Grote Reber

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Grote Reber (December 22, 1911 – December 20, 2002) was an American pioneer of radio astronomy, the study of radio waves from space. He built the second radio telescope ever used for astronomy and the first parabolic reflector radio telescope, and he conducted the first survey of the sky in radio waves.

Born in Wheaton, Illinois, Reber studied electrical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) and graduated in 1933. He was an amateur radio operator (callsign W9GFZ) and worked for radio manufacturers in Chicago. After learning about Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves from space in 1933, he decided to work in this field and applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was.

In 1937, Reber built his own radio telescope in his backyard in Wheaton. It featured a 9-meter parabolic dish with a receiver mounted 8 meters above it on a tilting stand. After two failed attempts at higher frequencies, his third receiver, operating at 160 MHz, succeeded in 1938 and confirmed Jansky’s discovery.

Reber published his first paper in 1940 and chose not to take a job at Yerkes Observatory. Instead, he began making a map of the radio sky, completed in 1941 and expanded in 1943. His work revealed radio sources such as Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A for the first time. For about a decade he was the world’s sole radio astronomer, and the field grew after World War II.

After the war, he helped move Jansky’s telescope and contributed to the broader development of radio astronomy. In 1951 he moved to Hawaii with support from the Research Corporation. In the 1950s he studied long radio waves (0.5–3 MHz) and, in 1954, moved to Tasmania to work with the University of Tasmania, taking advantage of very low radio noise and favorable ionospheric conditions there.

In Tasmania he set up a field of dipole antennas near the town of Bothwell and built a home he designed himself. He continued his radio work there, focusing on very long wavelengths.

Reber did not accept the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang. In 1977 he published Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe, proposing an alternative explanation for redshift known as tired light.

He died on December 20, 2002, in Ouse, Tasmania, just before his 91st birthday. His pioneering work laid the foundation for modern radio astronomy and helped the field grow after the war.