United States Naval Research Laboratory

The United States Naval Research Laboratory, known as NRL, is the corporate research laboratory of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. Located in Washington, DC, it was founded in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison and is now part of the Office of Naval Research. It conducts basic and applied research, technology development and prototyping, with specialities that include plasma physics, space physics, materials science and tactical electronic warfare. Its staff publish more than a thousand openly available papers a year, and its work has covered radio, optical and infrared sensors, autonomous systems, information security, ocean acoustics, directed energy and space systems. For many decades it has been funded as a Navy Working Capital Fund activity, recovering its costs from sponsor funded research projects rather than a direct line in the federal budget. Engineers such as George Carruthers built their instruments there.