Archibald Low
Low has been called the "father of radio guidance systems" due to his pioneering work on planes, torpedoes boats and guided rockets.
He was sent to Preparatory school at Colet Court when his father moved to Australia as a director of the Paddy Lackey Deep-level Company[7] gold mine.
Aged 16 Low entered the Central Technical College, an institution far more to his liking, where he began to more fully develop his abilities.
If all goes well with this invention, we shall soon be able, it seems, to see people at a distance.On 29 May the Daily Chronicle reported: Dr. Low gave a demonstration for the first time in public, with a new apparatus that he has invented, for seeing, he claims by electricity, by which it is possible for persons using a telephone to see each other at the same timeLow failed to follow up on this promising work, due in part to his temperamental failings as well as to the outbreak of World War I later that year.
[10] However, a US consular report from London by Deputy Consul General Carl Raymond Loop provided a different story and considerable detail about Low's system.
[12] Although it employed an electro-mechanical scanning mechanism, with its matrix detector (camera) and mosaic screen (receiver), it is unlike all of the later systems of the 20th century.
Furthermore, Carl Loop's report said "the selenium in the transmitting screen may be replaced by any diamagnetic material" and in his patent of 1938 A. M. Low stated, "It has also been proposed ... a photo-electric cell embodying a plate coated with a photo-sensitive substance which is subdivided into a number of cells by incising the coating lengthwise and crosswise", essentially the process used today to create megapixel image sensors.
His brief was to use his civilian research on Televista to remotely control the RFC drone weapons proposed by the Royal Aircraft Factory, so it could be used as a guided missile.
This project was called "Aerial Target" or AT, a deliberate misnomer to fool the Germans into thinking it was about building a drone plane to test anti-aircraft capabilities.
After they built a prototype, General Sir David Henderson (director-general of Directorate of Military Aeronautics) ordered that an Experimental Works should be created at Feltham to build the first proper "Aerial Target" complete with explosive warhead.
As head of the Experimental Works, Low was given about 30 picked men, including jewellers, carpenters and aircraftsmen, in order to get the pilotless plane built as quickly as possible.
Low and his team successfully demonstrated their ability to control the craft before engine failure led to its crash landing.
[3] In October 1914, two attempts were made to assassinate him: the first involved shots fired through his laboratory window in Paul Street; in the second, a visitor with a German accent came to Low's office and offered him a cigarette, which was found to contain a lethal dose of strychnine chloride.
Although none of these potential weapons were deployed in the war, the pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Agamemnon was converted into a remote-control target ship in 1920 and the Feltham "Aerial Target" project was taken up by Royal Aircraft Establishment, who tested a series of Royal Aircraft Factory 1917-type ATs with a 45 hp Armstrong Siddeley engine in 1921.
This drone development work culminated in the fleet of Queen Bee aerial target variants of the de Havilland Tiger Moth of the 1930s.
During World War II the Germans also made good use of Low's 1918 rocket guidance system and used it as one of the foundations for their guided weapons, the Henschel Hs 293, the Fritz X, and the V1 Doodlebug.
Low was commended for this work by a number of senior officers, including Sir David Henderson and Admiral Edward Stafford Fitzherbert.
Sir Henry Norman, a radio engineer and distinguished politician, wrote to Low in March 1918 saying, "I know of no man who has more extensive and more profound scientific knowledge, combined with a greater gift of imaginative invention than yourself".
In 1926, Low was reported to be working with Ivor Halstead, editor of the Daily Sketch, on the script of a film to be called Cosmos, about the history of the world from the beginning of time.
It was titled Armchair Science; Low helped edit it, and at one point the sales were 80,000 a month, yet it never achieved a profit and was ultimately sold off.
Low was worried about the number of road traffic accidents that were occurring, and believed speed in cities should be restricted to 25 mph using modern radio methods to enforce it.
He conducted experiments on the London Underground and achieved some success in pinpointing trouble spots and reducing their impact by use of shields over the wheels and padding of the interior panels.
Low was frequently in bad health from the late 1930s onwards, having never fully recovered from a bout of pneumonia he suffered a few years earlier.
The value of such stations might be very great; they might enable world-wide television broadcasts to be made; they would transmit data about cosmic rays; or solar radiation; and they might have incalculable military value.No team ever invents anything, they only develop one man's flash of genius.I always say that the greatest discovery is that we know practically nothing about anything.
