players held. Karl was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers baseball fan and had very strong political opinions. He was critical of the Roosevelt administration and speculated that if the president’s term was ten years instead of four that, “We might have another civil war.”4
Throughout his career at Bell Labs, Karl’s immediate boss was Harald Friis, a Danish-American radio engineer who had immigrated to the United States from Denmark and had established a reputation in radio antennas and propagation. Later Friis and his wife Inge became close personal friends of the Jansky family, and were godparents to Jansky’s daughter Anne Moreau. With time, tensions developed between Jansky and Friis over Karl’s work assignments, but apparently their personal relationship remained intact.
Jansky’s discovery of cosmic radio emission is a classic example of the scientific method, complete with false leads, that George Southworth (1956) later compared to a Sherlock Holmes detective story. Jansky’s story is described in his series of papers in the Proceedings of the IRE (Jansky 1932, 1933b, 1935), his laboratory notebook entries,5 and regular weekly work reports, as well as the running account of his work documented in his detailed letters to his father back in Madison.6 These letters provide a glimpse into the development of Karl’s thinking as he acquired and interpreted new data, and reflected on the difficult economic challenges he and his young family faced during those trying depression years.
In order to determine the direction of interfering signals, Jansky needed a directional antenna whose orientation could be varied. His notebook entries for 22 to 29 June 1929 indicate that he devoted this period to the design of a rotating antenna. On 24 August, he noted, “Mr. Sykes was interviewed and will start work on the ‘merrygoround’ next Monday.” The next months were spent designing and building the instrumentation with special attention to reducing receiver noise and obtaining good gain stability (Beck 1984). During this period, Jansky also planned the rotating Bruce Array7 at Cliffwood Beach which was constructed by Carl Clausen, a member of the Bell Labs staff. Jansky’s rotating array used a parasitic reflector to enhance the forward gain and directivity, and was mounted on the wheels and axles taken from an old Ford Model T car.8 Motor driven, the array made a complete rotation in azimuth every 20 minutes. Jansky’s work was interrupted by a decision to move the Laboratory to a new location at Holmdel, New Jersey, which would provide more room for the growing laboratory staff and less noise and local interference. A new circular track was constructed away from the laboratory building, and the rotating Bruce array was relocated to the new site (Fig. 1.2).
One of Karl’s first tasks at the new site was to find a frequency free of interfering signals. On 10 May 1930, he wrote, “It was decided to operate upon a frequency of 20,689.7 [kc] or 14.5 meters.”9 He then calculated the size of the quarter wave antenna elements as “142.72 inches = 11 feet 10.72 inches or 11 ft 10¾ approx.” A week later, on 17 May he wrote, “I designed the supporting framework for the array proper. The diagrams have been turned over to the shop office.”
