I'm not certain, but I'd guess that if the question is "How do you shoot down a missile going 1,200 miles per hour with a gun, in 1954?" the answer is: you don't.
HOW TO HIT A SUPERSONIC MISSILE in flight?
An enemy guided missile comes winging towards our task force … at speeds of up to 20 miles a minute. What kind of computer can predict and compute the necessary data fast enough to shoot down the missile… and be reliable every time? That was the problem posed to Ford Instrument Company engineers… and in cooperation with the Navy, they found the answer. Compact equipment, housed in easy-to-service units… that stand at the front line of our defense.
The whole series of ads is like this. Just bizarre.
In World War I, anti-aircraft fire against slow, low flying planes, could be managed by optical sighting and correcting from observed air bursts. Today's supersonic planes, flying at great altitudes must be tracked by radar and the guns directed by complex computers.
These ads for Ford Instruments are so weird. They are all for military components and they all use puppets… Could you imagine Boeing using Miss Piggy in an ad for cruise missiles?
Firing at a target many miles away from a pitching and rolling ship, steaming at full speed, requires rapid, complicated computations. Special computers and drives must do this job.
Throughout the past forty years, engineers of Ford Instrument Company have been specialists in this field — from their design of the earliest Rangekeeper in World War I to the latest great Naval electro-mechanical-electronic computers. As in their missile and aircraft instruments, their nuclear controls and weapon systems, the criteria of dependability and precision are the characteristics of Ford designed and manufactured computers and controls.
See! Little British dolls attack French bears all the time! That's why you need Ford Instruments.
Aiming a gun or a rocket from one fast moving plane and hitting another supersonic craft is beyond human capabilities. The elements of speed, ballistics, range, direction etc., must be taken into account and the aiming point computed in milliseconds.
From its earliest days, Ford Instrument Company has been specializing in weapons systems — ranging from directors and drives for heavy naval guns to rocket launching computers, AA gunfire computers and aircraft weapons systems. Complete familiarity with the military requirements of accuracy, dependability and combat-ruggedness makes Ford-designed and Ford-built instruments among the finest our armed services have at their command.
When a torpedo is launched, its control system must solve many problems — not only directing it towards the target, but controlling its depth, speed, and stability.
This is the first in a really weird series of ads I'm posting from the Ford Instrument Company. All of them involve these two little dolls doing things like launching missiles or torpedoes, shooting guns, or manning radar stations. Very odd stuff.
To make sure that a missile hits its target, Ford Instrument provides it with a guidance system that is sensitive to the variable conditions it meets along the way. If you have problems in this field, it will pay you to talk them over with Ford engineers. Guided missile devices are typical of the systems that Ford designs and manufactures for the Armed Forces and the Atomic Energy Commission. Thousands of Ford specialists are now working on such projects as electronic, hydraulic, mechanical and electrical servo-mechanisms, computers, controls and drives.