Bawdsey Manor
The development of radio detection and ranging (radar) and its deployment just in time to prevent the Nazis from invading Great Britain is one of the most compelling stories of the Second World War, and we’re learning the electromagnetic science of radar at the epicenter of that development – Bawdsey Manor in East Anglia.
At Bawdsey, students will live and work in the great manor house in which Sir Robert Watson Watt and his team of scientists and engineers designed and implemented the fabulously successful Chain Home series of radar stations. We’ll repeat the calculations that led Watson Watt to reject the idea of using electromagnetic waves as an offensive weapon in favor of employing them to detect and track German aircraft crossing the channel to bomb England. And we’ll examine the assertion that had the development of radar been completed three months later – or three months earlier – the world today would be a very different place.
Copyright Wittenberg University 2007