study leading to a series of discoveries that would fundamentally change our understanding of the Universe and its constituents. Radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), cosmic evolution, cosmic masers, gravitational lensing, electrical storms on Jupiter, and other now commonly known cosmic phenomena were all unknown until Karl Jansky opened the new radio window to the Universe.
Karl Guthe Janksy was born on 22 October 1905 in the territory of Oklahoma, where his father Cyril was Dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Engineering. Karl was named after Karl Guthe who was a former professor of his father at the University of Michigan. Karl grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father became a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
Karl’s older brother, Cyril Moreau Jansky, Jr., known as C.M. Jansky, Jr., and to his family and to his friends as “Moreau,” received a BA in Physics in 1917 and MS in 1919, both from the University of Wisconsin. Following his graduation, he taught at the University of Minnesota, where one of his first students was Lloyd Berkner, who would go on to become the driving force behind the formation of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as the first President of Associated Universities (Sect. 3.1). C.M. Jansky, Jr. worked briefly for Bell Labs, and played a leading role in the development of radio technology and regulation in the US. In 1930, with his former student, Stuart Bailey, he established the consulting firm of Jansky and Bailey, where he remained active until his death in 1975. In 1934, Jansky became President of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), the predecessor to the current Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
Like his brother, Karl also studied physics at the University of Wisconsin and received his BS in Physics in 1927, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a thesis titled, “Conditions for Oscillations in a Vacuum Tube Circuit.” While at Wisconsin, Karl was the fastest skater and a prolific scorer on the university ice hockey team, and later while working at Bell Labs, he was the table tennis champion of Monmouth County, New Jersey. After a year in graduate school,2 Karl sought a job at Bell Labs. Although Bell Labs was initially unenthusiastic about hiring Karl, who had a chronic kidney disease, Moreau intervened on behalf of his brother and urged the Bell Labs president to hire Karl (Jansky 1957).3 In recognition of his illness, instead of locating him at their main laboratory in industrial New York City, Karl was sent to their then small rural laboratory in Cliffwood Beach, New Jersey, where he began work to study the propagation of short wave radio transmissions and the noise limits to transatlantic telephone communications. He married Alice Larue Knapp the following year, and along with most of the other Bell Labs Cliffwood employees, Karl and his growing family lived in nearby Red Bank. Karl enjoyed the informal social life shared with his fellow engineers. In spite of his illness and against medical advice, he remained active. He played chess, tennis, and golf, enjoyed bowling and skiing, had the highest batting average on the softball team, and was a passionate bridge player who claimed to know what cards each of the
