly 30 percent between 1958 and 1960, and without a clear mission. Valley, back in the MIT physics department, urged Provost Julius Stratton to draw the laboratory closer to campus: Director Carl Overhage likewise urged closer integration, though he questioned whether the Department of Defense would fund the kind of research MIT wanted to do. Overhage steered Lincoln away from systems engineering and toward a research-and-prototype model that would define the laboratory for the following decades.
Lincoln found new missions in areas that built on its SAGE-era expertise. A 1952 Summer Study hosted at the laboratory, which included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Isidor Rabi among its participants, had already recommended constructing a surveillance radar network across the Arctic. The result was the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, a chain of radars stretching from Alaska to Greenland; Lincoln contributed radar designs, automatic alarm systems, and long-range communications technology. The DEW Line entered service in 1957.
The shift in the Soviet threat from bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles reoriented Lincoln's work. Beginning in 1955, the laboratory led the technical development of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), designing a prototype UHF tracking radar on Millstone Hill in Westford, Massachusetts. The Millstone radar went into operation in fall 1957, just in time to detect radar returns from Sputnik I within days of its launch, an unplanned demonstration that marked the beginning of Lincoln's long involvement in space surveillance. The operational BMEWS network, with sites in Alaska, Greenland, and England, was completed in 1964 using components and specifications developed at the laboratory.
Lincoln also built the Haystack long-range imaging radar at the Millstone Hill complex. Designed for space communications and radar research, Haystack became operational in 1964. Between 1958 and 1969, Lincoln scientists used these facilities to map the Moon, measure planetary orbits, refine the size of the solar system, verify a prediction of general relativity, and identify a molecule in interstellar space for the first time. The laboratory contributed to U.S. satellite communications through the Lincoln Experimental Satellites (LES), a series launched between 1965 and 1976 that demonstrated technologies including jam-resistant waveforms and satellite-to-satellite links.