CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 25 WORLD HERITAGE SITES developments that are of value to all humanity. The story of the observatory itself has modest beginnings. Bernard Lovell returned from the second world war to his job as a lecturer and researcher in the department of physics at the University of Manchester. His wartime work had included the development of radar, so instead of reverting to his original work on cloud chambers, he began to use radar techniques to try to detect cosmic rays. Having acquired some army surplus radar equipment, of which there was a huge amount at the end of the war, he tried to set it up in the quad outside the physics department near the centre of Manchester. He soon discovered that sparks from the trams that passed on the main road outside were causing interference with his readings, so asked around the university to see if there were land further away from the city centre. The university registrar and Lovell’s head of department, Patrick Blackett, gave him permission to decamp to the university’s then botany testing grounds near the hamlet of Jodrell Bank for two weeks. He never left. As the weeks stretched into months, Lovell’s research moved from cosmic rays to meteors and then out into the solar system and wider universe. Scientists joined him gradually, some of them with their own areas of investigation. The botany grounds no longer provided sufficient space, so the equipment spilled out into nearby fields (not always with permission of the landowner). By the late 1940s, the work at Jodrell Bank (which local villagers dubbed ‘The Fairground’ because of the random assembly of equipment that was springing up) began to yield ground-breaking results. In 1951, Bernard Lovell was made the world’s first professor of radio astronomy, a sure sign that using radio waves to examine the universe around us was finally recognised as a bona fide area of science in its own right. Lovell and his team celebrated with a group photograph in front of a radio telescope they had made from poles attached to the mount of a wartime searchlight they had repurposed. In 1952, tiring of the recycling approach to equipment that had driven the early research at Jodrell Bank, Bernard Lovell managed to persuade the government’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to fund the construction of a new radio telescope with a diameter of 250 feet (at the time) that could be steered to point at any position on the sky. Construction took longer than expected, and costs overran when new scientific discoveries meant that the telescope’s design had to be changed, even as the build proceeded. Eventually money ran out and the workers downed tools when there were insufficient funds to pay them. Lovell was in trouble with the PAC. He was warned by colleagues that he might face jail, and that the university would not take responsibility for his actions. In 1957, The Lovell Telescope under construction in around 1955 (Photo: University of Manchester)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=