Background
Robert Watson-Watt was born on April 18, 1892, at Brechin, Angus, Scotland. He was the youngest son of a carpenter.
Robert Watson-Watt was born on April 18, 1892, at Brechin, Angus, Scotland. He was the youngest son of a carpenter.
After attending Damacre Primary School and Brechin High School, he was accepted to University College, Dundee (then part of the University of St Andrews but became the University of Dundee in 1967).
Watson-Watt had a successful time as a student, winning the Carnelley Prize for Chemistry and a class medal for Ordinary Natural Philosophy in 1910.
Robert 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.
In 1915 Robert was assigned to the Meteorological Office to assist in the location of thunderstorms by their radio emissions for the information of aviators. This led to fundamental research into atmospherics (the transient radio emissions from lightning discharges) at the Radio Research Station, Slough, England, under the aegis of government departments. By the 1930s much had been achieved there through inter alia, the development of the cathode-ray oscillograph and aerial systems. Atmospherics were located by direction finding at two or more receivers and associated with the movements of cold-air fronts.
In 1935 Watson-Watt was asked to consider the possibility of radio destruction of aircraft (the "death ray"), but with A. F. Wilkins he soon confirmed its impracticability. However, further calculations indicated the possibility of radio detection, and in February 1935 Watson-Watt's memorandum on the "location of aircraft by radio methods" was taken up by the Tizzard Committee for the scientific survey of air defense. Watson-Watt showed that a metal aircraft approximated to a linear oscillator and indicated that the secondary radiation induced when aircraft were illuminated from the ground with 50-meter radiation could be detected at ranges of tens of miles. He proposed transmitting short pulses both to increase peak output and to use the time delay in the return of the echo from the aircraft to determine range. Cross bearings from other stations could fix positions. Pulse techniques had been developed for echo-sounding the generally reflective ionosphere, but extensive refinement was required for its application to the detection of small targets. At an establishment on the North Sea coast Watson-Watt, with Wilkins, L. H. Bainbridge-Bell and E. G. Bowen, brought the system to reality and added direction finding from crossed horizontal halfwave aerials. By 1936 a home defense chain of radar stations had been approved; largely completed by 1938, it played a vital role in the Battle of Britain.
The development of radar was very much a team effort with Watson-Watt as captain. Throughout the war he was increasingly concerned in coordinating the expanding effort in the radar field. He visited the United States in 1941-1942 as an adviser. In 1946 he left government service to practice as a consultant. Watson-Watt claimed the invention of radar, but, as with other classic science-based inventions, it evolved. There were precursors and simultaneity of discovery in several countries. Suffice it to say that no other saw the possibilities so clearly, and no government took up the implications more quickly. Perhaps more than any other in the history of invention, Watson-Watt was the right man in the right place at the right time. He lived in Tuxedo, New York, and briefly in Canada. But he died December 5, 1973, in his homeland of Scotland after a long illness.
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Quotations:
"Give me the third best technology. The second best won’t be ready in time. The best will never be ready."
"There are few humanities that could surpass in discipline, in beauty, in emotional and aesthetic satisfaction, those humanities which are called mathematics, and the natural sciences. "
"There is a great deal of emotional satisfaction in the elegant demonstration, in the elegant ordering of facts into theories, and in the still more satisfactory, still more emotionally exciting discovery that the theory is not quite right and has to be worked over again, very much as any other work of art—a painting, a sculpture has to be worked over in the interests of aesthetic perfection. So there is no scientist who is not to some extent worthy of being described as artist or poet."
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and was knighted in 1942.
Watson-Watt was married on 20 July 1916 in Hammersmith, London to Margaret Robertson (d. 1988), the daughter of a draughtsman; they later divorced and he remarried in 1952 in Canada. His second wife was Jean Wilkinson, who died in 1964.
In 1966, at the age of 74, 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 Women's 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.