Watson

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of February 1935, on a flat field at Weedon Bec, near the village of Stowe Nine Churches in Northamptonshire, an Air Ministry team under Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, scientific superintendent of the radio department of the National Physical Laboratory, demonstrated to a single Air Ministry observer (A. P. Rowe of the Tizard Committee) that a Heyford bomber flying through a beam of BBC Empire Service shortwave at twenty-five miles range produced a detectable echo on a cathode-ray oscilloscope inside an unmarked van. The flight, of two minutes, the echo, of eight miles' duration on the screen, and the corresponding deflection of the cathode-ray spot were the first practical British demonstration of what would within the year be called Radio Direction Finding and would, by the end of the decade, be called radar. The Air Ministry awarded Watson-Watt and his Slough team the immediate development funding for the system that became Chain Home, the chain of fifty British radar stations that detected and tracked the Luftwaffe formations entering British airspace through the summer of 1940. Watson-Watt was Aberdeenshire-born, the descendant of James Watt the engineer, in his forty-third year on the morning of the demonstration. Tradition holds that A. P. Rowe, on returning to London that afternoon, said to the Air Member for Research at the Air Ministry: Britain has become an island again.

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