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The lab's activities included physical electronics, electromagnetic properties of matter, microwave physics, and microwave communication principles, and the lab made fundamental advances in all of these fields. Half of the radar deployed during World War II was designed at the RadLab, including over 100 different radar systems, and $1.5 billion worth of radar. At the height of its activities, the RadLab employed nearly 4,000 people working on several continents. The RadLab constructed and was the initial occupant of MIT's famous building 20, the longest-surviving World War II temporary structure (now demolished), at a cost of just over $1 million.
When the RadLab closed, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development agreed to continue funding for the RadLab's Basic Research Division, which officially became part of MIT on July 1, 1946 as the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Other wartime research was taken up by the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, which was founded at the same time. Both labs principally occupied building 20 until 1957, and maintained space there until the building was closed.
Most of the important research results of the RadLab were published in a twenty-eight-volume compilation entitled the MIT Radiation Laboratory Series between 1947 and 1953, which is no longer in print. The series was rereleased as a two-CD-ROM set in 1999 (ISBN 1-58053-074-5).
With the cryptology and cryptographic efforts centered at Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall and the Manhattan Project, the development of microwave radar at the Radiation Laboratory represents one of few massive, secret, and outstandingly successful technological efforts spawned by the conflict of World War II.