Educated at McGill and London, Henderson joined the NRC in 1933 where he worked on the effects of the ionosphere on radio signals and the Direction Finder invented by A.G.L.
Henderson returned to the NRC after RCAF and diplomatic service from 1942 to 1947 and became head of its electricity section, which built several cesium atomic clocks.
He received the PhD degree in physics from King's College London in 1932, and followed this with post-doctoral studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Technische Hochschule in Munich.
Over the next several years, his work included the building of a highly advanced radio direction-finding set that used a CRT for its display; this was installed in Nova Scotia in 1938.
[2] In early 1939, Henderson was selected to represent Canada in a series of highly classified briefings in Great Britain concerning developments in the Air Ministry on Range and Direction Finding (RDF – later called radar).
Using commercial components and with essentially no further assistance from Great Britain, a system was developed to protect the entrance to the Halifax Harbour, called Night Watchman, tested in June 1940.
After laying the foundation for research and manufacturing of radar in Canada, in 1942 Henderson became a senior officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).
Near the end of 1947, Henderson returned to the NRC to head the Canadian part of SHORAN, an interdepartmental project to apply radar techniques to aerial surveying.