Robert Watson-Watt

Robert Watson-Watt was a Scottish radio engineer who began his career at the Meteorological Office, studying how radio waves reflected off distant thunderstorms. On February 26, 1935, working with his assistant Arnold Wilkins near Daventry, England, he used a BBC shortwave transmitter and a van full of radio receivers to detect the reflected signal of a Handley Page Heyford bomber several miles away, the demonstration now remembered as the Daventry Experiment. Its success led directly to Chain Home, the network of coastal radar stations Watson-Watt went on to design for Britain, which gave the Royal Air Force the early warning historians credit with helping it win the Battle of Britain. He was knighted in 1942 for the work and is popularly remembered as radar's inventor, though the German engineer Christian Hulsmeyer had patented a working radio-echo detection device three decades earlier.