Skadi Man: John Lawton, inventor of the avalanche transceiver

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In 1969, this WWII Vet Invented First Avalanche Transceiver

Photo top of page: John Lawton with the prototype transceiver, which used a loop antenna sewn into a parka.

A framed letter hangs on the wall of World War II U.S. Army veteran, electrical engineer and pilot John Lawton, Ph.D., in his apartment at an assisted living facility in Louisville, Colorado. It sits near a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol, models of a B-17 and Messerschmitt aircraft, and other mementos of an extraordinary life well lived.

            Lawton, who survived Kristallnacht in Vienna, recently celebrated his 100th birthday, and has been hailed as “living history,” after a visit by U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.).

            The life-long skier is most proud, besides having seven children, of inventing the first personal avalanche transceiver, named Skadi after the Norse goddess of the wilderness. The analog handheld electronic device is credited with saving numerous lives, including that of at least two clients of Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH) in the early 1970s.

            CMH’s Rick Gray wrote Lawton in February 1972 to report a rescue the month before. Three guests had already descended a slope facing due east, one averaging 35 degrees, that had been loaded with shifting snow.

            The guide skied it first. Three of his guests had already come down, one at a time.

            When the next two went out on the slope it broke and carried them a distance of about 1500 feet, 600 vertical feet down.

            Gray says the guide immediately got his group together. They all turned their Skadis to receive. They spotted one victim downslope whose head and shoulders were out, suffering from four broken ribs and a lung puncture.

            The rest of the party continued downslope to pick up the signal from the second victim. That person was completely buried, was then uncovered, and treated for lacerations around the mouth and damaged front teeth.

            In his report to Lawton, Gray continues, “If we hadn’t had the Skadis, it would have been at least 20 to 30 minutes before we could have organized a proper probing and may have been at least another 10 minutes before the victim would have been located … I am almost positive that during that time lapse this man would have completely suffocated.”

            Lawton would later write to Lou Dawson of Wildsnow.com that it was, “The first save by means of Skadi and as far as I know, by any avalanche rescue beacon.”

            With his World War II service still very much on his mind, and after years spent in active combat, Lawton tells Skiing History, “I think it’s nice to have invented a device that saves lives instead of taking them.”

            Before Transceivers

 

           Prior to transceivers, avalanche safety consisted of lines of rescuers with wooden probes and avalanche cords.

            Use of probes could often prove gruesome. Teeth were cut into the ends of the probes so that by turning the probe rescuers could determine what was underneath, whether it was wood bark, bits of clothing or blood. 

            “It was tough to tell the difference between a human being and a branch that bended,” he tells Skiing History. “We needed something that made a beep-beep-beep sound when a body was found.”

            As for avalanche cords, according to Tyler Cohen and Lucy Higgins writing in Backcountry magazine (February 23, 2015), “In the First World War, Austro-Hungarian Alpine companies began using avalanche cords while crossing often-dangerous mountain passes.

            “Soldiers would tie the 20-25-meter cords around their waists, and, if an avalanche broke, the light rope unfurled and rose to the surface. The cords were numerically marked every meter, and arrows pointed toward the buried skier.”

            They were similar to the powder cords skiers use today in case they lose their equipment in deep snow.

            Early Skeptics

            The introduction of the Skadi was hailed by The New York Times (February 16, 1969), as a new electronic device that may ultimately replace avalanche dogs. The invention was credited to Lawton, then working for the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, and said it was demonstrated at the Forest Service’s avalanche school in Alta.

            “However the day seems distant when ordinary skiers and climbers will carry such equipment,” sniffs the Times’ Walter Sullivan.

            In other words, don’t hold your breath.

            Sullivan continues, “Meanwhile the keen-nosed avalanche dogs will continue to save lives.”

            As proof, he recalls a visit to the Great St. Bernard Pass where Prior Bernard Rausis, in charge of the famous hospice between Switzerland and Italy, praised his dogs as rescuers, many of which were trained at a rescue school in Verbier.

            The whiskey barrel around those original St. Bernards’ necks is a myth, no doubt perpetuated by the 1820 painting entitled Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller by the renowned 19th-century British painter of animals Edwin Landseer, which showed the dogs equipped with an nip or two of liquid therapy.

            In the Times interview, Prior Rausis scoffed at the idea that true St. Bernard rescue dogs carried brandy kegs on their collars. “How could a dog with a keg under its chin drop his nose to sniff out snow-buried travelers?”

            Furthermore, according to Prior Rausis, fumes leaking from the keg would smother the dog’s sense of smell.           

            After escaping the Nazis, once hiding out in the back of his father’s broom and brush parts store in Vienna, Lawton then fled to England with his family, eventually emigrating to the U.S. Initially denied entry into the service because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, he quickly gained citizenship and was drafted to serve in a reconnaissance team in the 91st Infantry Division, spending most of the war in Northern Africa and in Italy.

            Upon the end of the war, he received a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University despite never graduating high school.

            Pulsing Electricity Through Copper  

            It was while working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory that he saw the benefit of creating a device that could locate buried skiers or climbers.

            Prior to Lawton’s work, researchers had managed to develop electromagnetic methods to locate avalanche victims, although their products lacked enough range and accuracy to deliver the timely location required to save lives, according to John Dakin of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and Hall of Fame in the Vail Daily (March 5, 2016).

            Lawton’s Skadi evolved from a culmination of ideas and experimentation involving a number of people, most notably, renowned avalanche expert glaciologist, mountaineer, and skier Edward LaChapelle (1926-2007).

            “LaChapelle’s work in Alta, Utah, in the late 1960’s, involved the development of avalanche safety ideas and techniques, including methods for finding buried victims,” Dakin writes.

            Lawton, who happened to be skiing at Alta, saw LaChapelle, a snow ranger for the Forest Service, conducting his experiments and figured there might be a better way.

            After sending early prototypes back to LaChapelle for testing, the avalanche safety expert enthusiastically reported, “They worked,” according to a letter LaChapelle wrote to Lou Dawson of Wildsnow.com (posted on Aug. 9, 2013). 

            Simply stated, Lawton’s Skadi device radiates a magnetic field by pulsing electricity through copper. Every member of a skiing party keeps their device on transmit. Then if a skier goes missing, the rescue party switches their Skadis to receive. The receiving part of the unit could pick up this signal and convert it into a sound heard through an earphone that became louder as users got closer to a victim.

            The original Skadi antenna was about a foot in diameter and sewn into the back of a parka. The large coil antenna provided more range, although it also proved awkward to use, while obviously limiting the user to the chosen parka.

            Lawton’s Cornell team selected a frequency of 2.275 kHz, which is audible to the human ear, eliminating much of the expense and complexity of a radio transceiver that had to convert a non-audible signal to a tone that could be heard. That spot on the dial

was virtually free of interference and worked well when blocked by objects such as rocks and trees.

            The Hot Dog

            In the early 1970s, Lawton downsized the unit by eliminating the parka antenna and replacing it with a smaller ferrite loopstick antenna integrated into a handheld plastic box nicknamed the “Hot Dog,” owning to its red color, solid yellow lettering, and curved corners.  It featured a long-lasting battery and an approximately 90-foot range. It retailed for $125 ($980 in 2023 dollars) and was originally made in his home basement under his new company name, Lawtronics.

            In 1996, the highly directional 457 kHz frequency offered greater range and was approved as an international standard by ASTM, according to the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and Hall of Fame’s John Dakin. 

            While Skadis could be found at all major U.S. and Canadian ski areas, and CMH alone purchased 400, Lawton tells Skiing History, “The sale of Skadis never amounted to a big business.”

            Nonetheless, Skadis had a significant impact on avalanche safety that lasts to this day. 

            Current digital avalanche beacons on the market, such as the popular Backcountry Access (BCA) Tracker DTS, incorporate microprocessors to simplify searching while containing a number of additional features, but all of them work on similar principles to the original Skadi.

            Still, probes and shovels, training and practice, and trained avalanche dogs (without brandy kegs), are all recommended to increase the chances of finding victims.    

            “Transceivers are still the best way to find someone who is buried under the snow.  The ease of use has changed dramatically with digital transceivers with multiple burial features and decreased search times,” says Mike Duffy, an Eagle, Colorado-based Certified American Avalanche Association instructor with almost 30 years in avalanche education as founder of avalanche1.com.  

              “Transceiver use is no longer the hard part of rescue, it's the digging that takes the most time.”

 

            Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is vice president of ISHA and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield). www.travelwithpurposebook.com

           

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