Basil Schonland and Stanley Hey

In February 1942, a young physicist, Stanley Hey, found himself saddled with a task that seemed, on the surface, to be extremely mundane. At the time, Hey was working in the British Army Operational Research Group (AORG) under the command of Colonel Basil Schonland, FRS. Schonland, a South African physicist, had a world-renowned reputation as an expert on radio detection of lightning. Soon after South Africa entered the war in September 1939, he formed a top-secret group at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with the intention of building an elementary radar in order, as Schonland put it, to “learn the technique.” Within three months, they had succeeded, and their 90-MHz radar received its first echoes.