Edward Bowen
Bowen, Edward (1911-1991), a British physicist, was part of the team that developed radar in Britain. He helped transform microwave radar into a military weapon and pioneered the science of radio astronomy in Australia.
Edward George Bowen earned his doctorate from King's College, University of London. In 1935, he joined a group that developed radar as a warning system. Later he led the group that designed airborne radar to detect other aircraft and submarines. From 1940 to 1943, Bowen worked in the United States on a project to optimize the wartime uses of microwave radar. In 1944, Bowen moved to Australia and joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, later reorganized as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), in Sydney. In 1946, he became chief of the division of radiophysics of CSIRO. There he was instrumental in pioneering radio astronomy, an important scientific spin-off that emerged from World War II (1939-1945). He was largely responsible for the building of the 210-foot (64-meter) radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. After the telescope began operation in 1961, it detected thousands of radio sources, including quassars. Quassars are extremely bright, extremely distant objects that emit radio waves. They are among the most distant objects in the universe.
A concurrent research interest of Bowen was improving the rainfall in arid Australia through cloud seeding. Although Bowen retired from CSIRO in 1971, the Australian state of Tasmania has continued to use cloud-seeding techniques successfully to enhance rainfall.
Bowen was elected to the Royal Society in 1975 and in 1977 became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering, a division of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His publications include A Textbook of Radar (1954) and Radar Days (1987).