First World War
McNaughton joined the Canadian militia in 1909. He took the 4th Battery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force overseas with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and arrived in France in February 1915.
While there he helped make advances in the science of artillery, and was wounded twice. The need to accurately pinpoint artillery targets, both stationary and moving, led to his invention of a target detection technique using an oscilloscope which was the forerunner of radar. He sold the rights to that invention to the Government of Canada for only $10. In March 1916 he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and returned to England to take command of the newly arrived 11 (Howitzer) Brigade RCA, taking it to France in July. In early 1917 he was appointed the Counter Battery Staff Officer of the Canadian Corps. On the day before the armistice he was promoted to Brigadier-General and appointed General Officer Commanding Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery.
Read more about this topic: Andrew McNaughton
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns, “The world is governed too much.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)