Edward George "Taffy" Bowen, CBE, FRS (14 January 1911 – 12 August 1991),[1] was a Welsh physicist who made a major contribution to the development of radar.
Before the first meeting of that committee in early 1935, the Government asked Watson-Watt whether an intense beam of radio waves, a "death ray", could bring down an aircraft.
Watson-Watt reported that a "death ray" was impracticable, but suggested that radio waves might be used to detect, rather than destroy, enemy aircraft.
After a successful demonstration in February 1935 of the reflection of radio waves by an aircraft, the development of radar went ahead,[4] and a team of five people including Bowen was set up at Orfordness under the cover of doing ionospheric research.
After working through the night, Bowen resurrected the old transmitter at Orford Ness for the following day's demonstration, allowing the Government and RAF to continue with the extension of the chain of coastal stations.
For example, he solved the problem of the power supply in aircraft by using an engine-driven alternator, and he encouraged Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) to produce the first radio-frequency cables with solid polythene insulation.
Further refinements continued until September 1937, when Bowen gave a dramatic and uninvited demonstration of the application of radar by searching for the British Fleet in the North Sea in poor visibility, detecting three capital ships.
This technology had a major effect on winning the Battle of the Atlantic which eventually enabled forces to be built up by sea for the invasion of Europe.
In the hands of skilled crews, later versions in 1941 were remarkably effective, and in the heavy night raids of 1941 radar-equipped fighters were the main weapon of air defence.
Centimetric contour mapping radars like H2S (British) or H2X (American) greatly improved the accuracy of Allied bombers in the strategic bombing campaign.
The anti-aircraft batteries, placed along the German V-1 flying-bomb flight paths to London, are credited with destroying many of the flying bombs before they reached their target.
Bowen went to the United States with the Tizard Mission in 1940 and helped to initiate tremendous advances in microwave radar as a weapon.
The first American experimental airborne 10 cm radar was tested, with Bowen on board, in March 1941, only seven months after the Tizard Mission had arrived.
Bowen addressed many audiences on the development of radar, its military uses and its potential peacetime applications to civil aviation, marine navigation and surveying.
In addition to developments in radar, Bowen also undertook two other research activities: the pulse method of acceleration of elementary particles; and air navigation that resulted in the Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) that was ultimately adopted by many civil aircraft.
He was also interested in the phenomenon of Climatic Singularities, suggesting that they might be related to the Earth's passage through belts of meteor dust – whose particles then acted as ice-nuclei for seeding clouds.