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 barr ...