The Norden bombsight cost roughly $1.1 billion to develop, nearly as much as the Manhattan Project, and American airmen swore an oath to defend it and were ordered to shoot it to pieces rather than let it fall into enemy hands. Yet in 1938, a factory inspector named Hermann Lang had already memorized the blueprints at work, sketched them at his kitchen table, and delivered them to Germany, where engineers were building the similar Lotfernrohr 7 anyway. This episode explores the obsession, engineering, and hubris behind Carl Norden and his machine.

From ‘Old Man Dynamite’, the volatile Dutch engineer who fled to his mother’s house in Zurich to think, and Theodore Barth, the diplomatic former colonel who handled the generals, to the Mark XV prototype of 1930 with its mechanical computer of gears, wheels, and friction discs, to the pickle barrel myth staged at Madison Square Garden with the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1943, the story follows the bombsight into combat, where cloud cover, jet streams, flak, and freezing 19-year-old bombardiers pushed the average error to 1,200 feet by 1943, with some estimates of 90 percent of bombs missing.

• How the Norden and Barth partnership of 1931 mirrored the modern startup dynamic of reclusive genius and charismatic CEO
• The tachymetric method explained with a record player and a rubber wheel, cutting setup from 50 seconds to as little as six and achieving 35-foot accuracy from 4,000 feet in testing
• Stabilized bombing approach equipment that let the bombardier fly the aircraft through the autopilot, and the eight-and-a-half-minute spirit level calibration at 40 below zero
• Why the Navy removed flotation bags from torpedo bombers to protect a secret the Nazis already had, and what bureaucratic inertia and psychological need had to do with it
• Curtis LeMay’s combat box formation, the shift to area bombing and radar, and the bombsight’s final combat use dropping acoustic sensors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1967