Robert
Watson-Watt
Sir Robert
Alexander Watson-Watt, (13 April 1892 – 5 December 1973) is considered by many
to be the "inventor of radar". Development of radar, initially nameless, was
first started elsewhere but greatly expanded on 1 September 1936 when
Watson-Watt became Superintendent of a new establishment under the British Air
Ministry, Bawdsey Research Station located in Bawdsey Manor, near Felixstowe,
Suffolk. Work there resulted in the design and installation of aircraft
detection and tracking stations called Chain Home along the East and South
coasts of England in time for the outbreak of World War II in 1939. This system
provided the vital advance information that helped the Royal Air Force win the
Battle of Britain.
Early years
Born in Brechin, Angus, Scotland, Watson-Watt was a descendant of
James Watt, the famous engineer and inventor of
the practical steam engine. After attending Damacre Primary
School and Brechin High School, he was
accepted to University College, Dundee (which was then part of the
University of St Andrews but became
the University of Dundee in 1967).
Watt had a successful time as a student, winning the Carnelley Prize for
Chemistry and a class medal for Ordinary Natural Philosophy in 1910.
He graduated with
a BSc in engineering in 1912, and was offered an assistantship by
Professor William Peddie, the holder of the Chair of Physics at University
College, Dundee from
1907 to 1942. It was Peddie who encouraged Watson-Watt to study radio, or
"wireless telegraphy" as it was then known and who took him through what was
effectively a postgraduate class of one on the physics of radio frequency
oscillators and wave propagation. At the start of the Great
War Watson-Watt was
working as an assistant in the College's Engineering Department.
In 1949 a
Watson-Watt Chair of Electrical Engineering was established at University
College, Dundee.
In 1916 Watson-Watt wanted a job with the
War Office,
but nothing obvious was available in communications. Instead he joined the
Meteorological Office,
who were interested in his ideas on the use of radio for the detection of
thunderstorms.
Lightning
gives off a radio signal as it ionizes the air, and he planned on detecting this
signal in order to warn pilots of approaching thunderstorms.
Early Experiments
His early experiments were successful in
detecting the signal, and he quickly proved to be able to do so at long ranges.
Two problems remained however. The first was locating the signal, and thus the
direction to the storm. This was solved with the use of a directional antenna,
which could be manually turned to maximize (or minimize) the signal, thus
"pointing" to the storm. Once this was solved the equally difficult problem of
actually seeing the fleeting signal became obvious, which he solved with the use
of a cathode-ray oscilloscope
with a long-lasting phosphor.
Such a system represented a significant part of a complete radar system, and was
in use as early as 1923. It would, however, need the addition of a pulsed
transmitter and a method of measuring the time delay of the received radio
echos, and that would in time come from work on ionosondes.
At first he worked at the Wireless Station
of Air Ministry Meteorological Office in Aldershot,
England. In
1924 when the War Department gave notice that they wished to re-occupy their
Aldershot site, he moved to Ditton Park
near Slough in
Berkshire.
The National Physical Laboratory
(NPL) already had a research station there. In 1927 they were amalgamated as the
Radio Research Station,
with Watson-Watt in charge. After a further re-organisation in 1933, Watson-Watt
became Superintendent of the Radio Department of NPL in Teddington.
In his English History
1914-1945, historian A. J. P.
Taylor paid the
highest of praise to Watson-Watt, Sir Henry
Tizard and their
associates who developed and put in place radar, crediting them with being
fundamental to victory in World War
II.
In July 1938
Watson-Watt left Bawdsey Manor and took up the post of Director of
Communications Development (DCD-RAE). In 1939 Sir George Lee took over the job
of DCD, and Watson-Watt became Scientific Advisor on Telecommunications (SAT) to
the Air
Ministry, travelling
to the USA in 1941 in order to advise them on the severe inadequacies
of their air defence efforts illustrated by the Pearl Harbor
attack. His
contributions to the war effort were so significant that he was knighted in
1942.
Ten years after
his knighthood, Watson-Watt was awarded £50,000 by the British government for
his contributions in the development of radar. He established a practice as a
consulting engineer. In the 1950s moved to Canada. Later he lived in the USA, where he published Three Steps to
Victory in 1958. Around 1958 he appeared as a mystery challenger on the American television programme To Tell The Truth.
Marriages
Watson-Watt was married on 20 July 1916 in
Hammersmith, London to Margaret Robertson, the daughter of a draughtsman; they
later divorced and he re-married in 1952 in Canada.
His second wife was Jean Wilkinson,
who died in 1964. He returned to Scotland in the 1960s. In 1966, at the age of
72, he proposed to Dame Katherine Trefusis Forbes,
who was 67 years old at the time and had also played a significant role in the
Battle of Britain as
the founding Air Commander of the Womens Auxiliary Air Force,
which supplied the radar-room operatives. They lived together in London in the
winter, and at "The Observatory" – Trefusis Forbes' summer home in Pitlochry,
Perthshire,
during the warmer months. They remained together until her death in 1971.
Watson-Watt died in 1973, aged 81, in Inverness.
Both are buried in the church yard of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity
at Pitlochry.
Funny occasion in his life .
On one occasion,
late in life, Watson-Watt reportedly was pulled over in Canada for speeding by a
radar-gun toting policeman. His remark was, "Had I known what you were going to
do with it I would never have invented it!" He wrote an ironic poem ("Rough
Justice") afterwards:
Pity Sir Robert
Watson-Watt,
strange target of
this radar plot
And thus, with others I can mention,
the victim of his
own invention.
His magical all-seeing eye
enabled
cloud-bound planes to fly
but now by some ironic twist
it spots the
speeding motorist
and bites, no doubt with legal wit,
the hand that once
created it.
No comments:
Post a Comment