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John Howland Kuck '37

Jun. 16, 1916-May. 28, 2006

John Howland Kuck ’37, an electrical engineer who helped design a weapons device that contributed to the Allied victory in World War II, was born on June 16, 1916, in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. A son of Julius A. Kuck II, a lawyer, and the former Lena W. Johnson, a hospital dietician, he grew up in Kuckville, a hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario east of Rochester that was named for his great-great-grandfather, the Rev. George Kuck. John Kuck, salutatorian of the graduating class at Albion High School, entered the College in 1933 from Waterport, NY. He joined Lambda Chi Alpha, but having decided upon a career in engineering, left the Hill after two years to transfer to the College of the City of New York. There he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1938, followed by a master’s in that field in 1940 from what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology.

John Kuck was employed for a year by Sunbeam Electric Manufacturing Co., the maker of Cold Spot refrigerators for Sears, in Evansville, IN. He worked on “how to make their refrigerators less noisy.” In 1942, after the U.S. had entered World War II, he began his long and fruitful association with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, MD. During the war he was assigned to a top secret project, designing the radio proximity fuze, which was intended to automatically detonate an explosive when close enough to a target to destroy it.

Originally designed for use against airborne missiles, the fuze increased the effectiveness of such weaponry as anti-aircraft guns. Defense officials, according to The Washington Post in its obituary of John Kuck, “credited the radio proximity fuze with neutralizing the German V-1 bomb attacks over London, with defending against low-flying Japanese suicide bombers in the Pacific and in land warfare against the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.” For his work in designing the electrical circuits for the fuze, which was also used in the first atomic bombs, Mr. Kuck received the Army-Navy Certificate of Appreciation.

After the war, John Kuck stayed on at the Applied Physics Laboratory and worked on other defense electronics projects, especially radar guidance systems for missiles. He acquired 25 patents in electronics, and by 1970 he had more patents than any of his colleagues at the Laboratory. He retired in early 1984, after 42 years with the lab.

Over the years, Mr. Kuck also did experimental work on aids for the visually impaired. He was himself visually impaired because of a childhood accident that destroyed his sight in one eye, and a subsequent illness that affected the other eye, eventually leaving him legally blind. As an aid for himself and others similarly afflicted, he developed a closed-circuit TV reader that allowed more comfortable reading than did the use of optical magnifiers or strong reading glasses. He built the prototype of the device, which later became available commercially, in his home basement, using various items he had on hand or picked up from a local hardware store. In addition, he developed an audio filing system for the blind.

John H. Kuck, a faithful alumnus and for more than 45 years a resident of Silver Spring, died on May 28, 2006, at a retirement community in Chestertown, MD, in his 90th year. He is survived by his wife, the former Phoebe Hargy, whom he had wed in 1943. Also surviving are a son, George Anson Kuck; a daughter, Sharon Natoli; and four grandchildren. An uncle of John H. Kuck ’54 and great-uncle of Thomas A. Kuck ’88, he was predeceased by his brother, Julius Anson Kuck III ’28, in 1997.

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Note: Memorial biographies published prior to 2004 will not appear on this list.



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