Joseph Lade Pawsey

Joseph Lade Pawsey (1908-1962), was born in Ararat, Victoria. He attended Wesley College as a teen, performing well in Physics and Maths. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1931 and moved on to complete his phD at Sidney Sussex college, Cambridge. After gaining experience in the reflection of radiowaves by the ionosphere (a region of the Earth's upper atmosphere), and working extensively on aerial design and influencing the introduction of television, Pawsey moved back home to Sydney with his new wife 32-year-old Canadian Greta Lenore, in 1940. During World War II he worked on radar equipment for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. As the most respected and senior scientist at the laboratory, he was privy to top secret documents that talked about some of the radar equipment being jammed by radio waves. After the war, in 1945, he put together a small research group (Ruby Payne-Scott and Lindsay McCready) to begin new observation of the sun using a radio aerial. Immediately they recorded radio emissions, which led them to discover temperatures of unique parts of the sun that had not been possible previously. This opened up a new branch of science called "radio astronomy".