[BITList] At Jodrell Bank

[John Feltham]

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Lovell, Sir  (Alfred Charles) Bernard  (1913-2012), astronomer, was born on 31 August 1913 in West Street, Oldland Common, an isolated village in Gloucestershire, seven miles east of Bristol, the only child of Gilbert Lovell (1881-1956), a local tradesman and Methodist lay preacher, and his wife, Emily Laura, nee Adams (1884-1975). Lovell's mother was one of the first women cricketers. He caught her enthusiasm for the game. Other family interests included music, particularly the organ (played by his uncles and the young Lovell in Gloucestershire chapels) and the piano (played by Lovell at school functions).

Lovell was educated at local schools and took his first steps towards science by experiments with bicycles and crystal wireless receivers (which his father sold). This general tendency was focused in 1928 on a school visit organized by his physics master to the University of Bristol. He saw A. M. Tyndall rehearse what became his spectacular Royal Institution Christmas lectures of 1930, The Electric Spark, with powerful electric arcs, colourful discharges in various gases, and a memorable demonstration in which Tyndall made his false teeth shine with ultraviolet light. Tyndall's electric discharges sparked in Lovell the realization that there were organizations (such as universities) set up for people to conduct scientific investigations with exciting gadgets.

Lovell entered the University of Bristol in 1931 and won a first-class degree in physics in 1934. The early 1930s were years of astounding discoveries in atomic physics and cosmology. These advances featured in the scientific weekly Nature, brought in excited hands into his classes by his teachers, such as John Lennard-Jones and Nevill Mott. Lovell recalled that 'the simple and unsophisticated world of my village upbringing was transformed in those three years of my undergraduate days'  (Astronomer by Chance, 28).

Research into physics

Lovell remained in Bristol to study for a PhD degree under the supervision of E. T. S. Appleyard. He investigated the electrical conductivity of thin alkali metal films, and submitted his thesis in October 1936, showing how the conductivity depended crucially on the purity of the metal films and explaining this result in terms of the new quantum mechanics. His work was published in Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society and the Physical Society in 1936-7.

As his doctoral studies ended, Tyndall shocked Lovell by telling him that, to widen his experience, he ought to move from Bristol. Tyndall recommended Lovell to Patrick Blackett, at Birkbeck College in London, and William L. Bragg, in Manchester, each of whom had lectureship positions to fill. Lovell preferred Blackett's job, researching into cosmic rays, which are fast-moving, energetic charged particles of natural origin. However, Blackett offered the job to another person, and Lovell found himself unhappy in Bragg's group in Manchester, a city he initially greatly disliked, but in which he was to work for the rest of his life. Moreover, he was in a group which specialized in X-ray crystallography, a field which had passed from the initial stage of exciting, fundamental advances to the stage that inevitably follows of smaller advances made along paths suggested by someone else. This did not suit Lovell's scientific temperament.

Unsure what else to do, Lovell continued experiments with thin metal films, in which work he lost momentum, even following paths that he himself had signposted. Only six months later, however, Bragg left Manchester for the National Physical Laboratory and was succeeded by Blackett, who asked Lovell to collect from London and re-erect in Manchester a cloud chamber, and photograph the tracks left there by cosmic rays. Primary cosmic rays originate in space, but they produce showers of secondary cosmic rays when they strike air molecules. Lovell studied these so-called 'air showers' and published his results in Nature and the Royal Society's Proceedings in 1938-9.

As an undergraduate, Lovell had met Mary Joyce Chesterman (1916-1993), the sister of a fellow physics student, Deryck Chesterman (and daughter of William Paul Chesterman, solicitor). They were married on 14 September 1937, at the Manvers Street Baptist Chapel, Bristol, soon after taking up his post at Manchester. In a long and happy marriage, they had five children, Jenifer Susan (1938-2006), Julian Patrick Bryan (b. 1942, later a geologist at Cambridge University), Judith Ann (b. 1946), and twins Roger and Philippa (b. 1951).

Radar

At the beginning of August 1939, literally as Lovell was packing a van to drive across France to study cosmic rays at a high altitude site in the Pyrenees, he was peremptorily told by Blackett to abandon the journey. Blackett, a member of a committee chaired by Sir Henry Tizard on the defence of Britain against air attack, had learned of the imminent likelihood of war and earmarked Lovell for urgent, applied research. Lovell was told to present himself to work on 'Chain Home', a shield of early warning radar stations looking out over the sea. Lovell's career took a decisive step onwards, both for the immediate future of wartime Britain and for the more distant time when peace would return.

Lovell was at first charged with training operatives for Chain Home and had to familiarize himself with its characteristics. On 3 September 1939, after listening to Chamberlain on the wireless announcing the outbreak of the Second World War, he was watching over the shoulder of a WAAF radar operator when he saw echoes which the young woman ignored. She told him that they were not from aircraft, they were reflections from the ionosphere. That was actually not proved and, thinking back to his work with Blackett, Lovell thought that perhaps they were from cosmic ray air showers, reflections from the charged particles.

Lovell spent the duration of the war developing radar and was able to have only one brief discussion about these natural echoes with Blackett, who nevertheless wrote a jointly authored paper for the Royal Society about the possibility that they might be caused by cosmic rays. Lovell was primarily concerned with a project codenamed 'H2S', the chemical name for hydrogen sulphide (the gas that smells like rotten eggs). There are two stories why this name was chosen, one that it was an abbreviation of 'Home Sweet Home', as a follow-up to Chain Home, and the other that it was a stinking matter that the project had been delayed for too long. H2S was to be installed on British aircraft, the better to bomb targets in Germany, and to attack enemy shipping. Miniaturizing H2S for aircraft, Lovell learned aerial design while he developed high-resolution parabolic dishes to home in on individual targets. He also had to manage the obstructionism of some sceptical individuals, and inter-service rivalry between Bomber Command (whose priority was navigation to cities and industrial complexes) and Coastal Command (whose priority was the location at night of U-boats recharging batteries on the surface of the sea). Lovell was appointed OBE in 1946 for his war work.

Return to Manchester

Through his experience with radar, Lovell had laid the foundation of his academic interest in radio astronomy. After the war, he returned to Manchester University as a lecturer under Blackett and began to investigate the strange radar echoes that he had seen in 1939. Through contact with a former Manchester student, service colleague, and fellow radio-astronomer, James Hey, he borrowed a gun-laying radar from the Army Operational Research Group and erected it at the university's physics department. Electrical interference from the city, especially the trams, was too great, and he moved the equipment twenty miles to Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, where the university ran an outstation for its botanical department. Given permission to experiment there for two weeks, he was still there seventy years later. With the help of an army team supplied by Hey, Lovell assembled the equipment and immediately detected atmospheric radar echoes, but too many to be caused by air showers.

Recalling a period in 1945 when he had investigated the cause of some interference while tracking incoming V2 ballistic missiles by radar, Hey suggested that the echoes were from meteors, atmospheric phenomena caused by interplanetary dust particles swept up by the earth. According to Lovell, professional astronomers thought that meteors were beneath notice, so, in the summer of 1946, he enlisted the help of an amateur astronomer, Manning Prentice, then director of the meteor section of the British Astronomical Association. Lovell established that meteors were the cause of the echoes, since he saw more echoes during the Perseids, a meteor shower that occurs on the same days each year, when by chance the earth passes right through a high concentration of the orbiting meteor dust. He observed a second meteor shower in October 1946, the Giacobinids, witnessing an unusually intense display of thousands of meteors per hour, both as trails that he could see in the night sky and as radar echoes. He established that the echoes reflected off the sides of the same trail of ionized gas that produced the visible streak of the meteors. He later discovered previously undetected meteor showers that occurred only during the daytime. In 1954 he published the first textbook on meteors studied by radar, Meteor Astronomy.

As he prepared with Prentice and Hey to give three linked talks to the Royal Astronomical Society on 13 December 1946 on their discovery, Lovell felt like a stranger among the professional astronomers, 'an alien infiltrating a privileged assembly'. As he left the meeting, he felt part of the astronomical community, having opened up the new technique of radio astronomy. He came later to be a leader of the community that he had just joined.

Jodrell Bank

With the support of Blackett and the vice-chancellor of the university, Sir John Stopford, Lovell began to build a radio astronomy observatory at Jodrell Bank, with a research group which included the all-important technical staff to maintain the electronic equipment. He accumulated radar dishes, transmitters and receivers, searchlights and diesel generators-a million pounds worth of war-surplus material, bought for a song. The botanical station took on the look of an army camp, with camouflaged trailers and muddy fields strewn with aerials.

With this equipment Lovell and his group built Jodrell Bank's first large radio telescope, a dish on the ground with a diameter of 218 feet, its receiver mounted on a 126-foot high pole at the centre. The work was carried out by the scientists themselves: bringing a war-time 'can-do' enthusiasm to the tasks, they poured concrete, sawed timber, and soldered wires. Although the parabolic dish was fixed on the ground, the receiver could be moved on the pole by a small amount so that the telescope could view a narrow strip of sky that passed across the zenith. Lovell had realized that it would not be possible to detect cosmic ray air showers after all, but the telescope was ideal to investigate cosmic radio noise, radio emissions from celestial sources. Up to then, the only sources known were in our galaxy. By good fortune, the nearest external galaxy to ours, the Andromeda galaxy, passes through the zenith over Jodrell Bank and by 1950 the 218-foot telescope had not only confirmed that it was a source of radio emission but also mapped it in detail. The telescope's limitation to the zenith strip was a considerable barrier to further discoveries and Lovell had begun to plan a fully steerable telescope, of comparable size to the 218-foot fixed parabolic dish but able to look to the sky in any direction. With the H2S project he had established his technical ability in the design of aerials, and learned the organizational skill to push through a complex technical project. In the creation of the large radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, he was to draw on these experiences.

The Mark 1 radio telescope

Lovell persuaded the university to investigate his concept of a large fully steerable radio telescope and produce studies which could justify a decision to proceed to the project stage. He envisaged that the telescope might cost £50,000. He engaged a structural engineer, H. C. Husband, to develop his concept, and applied to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) for a grant for the detailed design of the telescope, which was estimated to cost £120,000. Even before the DSIR agreed in June 1950 to pay for the design and to earmark the grant to build the telescope, Lovell carried on with his war-time make-do-and-mend philosophy by procuring with Husband the gun-turret racks from the battleships Royal Sovereign and Revenge, which were being broken up. They were incorporated into the design of the bearings to be used to drive the telescope in elevation.

Through the Royal Astronomical Society, Lovell sought the support of the two other radio astronomy groups in the UK, one at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, led by Hey, the other at Cambridge University, led by Martin Ryle. Hey had to back somewhat away from pure science, given the remit of his institute, primarily for defence research. But this was the beginning of a fruitful period of 'co-opertition' (co-operation and competition) between Lovell and Ryle, although there was little or no personal chemistry between them. For twenty-five years, they planned the development of radio astronomy into a science in the UK of outstanding global significance.

Lovell concentrated on the scientific aspects of the large telescope and did not overly worry about its cost. He had learned project management in wartime when the resources for an urgent project were readily available-if he wanted an aircraft for use in an experiment he asked for one. He used Husband's detailed design and estimates to apply to DSIR for a second grant in order actually to build the telescope and in April 1952 was awarded £335,000 to be spent over two and a half years. This sum was equal to all the money DSIR had available in any single year for research grants. The telescope had become one of the first modern 'Big Science' projects, almost a decade before the term was coined in 1961 by the nuclear physicist Alvin M. Weinberg.

The project did not proceed according to plan. The foundations and the steelwork cost more than estimated. Additionally, to exploit a newly revealed scientific potential, Lovell improved the specification in light of the discovery in 1951 of 21 cm radio radiation from neutral hydrogen, the most abundant gas in the universe. In 1952, the budget was revised to £439,000. Even this was not final. The drive system was more costly and other specifications were altered, some by Lovell for scientific reasons, others by Husband to increase the strength of the structure against its own weight, wind loading, and its tendency in gusty wind to oscillate itself to destruction. By the end of 1955, the year in which Lovell was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society, the estimate of the cost of the telescope with the project well under way was £630,000, more than was there. University officers continued to support Lovell, but, in not suspending the project when it was clear that to complete it would overspend, Lovell breached government accounting guidelines and was threatened with imprisonment.

Lovell and Husband came under criticism from government auditors for what was perceived as poor management of the project. The project was investigated by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the House of Commons. By the summer of 1957, the telescope was structurally complete and moveable (by hand), but, at the same time, the PAC issued a very critical report. Lovell and more especially Husband were pilloried in the press as having irresponsibly wasted public money. The issue of the undoubted overspend had been made to appear worse through misleading evidence given to the PAC about a lack of consultation between Husband and Lovell. For a consulting engineer this was professionally very damaging. The relationship between Lovell and Husband worsened when Husband threatened to sue Lovell for a million pounds.

Lovell was saved by a 'miraculous occurrence' on 4 October 1957, when the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union. The telescope drive system was rushed to completion, the satellite was tracked and an improvised radar system was used to locate the launching rocket, which had followed the Sputnik into orbit. The technical achievement was acclaimed as a national triumph with defence significance-the rocket was essentially an intercontinental ballistic missile, and no other radar system in the world could detect it. The telescope became a national icon, as well as an emblem of the University of Manchester.

In this euphoric atmosphere DSIR wrote to the PAC with an explanatory memorandum from Husband about the management of the project and the erroneous evidence was withdrawn. MPs like success and the PAC accepted the new evidence as showing that the project had been well run, notwithstanding the overspend, which left an outstanding debt of £130,000. This was cleared by a public appeal and by a donation of about half this sum from the philanthropist William Morris, Viscount Nuffield. In this way, Lovell's research establishment at Jodrell Bank became the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories (NRAL). Lovell was named as the first holder of a chair of radio astronomy created at Manchester University and appointed as the first director of NRAL. He ran the establishment hands on, overseeing almost every detail of its operation, leading and gaining the affection of, but sometimes infuriating, staff members.

Lovell was recognized for his distinguished contributions to radio astronomy by the award of the royal medal of the Royal Society in 1960 and knighted in 1961. He received a number of other honours at about the same time, such as honorary membership of the American, New York, and Royal Swedish academies and honorary degrees from numerous universities.

After the construction of the Mark 1 radio telescope, as the 250-foot structure became known, and reconciled with Husband, Lovell oversaw the construction in 1964 of the Mark 2, a large elliptical radio telescope for use at higher radio frequencies than the Mark 1. The Mark 3 telescope was like the Mark 2, built in 1966 in Wardle, near Nantwich. Both were prototypes for the never built Mark 4, 5, and 5a telescopes, Lovell's plans for huge telescopes to supersede the Mark 1. The Mark 1, 2, and 3 telescopes and others around the UK were eventually brought together in a highly successful radio astronomy array called MERLIN (Multi-Element Radio-Linked Interferometer).

Lovell used the Mark 1 telescope and others in various studies of radio astronomy, including radar investigations of the moon, the planets, and the aurora, radio emissions from flare stars, and the spectra of celestial radio sources. The scientific results were not as significant as Lovell might have wished. His concept of a large, fully steerable telescope was however proved by other scientific programmes such as NRAL's outstanding work on pulsars.

Where Lovell starred, it was in coups that used the 250-foot telescope to support the space programmes of the USA and the USSR. What had been a secret agreement between Jodrell Bank and the American air force to track spacecraft sent to the moon, an unsuccessful project known as Project Able, was flaunted as a huge American container of equipment painted with the words 'Jodrell Bank, US air force, Project Able' drove into the observatory. A similar project by the USSR in 1959 called Luna 2 (but Lunik by the western press) was the first space probe to impact on the lunar surface; it was tracked by the Mark 1 telescope, whose records of its acceleration under the pull of the moon proved against cold-war scepticism from President Richard Nixon that Luna 2 had really done what the USSR claimed. A few months later, the USSR orbited a space probe, Luna 3, around the back of the moon, transmitting the first pictures from the unseen far side. At Soviet request, the data was recorded by the Mark 1 telescope and sent on tape to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Politics and astro-politics

Lovell's ability, experience, and high public profile led to his appointment to a number of official bodies in the UK, as well as further relationships with bodies in the USA and USSR. From 1953 he advised the Ministry of Supply, and later the Ministry of Defence, on air navigation and other matters of defence significance. The Mark 1 telescope was the only instrument in the UK able to detect an incoming ballistic missile, before the Fylingdales ballistic missile early warning system was commissioned in 1963. Lovell agreed that it could be kept on standby for use in a 'state of military vigilance', even though this was worryingly near to compromising the norms of a university.

Lovell was active in campaigning against environmentally damaging experiments in space. He campaigned against the American air force's West Ford project (1961-3) to encircle the earth with bands of copper needles to communicate around the globe, and against Operation Starfish, a nuclear weapon exploded in space in 1962. Such tests were subsequently banned in nuclear test ban treaties, starting in 1963.

In 1966 the telescope eavesdropped on data sent by Luna 9, the first probe to soft-land on the surface of the moon. One Jodrell Bank scientist noticed that the characteristics of the data were similar to the technical standard then used by press agencies to distribute pictures to newspapers. As the data was fed into a borrowed converter, a picture appeared, line by line. Once again, Jodrell Bank was filled with milling crowds of reporters, who converged on Lovell as he displayed the first landscape of the moon's rocky and dusty surface.

Lovell was understandingly uncomfortable in his precarious position on the cusp of cold war interactions. In guarded words, he claimed that, on a visit to a Black Sea tracking station, he had been approached to defect to the Soviet Union, and, perhaps exaggerating, that, in an assassination attempt, he had been targeted and made ill by radiation from a radar dish; he lodged papers about all this in Manchester University library, which were unsealed after his death. In his fifties he gave thought to giving up his profession and becoming a churchman. Instead he turned to scientific administration.

From 1965 to 1970, Lovell chaired the astronomy space and radio board of the Science Research Council, the body that succeeded DSIR in 1965. He was president of the Royal Astronomical Society between 1969 and 1971. He led the process that planned large astronomy projects for the UK in a statesmanlike way. In 1967 he shelved his own plans for a larger successor to the 250-foot telescope in favour of Ryle's project to build an interferometer radio telescope in Cambridge and a collaborative project with Australia to build an optical telescope (the Anglo-Australian telescope). Large single-dish radio telescopes were subsequently superseded by arrays of large numbers of smaller telescopes linked together by information technology, offering sensitivity through the total collecting area of the dishes and high directionality through the overall size of the array.

Lovell vacated his chair at the University of Manchester in 1980. He was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1981, recognition of a lifetime of scientific leadership. He handed over the directorship of NRAL to Sir Francis Graham Smith the same year. The Mark 1 telescope was renamed as the Lovell telescope in 1987.

Lovell retired to a life of much reduced stress, gardening, playing the organ in the village church (up to the age of eighty-three), and playing and watching cricket (but never on the sabbath). He created an arboretum behind the pub in his village, later open to the public. In memoirs and thoughtful general works, written in the office he continued to occupy at Jodrell Bank, he reflected on an eventful career and a life troubled by the conflict between the scientific questioning of his maturity and the religious beliefs of his simple childhood and his philosophical old age. He died of bronchopneumonia on 6 August 2012, just over one year short of a century, at his home, The Quinta, Swettenham, Cheshire, survived by four of his five children; by his death he also had fourteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren. He was interred at St Peter's Church in Swettenham on 23 August 2012.

Paul Murdin 

Sources  B. Lovell, Echoes of war: the story of H2S radar (1991) + B. Lovell, The story of Jodrell Bank (1968) [republished as Voice of the universe (1987)] + M. J. Seaton, 'Address of the president on the presentation of the gold medal to Professor Sir Bernard Lovell on Friday November 13, 1981', Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 22 (1981), 225 + D. Saward, Bernard Lovell: a biography (1984) + B. Lovell, Astronomer by chance (1990) + Daily Telegraph (19 April 2011); (8 Aug 2012) + The Times (8 Aug 2012); (14 Aug 2012); (16 Aug 2012) + The Guardian (8 Aug 2012); (9 Aug 2012); (11 Aug 2012) + The Independent (8 Aug 2012); (15 Aug 2012) + Economist (8 Aug 2012) + Manchester Evening News (8 Aug 2012); (15 Aug 2012); (24 Aug 2012); (20 Sept 2012) + Western Daily Press (8 Aug 2012); (16 Aug 2012) + Bristol Post (8 Aug 2012); (16 Aug 2012); (17 Aug 2012); (20 Aug 2012) + New York Times (8 Aug 2012) + Nature, 488 (30 Aug 2012), 592 + Burke, Peerage + WW (2012) + personal knowledge (2016) + private information (2016) + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives JRL, Jodrell Bank archive FILM BBC Archives + BFI NFTVA, documentary footage + Web of Stories website, www.webofstories.com/story/search?q=bernard+lovell SOUND BBC Archives
Likenesses  D. Low, pencil sketches, c.1950-1963, NPG · Elliott & Fry, bromide print, 1952, NPG · Elliott & Fry, quarter-plate glass negative, 1952, NPG · photographs, 1954-93, Rex Features, London · photographs, 1954-2007, PA Images, London · photographs, 1957-70, Getty Images · W. Suschitzky, bromide print, 1960, NPG [see illus.] · S. Samuels, bromide fibre print, 1971, NPG · S. Samuels, bromide fibre print, 1979, NPG · E. Barber, C-type colour print, 1990, NPG · obituary photographs · photographs, Photoshot, London · photographs, Camera Press, London · photographs, repro. in Saward, Bernard Lovell



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