He oversaw the day-to-day work and the testing that created the SCR-584 (for Signal Corps Radio), a microwave radar device with a sophisticated scanning technique to track an enemy plane and a computer to adjust automatically the angle of antiaircraft guns to shoot it down.
As the MIT laboratory deputy to physicist Ivan Getting, a major figure in developing the Global Positioning System in the postwar years, Dr. Davenport worked with companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Bell Laboratories to produce about 3,000 SCR-584 sets for the armed forces.
The device, far more complex than the radar used by the British to down German planes during the 1940 blitz, faced its first combat test when it helped gun crews shoot down German planes at the Anzio beachhead in Italy in early 1944.
Dr. Davenport, meanwhile, had gone to England, where he waterproofed SCR-584 units for the D-day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Soon after the landings, he went to France to oversee use of the SCR-584 there.
“They issued papers for me to be known as a captain in the Signal Corps,’’ he told The Greenwich Citizen, a weekly newspaper, last year. “I had all the dog tags and identification.’’ He said that if the Germans had captured him and known he was a civilian, he would have been “shot as a spy.’’
In mid-June 1944, the Germans began using pilotless aircraft known as buzz bombs, which crashed and exploded in London and surrounding areas.
Dr. Davenport returned to England to put his radar units into action against the barrage, only to find that some gun crews had not learned how to operate them.
US soldiers at one antiaircraft battery were reading instructional manuals to figure out how to use the radar while the bombs flew overhead.
“Seven or eight buzz bombs came within range while I was there,’’ he told Robert Buderi, recounting that moment in “The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution’’ (1996). “And the crew never got a single shot off at any one of them.’’
