Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor,
Father of Naval Radar

From: RADAR: A RELUCTANT MIRACLE
By Colonel John B. McKinney, U.S. Army 1961
Pages 12 - 14

Photo From Dunlap’s 100 greatest men in radio Pages 194-196

Albert Hoyt Taylor
The Navy’s Radar Pioneer
Born: January 1, 1879 Chicago, Ill.

Web Editor's Note: A. Hoyt Taylor was the Navy's Trans-Atlantic Communications Officer stationed at Marconi's Belmar High-Powered Station during WWI. This is Camp Evans, the home of Infoage Science-History Center. This book was sent to Infoage by Dr. Brown of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnestism.

DR. A. HOYT TAYLOR
    On the American side of the Atlantic, there were other "Fathers of RADAR " Among these must certainly be included the brilliant Dr .A. Hoyt Taylor, a product of America's mid-west, who spent over thirty years developing radio and RADAR equipment of all types for the United States Navy. Hoyt Taylor, like Watson-Watt, started his professional .career in the cloistered environment of a university, but his association with the academic life lasted much longer . Upon graduation from Northwestern in 1900, with a degree in physics, he taught at Michigan State College for three years and at the University of Wisconsin for
another five years. In 1908, he again returned to the student's side of university life and journeyed to Germany where he received his Ph .D at Gottingen the following year. The next eight years were spent teaching at the University of North Dakota .
    While at North Dakota, Dr.Taylor developed a great interest in the newly developing science of radio and became one of the nation's first and best known, amateur radio operators, or "hams" as they are usually known, through his work with station 9YN. When World War I burst upon the international scene, the U.S. Navy granted him a lieutenant's commission and made him district communications superintendent at the Great Lakes Station. Probably unrecognized by both Taylor and the Navy at the time, this was a fateful decision for the future of naval radio research.
    While at the Great Lakes Station, and entirely on his own initiative, Hoyt Taylor set up a small radio research group to deal principally with low frequency problems. The core of this group was to remain together for over a quarter-century and its contributions over the years were among the brightest on the radio horizon.
    Before going, on with Dr.Taylor's story, a brief look at the other members of Taylor's team is in order. Louis a Gebhard had been an employee of the Marconi Wireless Company for the previous four years. Leo Young was in the tradition of the resourceful, inventive, gadget minded small town boy with no education beyond high school, but with a great and consuming passion for radio. After five years as a telegraph operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he found himself working for Dr. Taylor at Great Lakes. A third team member, Robert M.Page, was not part of the original Great Lakes group, but he should be identified at this
point because Taylor credits him with having contributed more significant inventions to RADAR than any other man. Page joined up with Taylor in June 1927 immediately after his graduation from Hamline University. He has bean with the Naval Research Laboratory ever since.
    The war years for Taylor were years of travel. The Navy moved him from Great Lakes to Belmar, New Jersey; Hampton Roads; and finally to Washington D.C. Late in the fall of 1918, Taylor established his group in three wooden barracks at the Naval Air Station at Anacostia, where they remained until the Naval Research Laboratory was established in 1923. 5   When NRL came into being, Taylor was named Superintendent of the Radio Division. Three previously separate activities, the Radio Test Shop, the Naval Research Laboratory,and the Aircraft Radio Laboratory were merged under his direction.
    During the next quarter century, Taylor became associated with a wide variety of scientific explorations, but the one unique experience that he shared with the other early developers of RADAR was his work, in cooperation with Breit and Tuve, on ionospheric research. Their combined efforts to measure the height of the ionosphere marked one of the earliest uses of the radio-pulse technique, which became one of the most important RADAR techniques as well .6
    Although Taylor shared with Watson-Watt an interest in the ionosphere, a university background, a wartime call to government service, and a conservative family heritage, they also had some important differences. Watson-Watt attacked a problem with greater singleness of purpose. He directed all his energies toward one project at a time. He was impatient to achieve success as early as possible. His early disenchantment with university life was reflected in his constant willingness
to sacrifice the desirable for the attainable. In Britain's five year race with destiny, the country was indeed fortunate to have had Watson-Watt's brilliance, impatience, and somewhat arrogant self-confidence. Taylor, on the other hand, typified his seventeen years of university life. He had a burning intellectual curiosity about many things. His broader responsibilities, both administrative and technical, precluded his becoming quite the zealot that Watson-Watt became. Although his
experiments with RADAR antedated Watson-Watt's by more than a decade, he was not faced with the same degree of urgency. The survival of the nation was not hanging on his success or failure. Consequently, he was more deliberate in his approach to problems, but just as determined nonetheless. One could predict that if the same challenge had been given him in 1934, as was given Watson-Watt, he too would have succeeded .

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