Radar gets its first proof in a field near Daventry
On this day · 26 February 1935
Three men in a van watched a bomber light up their oscilloscope, and the idea that would win the Battle of Britain was born.
On February 26, 1935, in farmland near Daventry, England, Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt and his assistant Arnold Wilkins sat in a van crammed with radio receivers and waited for an aircraft. Britain’s Air Ministry had demanded proof that Watson-Watt’s memo on detecting planes by radio was more than theory.
The test was elegantly simple. As a Handley Page Heyford bomber flew loops near a powerful BBC shortwave transmitter, the aircraft reflected the radio waves, producing a wavering blip on the receiver’s display at a range of several miles.
Only three people witnessed it, such was the secrecy.
The demonstration worked, and within weeks Watson-Watt had funding and a patent. The result was the Chain Home network of coastal stations that gave the RAF crucial early warning during the Battle of Britain in 1940. A quiet trial in a muddy field had quietly rewritten the rules of air warfare.
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