Naval Ordnance Laboratory - Definition and Overview

The Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL), now disestablished, formerly located in White Oak, Maryland was the site of considerable work that had practical impact upon world technology. The White Oak site of NOL has now been taken over by Food and Drug Administration.

Projects

• The World War II artillery fuze.

• Nitinol, the shape changing nickel-titanium alloy well known to everyone. The NOL at the end of Nitinol refers to Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

• Hypervelocity wind tunnel testing of Space Shuttle models for NASA.

People

People who have worked there include:

• John Bardeen, the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics.
• John Vincent Atanasoff, inventor of the first electronic computer, Chief of the NOL Acoustics Division.
• William E. Caswell, physicist and victim of September 11, 2001.
• Norm Scofield, inventor of the Scofield-Gold neutron unfolding algorithm (http://www.nea.fr/abs/html/psr-0173.html) which is a method of solving a Fredholm integral equation.