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thirty-five patentable features, was interlaced with upward of two thousand minutely calibrated parts, had a single motor-driven, wide-angled telescope, and was stabilized with two servo-connected gyroscopes spinning at seventy-eight hundred revolutions per minute. Most significant, the bombardier wasn’t required to hit the release button. When the axis of the sighting telescope and the pointer on the range bar clicked into alignment, the bombs fell automatically, sent along their path by the ingenious resolution to a problem of advanced mathematics, ballistics, electrical engineering, optics, and aeronautics.
    The bombsight was the creation of Carl Lukas Norden, a Dutch citizen with a mechanical engineering degree from the prestigious Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, who spent eight years in solitary experimentation (often in the sanctuary of his mother’s home in Switzerland) before the Navy offered him a production contract in 1928, allowing for the formation of a corporation with his partner, Ted Barth, and the opening of a small production facility at 80 Lafayette Street. “Old Man Dynamite,” as Norden was nicknamed for his feared explosions of temper, wouldn’t countenance the production of any more than about a hundred bombsights a year between 1931 and 1938, ensuring that Norden Inc. was more a secret workshop of artisanal craftsmen than a war factory of low-skilled workers.
    As a dedicated believer in the superiority of Northern European craftsmanship—he thought anyone too exposed to sunlight was mentally deficient—Norden favored German Americans who had been schooled in the apprentice system in Europe, which he felt gave them the necessary rigor to construct an instrument able to function in accord with his finely wrought mathematical formulas. According to an internal history, “Mr. Norden was so critical of each piece as it was turned out, that, when a part did not suit him, he had a habit of saying, ‘That is not good—throw it out the window.’ ” Although several of the employees had arrived in New York during the Weimar years with an outward sympathy toward Nazism, the company’s highly Germanic institutional culture was undisturbed by such ideological proclivities, especially at a time when few imagined the possibility of America’s getting into another confrontation with Germany.
    The Norden bombsight was designed to revolutionize armed conflict. It was the crown jewel of an American aerial doctrine that imagined the next war could be won by a few high-flying airplanes delivering a handful of precision strikes against the industrial and infrastructural hubs essential to the modern war-making effort. Carl Norden’s handiwork would ensure that the American bombing campaign of the brave future would be so surgical that civilians wouldn’t have to die, an attractive concept in a Depression-wracked nation uninterested in returning to the trenches and captivated by the increasingly fantastic feats achieved by contemporary aircraft. “My dear, we are a humane country,” he later told a reporter. “We do not bomb women and children.”
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    During their first meeting in the living room of his Queens apartment, Pop Sohn informed Ritter about a colleague of his whom he identified as “Paul,” one of the select workers at 80 Lafayette Street working on the sixteenth floor, where the completed bombsights were assembled. Ritter knew that “our own bombsights did not meet expectations” and “everybody was feverishly working on improvements for the aiming instruments” but that “so far nobody had solved the problem successfully.” He was electrified by the possibility of addressing a vital dilemma for the Luftwaffe. Attempting to conceal his excitement, Ritter expressed a wish to meet “Paul” in person, and Sohn offered to arrange a meeting at his place for a few days hence.
    On a Sunday, Ritter wrote, he entered into the rarefied presence of a man he instantly