(1903–92). During the 1930s, U.S. physicist Robert Page invented the technology for pulse radar, a system that detects and locates distant objects by sending out short bursts of electromagnetic radiation and then receiving and displaying the echoes that return from the objects. His invention was vital to the Allies during World War II for detecting enemy planes and other targets.
Robert Morris Page was born on June 2, 1903, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He initially studied theology while attending Hamline University in St. Paul, but he changed his major to physics in his senior year. After graduating in 1927, he joined the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., and he earned a master’s degree in 1932 from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the 1940s Page and other U.S. and British scientists studying radar pooled their work at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Page, who held 75 patents on inventions in precision electronics, developed the first radar duplexer capable of using a single antenna for transmitting and receiving; the planned position indicator, the first radar technology to identify the direction and range of a target simultaneously; and Project Madre, a radar system that could bend its beam to the curve of the Earth and thus “see” over the horizon. Page successively served at the NRL as a physicist and head of the Radar Research Section (1938–45), superintendent of Radio Division III (1945–52), associate director of research in electronics (1952–57), and director of research (1957–66). He was the recipient of the Distinguished Civilian Service Award (1945), the Presidential Certificate of Merit (1946), and the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service (1960). Page was the author of The Origin of Radar (1962). He died on May 15, 1992, in Edina, Minnesota.