Inventing radar
Radar is used in many everyday items flying on a plane and watching the evening weather forecast all involve one thing-radar. Radar is a technology that detects the presence of another object further away. The basic principle of radar is based on radio waves. Radar bounces radio waves off a distant object. Sound waves do not travel that far. But radio waves travel much futher. A control tower at an airport uses radar to see how far away planes are. This is the same concept as when a person yells in a canyon. Their voice goes across the canyon, hots the other side, and then bounces back. This is called an echo. Radar is just like an echoing voice.
Long ago, radar technology was very crude. A German inventor, Heinrich Hertz, discovered the concept of radar at the end of the 19th century, but it was never fully developed. Radar was later credited to a British inventor, Robert Watson-Watt . In the 1930s, Watson-Watt proved sound waves could be bounced off another object over 200 miles away. Unfortunately, Heinrich Hertz never became famous for his innovative technology, a situation that happens to many inventors
A working radar system was only developed during world war II in Britain. Each night during the war, German fighter planes flew over the English Channel and dropped bombs on London. The British didn’t know when the planes were coming. The British military realized they needed an advantage to beat the Germans. They asked Watson-Watt to help By 1940, they had a set of 51 radar stations along the coastline of England. The radar stations bounced radio waves in to the air . The waves would hot the approaching German plane and bounce back to the station. This let the British calculate the distance. Once the British knew that German planes were coming, they would send their own planes on to the air to fight them. The Germans did not have radar nor know about the British invention until the end of the war. Being able to spot enemy planes before they were within sight was a huge advantage. Without radar, many historians argue that Britain could have easily lost the war.