Grote Reber

Lore & Background

Reber was born and raised in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and graduated from Armour Institute of Technology in 1933 with a degree in electrical engineering. He was an amateur radio operator with callsign W9GFZ and worked for various radio manufacturers in Chicago from 1933 to 1947. When he learned of Karl Jansky's work in 1933, he decided this was the field he wanted to work in and applied to Bell Labs, where Jansky was working. In the summer of 1937, Reber decided to build his own radio telescope in his back yard in Wheaton. The telescope consisted of a parabolic sheet metal dish 9 meters in diameter, focusing to a radio receiver 8 meters above the dish, mounted on a tilting stand. Completed in September 1937, his first receiver operated at 3300 MHz and failed to detect signals from outer space, as did his second at 900 MHz. His third attempt at 160 MHz was successful in 1938, confirming Jansky's discovery. He turned his attention to making a radiofrequency sky map, completed in 1941 and extended in 1943. His data, published as contour maps, revealed radio sources such as Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A for the first time. During this time he uncovered a mystery: standard black-body radiation theory predicted more high-energy light than low-energy, but Reber demonstrated the reverse, with a considerable amount of low-energy radio signal. This was not explained until the 1950s, when synchrotron radiation was offered as an explanation. Reber sold his telescope to the National Bureau of Standards; it eventually made its way to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where Reber supervised its reconstruction.

Reader's Guide

Starting in 1951, Reber received generous support from the Research Corporation in New York and moved to Hawaii. In the 1950s, wanting to return to active studies but finding the field filled with large and expensive instruments, he turned to medium frequency (hectometre) radio signals in the 0.5–3 MHz range. In 1954, Reber moved to Tasmania, Australia, where he worked with Bill Ellis at the University of Tasmania. There, on very cold, long winter nights, the ionosphere would quieten and de-ionize, allowing longer radio waves into his antenna array. Tasmania also offered low levels of man-made radio noise. In the 1960s, he had an array of dipoles set up on a sheep grazing property near Bothwell, Tasmania, where he lived in a house of his own design and construction. Reber was not a believer of the Big Bang theory; he believed that redshift was due to repeated absorption and re-emission or interaction of light and other electromagnetic radiations by low density dark matter over intergalactic distances, and in 1977 published an article called 'Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe' outlining his theory. He was supportive of the tired light explanation for the redshift-distance relationship. He died in 2002 at the Ouse District Hospital in Tasmania, two days before his 91st birthday. His legacy includes the asteroid 6886 Grote, the Grote Reber Medal established by the Trustees of the Grote Reber Foundation, and the Grote Reber Museum at the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory in Cambridge, Tasmania, opened on 20 January 2008.

Did You Know?

• Reber's first two receivers, at 3300 MHz and 900 MHz, failed to detect signals from outer space; his third at 160 MHz succeeded in 1938.
• For nearly a decade from 1937, Reber was the world's only radio astronomer.
• He moved to Tasmania in 1954 to study medium frequency radio signals, taking advantage of quiet ionospheric conditions on long winter nights.
• Reber's house in Tasmania was so well thermally insulated that the oven in the kitchen was nearly unusable because the heat would raise the room temperature to over 50 °C.