Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
John Randall (physicist)
Sir John Turton Randall, FRS FRSE (23 March 1905 – 16 June 1984) was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.
Randall collaborated with Harry Boot, and they produced a valve that could spit out pulses of microwave radio energy on a wavelength of 10 cm. On the significance of their invention, Professor of military history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, David Zimmerman, states: "The magnetron remains the essential radio tube for shortwave radio signals of all types. It not only changed the course of the war by allowing us to develop airborne radar systems, it remains the key piece of technology that lies at the heart of your microwave oven today. The cavity magnetron's invention changed the world."
Randall also led the King's College, London team which worked on the structure of DNA. Randall's deputy, Professor Maurice Wilkins, shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Watson and Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge for the determination of the structure of DNA. His other staff included Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Alex Stokes and Herbert Wilson, all involved in research on DNA.
John Randall was born on 23 March 1905 at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, the only son and the first of the three children of Sidney Randall, nurseryman and seedsman, and his wife, Hannah Cawley, daughter of John Turton, colliery manager in the area. He was educated at the grammar school at Ashton-in-Makerfield and at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he was awarded a first-class honours degree in physics and a graduate prize in 1925, and a Master of Science degree in 1926.
In 1928 he married Doris Duckworth.
From 1926 to 1937 Randall was employed on research by the General Electric Company at its Wembley laboratories, where he took a leading part in developing luminescent powders for use in discharge lamps.[citation needed] He also took an active interest in the mechanisms of such luminescence.
By 1937 he was recognised as the leading British worker in his field, and was awarded a Royal Society fellowship at the University of Birmingham,[citation needed] where he worked on the electron trap theory of phosphorescence in Mark Oliphant's physics faculty with Maurice Wilkins.
When the war began in 1939, Oliphant was approached by the Admiralty about the possibility of building a radio source that operated at microwave frequencies. Such a system would allow a radar using it to see small objects like the periscopes of submerged U-boats. The Air Ministry radar researchers at Bawdsey Manor on the Suffolk coast had also expressed an interest in a 10 cm system, as this would greatly reduce the size of the transmission antennas, making them much easier to fit in the nose of aircraft, as opposed to being mounted on the wings and fuselage as in their current systems.
Hub AI
John Randall (physicist) AI simulator
(@John Randall (physicist)_simulator)
John Randall (physicist)
Sir John Turton Randall, FRS FRSE (23 March 1905 – 16 June 1984) was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.
Randall collaborated with Harry Boot, and they produced a valve that could spit out pulses of microwave radio energy on a wavelength of 10 cm. On the significance of their invention, Professor of military history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, David Zimmerman, states: "The magnetron remains the essential radio tube for shortwave radio signals of all types. It not only changed the course of the war by allowing us to develop airborne radar systems, it remains the key piece of technology that lies at the heart of your microwave oven today. The cavity magnetron's invention changed the world."
Randall also led the King's College, London team which worked on the structure of DNA. Randall's deputy, Professor Maurice Wilkins, shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Watson and Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge for the determination of the structure of DNA. His other staff included Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Alex Stokes and Herbert Wilson, all involved in research on DNA.
John Randall was born on 23 March 1905 at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, the only son and the first of the three children of Sidney Randall, nurseryman and seedsman, and his wife, Hannah Cawley, daughter of John Turton, colliery manager in the area. He was educated at the grammar school at Ashton-in-Makerfield and at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he was awarded a first-class honours degree in physics and a graduate prize in 1925, and a Master of Science degree in 1926.
In 1928 he married Doris Duckworth.
From 1926 to 1937 Randall was employed on research by the General Electric Company at its Wembley laboratories, where he took a leading part in developing luminescent powders for use in discharge lamps.[citation needed] He also took an active interest in the mechanisms of such luminescence.
By 1937 he was recognised as the leading British worker in his field, and was awarded a Royal Society fellowship at the University of Birmingham,[citation needed] where he worked on the electron trap theory of phosphorescence in Mark Oliphant's physics faculty with Maurice Wilkins.
When the war began in 1939, Oliphant was approached by the Admiralty about the possibility of building a radio source that operated at microwave frequencies. Such a system would allow a radar using it to see small objects like the periscopes of submerged U-boats. The Air Ministry radar researchers at Bawdsey Manor on the Suffolk coast had also expressed an interest in a 10 cm system, as this would greatly reduce the size of the transmission antennas, making them much easier to fit in the nose of aircraft, as opposed to being mounted on the wings and fuselage as in their current systems.