Mr. Reber effectively founded the science of radio astronomy, although by education and profession he was not an astronomer, but a working electrical engineer. In his popular book Stargazer (Allen & Unwin, 2004), British astronomer Fred Watson remarks that "Reber...was for almost a decade the world's sole radio astronomer...".
Biography
Grote Reber was born in Chicago on December 22, 1911. His parents were Schuyler Colfax and Harriet Mary (Grote) Reber. We have no information on relatives of either his mother or father; we do know that his father was born in Pennsylvania about 1869, and was apparently named for Schuyler Colfax, who was Vice-President under U.S. Grant. Both sides of the Reber family appear to be of German extraction, but his father’s family in particular had been in this country at least two generations.
So far as we know, Grote was the first child of this couple; a brother was born in Chicago in 1914, and shortly thereafter the family relocated to Wheaton, DuPage County. Grote entered Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1929, not yet 18, and graduated in 1933 with a bachelors’ degree in radio engineering. Among his interests was amateur radio: He was licensed as W9GFZ, probably after 1931, and an obituary by a fellow ‘ham’ calls him “avid”. (His former call, W9GFZ, fittingly now belongs to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Radio Club in Socorro, NM.) It may have been through that hobby that he learned of Karl G. Jansky’s discovery at Bell Labs (1932, published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1933) that there was “cosmic static” emanating from the zodiac; the finding was also reported (and more than slightly fantasized) in the popular press, but received rather short shrift in other scientific circles. Jansky did not immediately follow up his finding, which came about as a sidelight of other research; Reber was interested in doing so, but the Depression made job pickings slim, and both Bell Labs and various observatories turned down his applications. Reber thereupon joined a Chicago radio manufacturer; we do not know which one, although we do know that he worked for several, and that he was at Zenith for some time. (Chicago, at that time and for several decades thereafter, was a center of consumer electronics manufacturing.)
Reber conducted his astronomy experiments, largely at night—automobiles were a constant source of debilitating interference—and financed them via his daytime jobs. In 1937, convinced that Jansky’s methods were too crude, he decided to adapt optical technology, and therefore constructed, in the backyard of his Wheaton home, a parabolic antenna, 10 meters (31.4 feet) in diameter, with a feed point located 20 feet in front on a tripod structure fixed to the perimeter of the dish. This structure weighed nearly 4000 pounds, and Reber had to hire two men to help him build it. It could be elevated by hand, but was not rotatable. (We have it on good authority that some of his neighbors thought it obscene!) The antenna was completed in 1937, and his initial surveys—at 3300 MHz, and then at 900 MHz—came up empty. However, a third receiver, at 160 MHz, in 1938 successfully detected the “cosmic static” which Jansky had reported from the Milky Way. Reber’s antenna was substantially more selective than Jansky’s-- that is, it had a narrower pattern--, and Reber set about preparing charts showing the distribution of radio emanations in the visible sky; the first of these was published in 1941. He quickly found that the strongest emissions could not be correlated with known visible light sources, i.e., stars. Reber also found that the strength of these emissions appeared to be inversely related to frequency—an unexpected result, since thermally generated emissions should have increased with frequency. (This was finally explained by the Russian physicist, V. I. Ginzburg, in 1951, as the result of synchrotron radiation. )
Reber later donated his original parabolic antenna to the National Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Green Bank, WV, where it now stands; he helped supervise its reconstruction—it was given a more flexible mounting, although it is no longer used for actual observations—and also helped construct a full-size replica of Jansky’s antenna array at that location.
Reber quit his employment in radio engineering in the mid-1940’s, and from 1947-1951 was employed by the National Bureau of Standards, which later spun off the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), now headquartered in Green Bank, WV; later he worked briefly for The Research Corporation. He continued to have a consuming interest in the radio astronomy discipline, and about 1951 moved to Tasmania, Australia, where he spent the rest of his life: Tasmania was picked because it has little electronic interference and is situated in an excellent location—where the ionosphere tends to be somewhat thinned-- for sky observations, primarily in the spectrum from 1-2 MHz. He died on December 20, 2002, two days before his 91st birthday. His ashes were distributed among 24 radio observatories, including those at Dwingeloo and Molonglo in Australia, the Goldstone Apple Valley location in California, and Jodrell Bank in England.
Reber's home in Tasmania, Australia. The prefabricated home was purchased in Oregon, and shipped to him in Tasmania, where he reassembled it with local help. It is a passive solar home, including a heat reservoir of many tons of round rocks which are heated by the sun; in the summer, the home is designed and oriented so that little heat enters.
Below detail showing the 600-ohm feedlines to the antennas. The lines were phased so as to match Earth's rotation.
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A view of one of the 175 dipole elements of Reber's Tasmanian antenna. The elements radiated out like spokes from a central point. The signals were received at 144 meters and were recorded on a pen recorder
Reber-- on the left-- just after his 88th birthday. He died just under 3 years later.
His honors were many—especially if one considers that he was not, by training, a professional astronomer. Included among them: