History
Hanscom Air Force Base is named after Laurence G. Hanscom (1906–1941) in honor of the pilot, aviation enthusiast, and State House reporter who was killed in a plane crash at Saugus, Massachusetts when he had been lobbying for the establishment of an airfield in Bedford. Laurence G. Hanscom was a reporter for the Worcester Telegram-Gazette. Hanscom was active in early aviation, founding the Massachusetts Civil Air Reserve. The base was named in his honor on 26 June 1941.
Founded at the start of World War II, the focus of Hanscom had shifted from combat missions to radar technology development by the end of the war. After the war, Hanscom encouraged the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to institute a research laboratory, Lincoln Laboratory, with which it collaborated to develop the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system. In 1961, Hanscom became the headquarters for the Air Force's Electronic Systems Division. Hanscom developed several important systems for intelligence-gathering aircraft in the 1970s and 1980s, and underwent significant expansion in the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Hanscom Air Force Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)