Proximity Fuze – The 3rd Most Crucial Development of WW2

That "battery completed during firing" is, to me, the most brilliant part of the design. (The glass ampule that breaks, releasing the acid for the battery, with the centrifugal force pushing it outward to complete the battery.)

As an electronic engineer i am astounded what they could do back then with basic components. Cool stuff

One of the most amazing things to me that no one seems to be talking about is how they were able to pump out tens of thousands of miniaturized radar sets cheaply enough for them to be expendable.

The breaking of the ampule of acid to complete the battery - as a safety feature - is such simple genius.

Excellent! My mother was a final inspector of the VT proximity fuse at McQuay Norris in St. Louis during WWII. She talked very little about it, due to her swearing secrecy. People who remember WWII might recall that you couldn’t purchase small Christmas type lamp bulbs during that time. The reason was that they were being used to house the acid for the batteries of VT fuses! They were meant to break upon firing so the acid would activate the battery. The VT fuse is probably the most overlooked important weapon of WWII. You did it justice. Thank you!

Using the problems (G forces and spin) as active parts of the design’s safety features.... total genius!

Can we just stop and appreciate the sacrifice made by the fly. Gentlemen, I'm not going to sugar coat it. This is a suicide mission. Are there any volunteers? Fly On The Wall: Did someone say sugar coat?

"and when the german heavy bombers came out, we brought the big anti aircraft guns. we never hit anything with them, but the civilians in the shelters liked the sound of them, found the booms reassuring" a quote from an anti aircraft gunner who operated in london, about pre-proximity fuse AA guns, taken for The World At War.

I was about to go to bed. But i have to learn about proximity fuses first.

Paul Shillito really is one of the best presenters' of infomation, regardless of the subject.

I was a munitions specialist in the U.S. Air Force for years and worked with a wide-range of proximity fuzes. Thank you Paul for giving a very detailed historical insight to the development of this device.

When the proxy fuze was first developed, production was extremely slow because the long thin cylinder had to be machined by hand on a lathe. The allies struggled with this for awhile until one of the developers on the project got an idea from seeing a stack of pennies when he was at the store. It gave them the idea to segment the tube into many slices that could be stamped out by a press and then assembled together after. The is what allowed the allies to scale production up enough to be widely used in shells.

6:41 R.I.P. Fly - Your sacrifice will never be forgotten.

It was such a well-kept secret that I had never heard about this until today. Thanks for this incredibly informative video.

I'm an old M101 Gunner (RCA 97-04). I was only able to see a single VT barrage from a single 24 gun regiment, and.. It was terrifying. I understood at that moment that I could never grasp the horrors of Bastogne without having been there.

Industrialisation of penicillin was probably as important as the actual weapons (the war in the Far East would have been impossible to fight for European troops without it)

The genius of invention necessitated by WWII is truly something to behold.

My father was an intelligence officer in the artillery during the Battle of the Bulge. He shared his experiences on this and how proximity fuses made a difference during the Bulge and elsewhere. Good video.

As a bomb technician, learning the history, development and overall importance of these fuzes means the world to me. Thank you for the astounding content and tight accuracy.

An awesome accomplishment for the time. It boggles the mind to think of the forces that those fuses went through at firing. I'm an US Air Force vet from the 70's - 90s and worked on aircraft electronics, some of which still had vacuum tubes. Knowing how tubes were perhaps the biggest single point of failure highlights the genius of the design. Once again, England was shown to have been in the elite when it came to innovation. It was a true game changer.