Harry Boot

Henry Albert Howard Boot (29 July 1917 – 8 February 1983) was an English physicist who with Sir John Randall and James Sayers developed the cavity magnetron, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War.

His professor Mark Oliphant had seen the klystron at Stanford University but it produced insufficient power to be useful as a radar transmitter.

[3] As with many British inventions of this period, the magnetron was provided to the US for free when they entered World War II.

After a brief time at British Thomson-Houston, Rugby, in the latter years of the war, Boot returned to Birmingham as the Nuffield Research Fellow.

After some work on nuclear physics, Boot returned to magnetrons and after the war built a cyclotron at Birmingham.