Abstract
IN 1920 the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, guided by a newly formed Radio Research Board, started research in radio, which had grown in importance during the First World War. Most of the work was done at a field station at Slough under R. A. (now Sir Robert) Watson-Watt, and at the start attention was mainly devoted to investigations on atmospherics, direction-finding and the propagation of waves over the ground. When, in 1924, Appleton and Barnett demonstrated the reflexion of radio waves from the ionosphere, they asked the co-operation of Slough in fundamental experiments which laid the foundations of our present knowledge of the subject. Later, much of this experimental work was transferred to Slough, still under Appleton‘s guidance, while he continued his own work at Cambridge. In this way there grew up at Slough a team skilled in the use of pulses for the determination of distance by radio methods, which was able to turn its energies to the development of radar when the time came. In 1933 Slough and other radio research stations under the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research had been formed into a Radio Division of the National Physical Laboratory, with Watson-Watt as superintendent. In 1935 he took away a small team of experts to start a secret radar establishment, and Dr. R. L. Smith-Rose succeeded him. Just before, and during, the War, the ionospheric investigations at Slough developed so as to provide a world-wide organisation
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Radio Research in Great Britain : Dr. R. L. Smith-Rose. Nature 161, 387–388 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161387b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161387b0