Voice of the Universe: Building the Jodrell Bank Telescope

by Bernard Lovell

In this volume the creator and director of Jodrell Bank, the world's largest radio telescope, tells the fascinating story behind the building of this huge telescope. Though the telescope is popularly known for tracking and communicating with man-made satellites, its prime function is the study of the universe by means of radio waves emitted by distatant stars. The radiation received from meteors, the moon, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Milky Way offers new information daily about the origins of life on this planet and the possibilities of life on other worlds. The building of the telescope was fraught with mishaps and frustrations-financial, political, and otherwise; yet, through his perseverance, Sir Bernard Lovell made its creation a reality. His story, drawn largely from personal diaries, documents the complex conflicts among scientists, bureaucrats, and politicians which arose out of this monumental endeavor.

331 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 1987

About the author

Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell (born 31 August 1913, Oldland Common, Bristol) OBE, FRS is an English physicist and radio astronomer. He was the first Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, from 1945 to 1980.

He studied physics at the University of Bristol, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1936. At this time he also received lessons from Raymond Jones, a teacher at Bath Technical School and later organist at Bath Abbey. The church organ was one of the main loves of his life, apart from science. He worked in the cosmic ray research team at the University of Manchester until the outbreak of World War II, during which he worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) developing radar systems to be installed in aircraft, among them H2S, for which he received an OBE in 1946.

He attempted to continue his studies of cosmic rays with an ex-military radar detector unit, but suffered much background interference from the Electric trams on Manchester's Oxford Road. He moved his equipment to a more remote location, one which was free from such electrical interference, and where he established the Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Goostrey in Cheshire. It was an outpost of the University's botany department. In the course of his experiments he was able to show that radar echoes could be obtained from daytime meteor showers as they entered the Earth's atmosphere and ionised the surrounding air. With University funding he constructed the then-largest steerable radio telescope in the world, which now bears his name - the Lovell Telescope. Over 50 years later, it remains a productive radio telescope, now mostly operated as part of the MERLIN and European VLBI Network interferometric arrays of radio telescopes.

In 1958, Lovell was invited by the BBC to deliver the annual Reith Lectures - a series of six radio broadcasts, titled The Individual and the Universe, in which he examined the history of inquiry into the solar system and the origin of the universe.

He was knighted in 1961 for his important contributions to the development of radio astronomy, and has a secondary school named after him in Oldland Common, Bristol, which Sir Bernard Lovell officially opened. A building on the QinetiQ site in Malvern is also named after him.

In 2009, Lovell spoke of a claimed assassination attempt in Deep-Space Communication Center (Eupatoria) during the Cold War where the Soviets allegedly tried to kill him with a lethal radiation dose. At the time, Lovell was head of the Jodrell Bank space telescope that was also being used as part of an early warning system for Soviet nuclear attacks. Lovell has written a full account of the incident which will not be published until after his death.

The first name of the fictional scientist Bernard Quatermass, the hero of several BBC Television science-fiction serials of the 1950s, was chosen in honour of Lovell.

Now in his 99th year, Sir Bernard, physically very frail, lives in quiet retirement in the English countryside. He is surrounded by music, his books and a vast garden filled with trees he himself planted many decades ago and which he has loved so long.