Rivett brought to the Council a deep conviction of the importance of theoretical systems analysis, a desire for axiomatic certainty, and a distrust of purely empirical work, a set of beliefs which was to have a major influence on the ethos of CSIR. Schedvin (1987, p. 24).

Joe Pawsey’s was the first generation in which an Australian born child could think of growing up to be a scientist, as he was poised to do at the end of his undergraduate years. There was a new sense in Australia that science would be important for a nation growing in independence and confidence, and the modern world was being rapidly and profoundly reshaped by technology. In this chapter we set out the social and intellectual background to Pawsey’s Masters and PhD research and introduce the reader to the scientific staff of the Australian Radio Research Board, where Pawsey’s Masters was undertaken.

The Developing Independence of Australian Science and the Formation of the CSIR

By the mid-1920s every state capital had a University, and most University science departments included Professors who now managed to pursue some research interests, despite the heavy teaching loads created by the influx of returned soldiers and a population with growing interest in education. There was research outside the Universities, too: in state government departments of Mines and Agriculture, in the State Natural History museums, in hospital laboratories, behind chemist shops and for chemical companies.

Of course the institutions, relationships, styles of research and choice of projects in Australian science remained structured by Australia’s sense of place within the British Empire, and by Empire ideologies and loyalties, but also by the tension between these and emergent independence and nationalism (MacLeod, 2000; MacLeod & Jarrell, 1994; MacLeod & Lewis, 1988; MacLeod, 1980). It is characteristic of science in the Commonwealth that Departmental research programs were very limited in scope and depth, and yet impressive in their achievements. Most information about Australian flora, fauna, geology, and climate was yet to be “discovered” by European scientists. (Tragically, little attention was paid to the extraordinary systematic knowledge among Aboriginal people, of either the celestial, or the terrestrial environment (Norris, 2016)).

After World War I, scientific research expanded in Australia, and globally: the pace of commercial and technological change was increasing, dazzling new possibilities—like being able to send voices across vast distances, without wires, the magic of radio—were reshaping every aspect of work and life. Of course funds were very scarce—Universities scraped by with small philanthropic scholarships, such as the one Pawsey would be awarded. Funding only decreased at the time that Pawsey began his Masters work, due to the global economic Depression. Despite this, a number of research institutions were constructed in the years after the War, such as the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (built to manufacture vaccine against diphtheria), the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine (oriented to the fundamentally racist research questions of whether and how white people could thrive in the tropics), and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (a venture to investigate venom and infectious diseases, which became a centre for virology under the direction of future Nobel prize winner Frank Macfarlane Burnet (Brogan, 1990)). It was this modest growth that enabled a fortunate few Australian children, one of whom was Pawsey, to become scientists.

Creation of the CSIR, Scene of Most of Pawsey’s Career

In 1920 an Institute for Science and Industry was created by an Act of Federal Parliament and in 1926 the Act was amended to form the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR; later CSIRO). The purpose of the new organisation was to “initiate and conduct scientific research to assist in the development of the primary and secondary industries of Australia” (https://www.csiro.au/en/About/History-achievements/Our-history). This creation of a national laboratory that would undertake major research projects and coordinate scientific research across the country was a symbol of science becoming a national priority (Schedvin, 1987).Footnote 1

The new CSIR was governed and directed by an Executive Committee of three. The members of this Committee were selected for their scientific eminence—and for their eye on business interests (Schedvin, 1987). They comprised George Julius, an energetic engineer and successful businessman enthusiastic about supporting radio research, Arnold Richardson, an agricultural scientist and Superintendent of Agriculture to the Victorian government, and above all, ACD Rivett, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne (and married to chemist Stella Deakin, daughter of Australia’s second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin). As the masterful historian of CSIRO, Boris Schedvin, has argued, this “triumvirate” provided exceptionally balanced leadership for the new organisation through its first two decades (Schedvin, 1987). It was a particular challenge to find a balance between the pressure to undertake applied research that would quickly produce “results” and to support the scientific enterprise in general. Fortunately for Pawsey’s career, David Rivett provided consistent support and advocacy for “basic” science throughout his 23 years of service to CSIR (Rivett, 1972).

In fact David Rivett, a generation younger than Pawsey, shared many similarities with him—and indeed the two families were distantly connected, as wartime correspondence between Rivett and Pawsey’s mother indicates.Footnote 2 Both Rivett and Pawsey were Australian born, and both were from rural backgrounds, with principled, Nonconformist parents and relatives (Rivett’s father was a pastor, passionate about equality, pacifism, and social progress through education); both were educated, with the help of scholarships at Wesley College for their high school and matriculation, and then at Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne; and both were mentored during their degree in science at the University of Melbourne (BSc 1906, for Rivett) by an enterprising professor. Rivett had a transformative experience of what “pure” research could offer during World War I when he was seconded to research into the factors limiting the production of pure ammonium nitrate, needed for explosives, in Britain.Footnote 3 He wrote of his war work:

any ordinary type of test tube fumbler, if given a handful or two of these materials, could manage by a few hit and miss trials to get some sort of procedure for getting a specimen of ammonium nitrate out of them: but there was only one possible way of finding how to get the maximum amount of this compound in the purest condition and that was by going through the whole involved business of getting the complete phase rule model of the highly complex four-component system, with its dozen or more possible phases. Once you got these models … [y]ou knew you had the one and only best line of procedure: and you realised what an utterly stupid practice blind empirical stabbing would have been, since even if it had led to some success, the chances of the highest success being attained were not one in a million. [our emphasis].Footnote 4

Schedvin comments that Rivett brought to the Council a deep conviction of the importance of theoretical systems analysis, a desire for axiomatic certainty, and a distrust of purely empirical work, which guided his dedication to ensuring the Council supported basic science research.Footnote 5

Rivett’s vision for the CSIR was of the recreation of the British and European model of small research teams built around a distinguished scientist, who could exercise great autonomy in setting research goals and methods (Schedvin, 1988). C.B. Schedvin writes that CSIR in these years was profoundly characterised by the scientific norms—or ideals—of community—open sharing of information, individual endeavour, and above all, by commitments to scientific autonomy. The Executive, and in particular Rivett, continued to defend this vision rather remarkably through the pressures of the Depression and beyond.Footnote 6

But the CSIR had no annual appropriation to build such research programs on its own, and pursuing basic research was outside its supposed limited “coordination” role—the actual doing of science was supposed to remain the province of the States. Virtually all the early work of the CSIR was focused on urgent agricultural issues, such as the terrifyingly swift spread of prickly pear cactus in Queensland, or the frequency of rust in wheat crops. Indeed, so strong was this focus that W F Evans calls it an “enigma” that the CSIR should so early have also created the Radio Research Board (Evans, 1973) . But wireless was the transformative technology of the decade, and its predecessor, the telegraph, quite literally tied the new nation together (Standage, 1998; Taylor, 1980; Muscio, 1984) (at some cost: the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their Country, and also the life of the great uncle of one of the authors of this book!). 1901, the year the Commonwealth of Australia came into being, was also the year that Guglielmo Marconi first managed to transmit a Morse signal across the Atlantic.Footnote 7

Thus Pawsey’s career began in a new national scientific organisation in which one leader, David Rivett, was an active supporter of basic science research—and where there were also strong connections to industry, including the new industry of telecommunications.

Radio: A Technology Transforming Australia

The spread of radio was an early example of the breathtaking speed of technological and social change that marked the twentieth century. The new nation of Australia would need to be able to innovate. This section explains why the Radio Research Board at the CSIR was formed and provides context to understand why Pawsey’s Masters research was of importance.

In 1905 the Marconi company had already started a wireless Morse service for interstate communication in Australia. Amateur wireless transmitters were active in Australia; in 1905 the first legislation regulated such activities, within the Commonwealth Postmaster General (PMG) department. Radiotelegraphy was central to Naval and land communications during WWI. The year before, using Australian and British capital—the Australian government owned 50% of the shares, plus one—Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) came into existence by buying the rights of the Marconi and Telefunken organisations in Australia. AWA undertook manufacture of radio equipment for a range of customers including merchant shipping and built a necessary research and development arm to support its products. Over the next two decades, the influence of AWA in providing technical innovation and human resources for science, was profound. Its Chairman, Sir Ernest Fisk, acknowledged that it was the second largest wireless organisation in the British Empire. It was, John Madsen pointed out when arguing for the value of including Fisk on the radio research board, “a semi Government department”, one that undertook almost all the construction and technical work in Australia and with respect to broadcasting in Sydney and Melbourne specifically (Evans, 1973).

After the war, the commercial broadcasting potential of radio grew exponentially (Jones, 1995; Carty & Griffen-Foley, 2011). In the USA the first advertised service began in 1920; by March 1921 there were 50,000 receiving sets, which grew to 750,000 by May the following year, while 187 new broadcasting stations sprung into being in the same time period. The British Broadcasting Company was formed in May 1922 and by 1925 had issued over a million listeners’ licences. In 1923 the British government announced it would erect a long wave transmitter for Empire telegraphy, which was in operation by 1926; in 1924 the first still pictures were successfully sent across the Atlantic by radio.

Radio was transforming Pawsey’s world during his formative adolescent and early adult years; but successful commercial radio needed to solve a whole series of challenges to make the technology workable in the many markets now so enthusiastically taking it up. Radio reception was highly variable in geographical range and in quality. Radio operators encountered the phenomena of “skipping” (long distance propagation occurred but signals “skipped” over “dead zones”), fading or “swinging” of signals (variations in the received signal (or in signal attenuation); for example, there were dramatic differences in the distance over which radio signals could be heard between day and night, and “static” or “strays”, that is, noise created by electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, also known as “atmospherics”, (the topic that Pawsey would investigate for his Masters research). Antenna development itself required (and continues to require) a mix of empirical engineering and mathematical-theoretical research (Gillmor, 1991).

Responding both to the commercial challenges and the strategic potential for Empire-wide communication systems, the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) —the model on which the CSIR was based—constituted a Radio Research Board in 1920 to “assist in the coordination of radio research work carried out by the fighting services and the Post Office, and to provide for research work of a fundamental nature in directions where it was lacking and where it would be likely to lead to useful applications.”

In order to understand Pawsey’s Masters and PhD research, and how it provided the “repertoire” (Ankeny, 2019) of ideas, practices, mathematical theory and devices that would underpin wartime radar research and then early radio astronomy (Gillmor, 1991; Sullivan, 2009), we now offer a brief sketch of research into radio communications and the entity that turned out to strongly influence these, the ionosphere. In hindsight, ionospheric research can also reveal—par excellence—how much scientific progress has been driven by a dialectical interaction between science and technology (de Solla Price, 1964). Ionospheric research also involved several other actors—Appleton, Fred White and the new Australian Radio Research Board scientists David Martyn and George Munro, among others—who shaped Pawsey’s scientific development enormously, directly or indirectly (Gillmor, 1991). Having set out a sketch of ionospheric research, we will then return to describe the work of the Radio Research Board.

The Creation of the Radio Research Board (CSIR): High Impact in Constrained Circumstances

The case for a Radio Research Board was compelling enough in itself, given the need to improve receivers and broadcast quality and to understand how conditions local to Australia, such as climate and geography, impacted on transmission quality. Local radio broadcasting companies wanted to know what frequencies to use to broadcast to a rural population, and what local conditions of climate and geography would affect the broadcast quality (Gillmor, 1991).

John Madsen and Thomas Laby were among the earliest to see the importance of new radio technologies and the need for research to support their development. Madsen above all is credited with the creation of the Radio Research Board at CSIR. He was able to advocate, network, finagle, hustle and harass a similar Board into being in Australia, bringing together the Chairs, Presidents and leadership of the Wireless Institute of Australia, the Broadcasting Company of Australia (3LO), Farmers Broadcasting Company, Australian National Research Council, HP “Poo-Bah” Brown (Chair of the Postmaster General Department), the Munitions Supply Board, the Department of Defence, and the relevant professors in Melbourne and Adelaide, T H Laby and Kerr Grant (Evans, 1973, and Gillmor, 1991). (Just what a feat it was to constructively manage competing interests and points of difference is worth a pause of appreciation and admiration for John Madsen, and is entertainingly presented in Evans’s history of the RRB (Evans, 1973)).

During its first 13 years, the Radio Research Board led a precarious existence, constantly threatened by dire governmental funding cuts during the Depression. Despite this, it generated substantial contributions to science locally and globally. The Board was constituted in order to conduct useable research in six priority areas: “Field Intensity; Atmospherics; Fading; Distortion and Modulation”. However, the training, interests, and connections of the researchers—as well as fact that the physical world impinged directly on radio communications and needed to be understood before various difficulties could be remediated—resulted in the Board making more contributions to “pure” science issues than to patentable improvements to radio communications technology in the years prior to World War II.

From our perspective, it also brought together a remarkable (if small) group of radio researchers whose knowledge and expertise would be available to Pawsey as he embarked on his first significant experience of research in his Masters degree.

David F. Martyn, A.L. Green and G.H. Munro and L.H. Huxley Are Recruited to the Radio Research Board, 1929–1930

Once established, the Radio Research Board found funds—70% from PMG, and the rest from broadcasting companies in Sydney and Melbourne that Laby and Madsen had already been pursuing agreements with—to support 6 research scientists, 3 in Sydney and 3 in Melbourne. High quality researchers with expertise in relevant areas were hard to find. Pawsey was the only Australian candidate appointed; in the absence of students with suitable training, the rest needed to be recruited from Britain.

Four of its six initial research officers were recruited from Britain, via an illustrious selection committee composed of leading British physicists Sir Ernest Rutherford (Chap. 3), Sir Edward Appleton (Chap. 5) and Sir Henry Tizard (Chap. 9).Footnote 8 This committee would ensure that the Australian program remained connected to the “centre” of ionospheric research. British scientists offered consistent support to the Australian team. Tizard offered to train the new recruits at Slough; Sir Robert Watson Watt made available at a reduced price, a new cathode ray direction finder which Munro and Huxley brought with them on the voyage from Britain.

The initial four officers recruited to the Radio Research Board were A.L. Green, G.H. Munro (Home, 1995), L.G. Huxley (Crompton, 1991) and D.F. Martyn (Massey, 1971). All arrived intending to pursue the “pure” science questions that had interested them prior to their appointment—they were not jobbing graduates with a narrow interest in solving technical problems for local broadcasters—and all made swift and profound contributions to research exploring the composition and physical features of the ionosphere, at that time the leading issue in radio research.

The pre-eminent researcher among the group was David Forbes Martyn (Piddington & Oliphant, 1971; Home, 2000). Martyn was a Scot who graduated with a PhD from the University of London, and showed considerable talent as both an experimentalist and as a theoretician. He was 23 when he came to Australia in 1929, at first to work in Laby’s laboratory (where he doubtless would have met Joe Pawsey) investigating fading of signals from local broadcasting stations, but soon after moving to Sydney to work with Madsen’s group. Laby proved touchy and difficult to work with throughout this time; in 1932 and 1933 respectively, George Munro and Thomas Cherry also moved to Sydney to avoid him (Evans, 1973).Footnote 9

Because Martyn’s research interests and capacities would have a profound impact on Pawsey in subsequent years, and because his Radio Research Board activities offer a snapshot of “the state of the science” at the time when Pawsey began his career, we sketch a few salient details here. Martyn came to Australia with two proposals of research to put to the Board: one was for what was effectively a Doppler radar—a proposal to study the moon using the reflection of very high frequency wavesFootnote 10—and the other to study the ionosphere using an adaptation of Appleton’s frequency change technique. Only the second project was approved by the Board, and according to Jack Piddington, it proved to contain a subtle fallacy, prompting Martyn’s interest in the pulse echo sounding technique.Footnote 11

At this time Martyn had a gift for activating the otherwise isolated researchers in Australia, and he collaborated with nearly everyone working in the field locally (Evans, 1973, p. 122), showing great flair not only as a theoretician, but in research to solve a spectrum of issues in instrument design. His collaboration with Cherry and later with Green perfected the group’s 3-aerial reception system, which he later found to be in advance of any European instrument for studying polarisation and lateral deviation. Thomas Cherry had also recorded some complex wave-length-change fringes in Melbourne (from long distance signals from transmitters in Sydney), and it was Martyn who succeeded in analysing them to reveal a layer between the E and F layers of the ionosphere. With Radio Research Board colleagues George Munro and J.H. “Jack” Piddington, he perfected a “pulse-phase” technique that provided continuous data on the polarisation of reflected radio waves and hence on the dynamics of the layers of the ionosphere from which they were reflected, resolving a debate about which dispersion formula applied to ionospheric reflections. In 1934, his collaboration with Sydney Professor of Physics V.A. Bailey (1895–1964) (Home, 1993) provided a theoretical explanation of the newly discovered “Luxembourg Effect” (cross modulation of radio waves), showing it to be a non-linear effect in the ionosphere. In 1935 he and Green demonstrated that the reflection point of radio waves from the ionosphere could move rapidly. In the same year he developed a theorem relating equivalent height and reflection coefficient at oblique incidence to that at vertical incidence. Whilst he was himself rather self-deprecating about this piece of “simple trigonometry” (Evans, 1973, p. 121), the theorem was widely accepted and applied and became known as “Martyn’s Theorem”.

All of these publications had substantial international impact, as did his 1936 researches with O.O. Pulley on the layers of the upper atmosphere, which yielded several fairly revolutionary assertions, including that above 80 km the temperature rose steadily to values of the order of l000 C. This paper, communicated to the Royal Society by Rutherford, aroused substantial discussion, and its claims have since been verified by post-war research using rockets and satellites. Martyn’s many contributions made him an internationally pre-eminent ionospheric scientist even in those years where only one research trip back to the UK was possible (in 1936). In 1972, Stewart Gillmor surveyed all ionospheric papers published between 1925 to 1960 by 1676 authors. The most cited authors were (1) Appleton, (2) Chapman, (3) Ratcliffe and (4) Martyn (Piddington & Oliphant, 1971; Home, 2000; Evans, 1973, p. 188).

We note here that it was at this time that solar research in Australia began to develop under the stimulus of Madsen, Martyn and others in the Radio Research Board, who were interested in better understanding the sun, since solar radiation produced the structural complexity of the ionosphere. By 1930, Madsen had sought connections to the Mt. Stromlo Solar Observatory, located near Australia’s capital of Canberra (some 3.5 hours’ drive from Sydney today and considerably more distant in travel time in 1930). A.J. Higgs collaborated with both the Sydney and the Melbourne team, using an atmospherics recorder, a cathode ray direction finder and then building his own manual ionosonde, to explore connections between solar activity and auroral displays, “magnetic storms”, and radio fading (Evans, 1973, p. 107).Footnote 12 Higgs’s pulse-echo recordings became an essential segment of ionospheric research at Sydney. By 1937 the research program at Mt. Stromlo employed two investigators almost full time, and the Radio Research Board was approaching the Observatory authorities to initiate investigations on the spectra of solar eruptive zones and other solar factors that influenced the ionisation of the upper atmosphere, plans that would be disrupted by war. When the Mt. Stromlo Director retired just prior to World War II, Martyn was a strong candidate for his replacement.Footnote 13 This research and the connections between Sydney’s radio researchers and the Mt. Stromlo astronomers would be very important in the years to come.Footnote 14

As well as indicating the calibre and range of Martyn’s research, this very brief precis demonstrates how significantly Australian science could develop as a result of investing in high calibre scientists and training for young scientists. All these researchers were, or would become, close colleagues of Pawsey. And the Radio Research Board’s investment in human resources had other crucial, but largely unforeseen, impacts.

First, Evans’s analysis of the history of the Radio Research Board identifies the significant contributions that the Board made to the development of scientific culture in Australia—partly as a result of the frequent interchange of scientific visits to the UK (and the USA) and vice versa; partly because radio researchers often delivered special courses and colloquia to augment teaching at the Universities (Evans, 1973, p. 94); and especially in training postgraduate researchers, with at least 16 scientists gaining postgraduate degrees as a result of support from the Board (Evans, 1973, p. 92). Most went on to distinguished careers.

Secondly, the Radio Research Board was an important supplier of trained personnel to industry. When A.L. Green left the Board to join the staff of the large telecommunications company AWA (Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia)), a formal Board memorandum noted somewhat tartly that it was decided to send the Executive a note “and to point out that the Board has now supplied Messrs AWA Ltd with three Officers” (Evans, 1973, p. 113). W. Baker, G. Builder, H.B. Wood and O.O. Pulley likewise worked in industry during the later 1930s. And of course, all the early Radio Research Board appointees, except Huxley (he returned to the UK when job insecurity was at its peak in 1931), would be key contributors to the wartime radar research program. Perhaps most importantly, the third point to be made is that, had the Board been terminated in the Depression era as was very nearly the case, then Australia would not have had the trained personnel available to pursue the radar research program that provided such crucial defence capability during the war.

We also note that although the Radio Research Board was clearly constituted within the structures of Empire (Egaña & Anduaga, 2009), it held a clear international outlook. Radio communications itself, and Marconi’s and other major companies, were supra-national in outlook (Evans, 1973, p. 114)—as, indeed, was meteorological science. There were many close links between the Radio Research Board and Appleton’s research group; for example, Radio Research Board scientists O.O. Pulley (1906–1966) and G. Builder (1906–1960)Footnote 15 were Australian graduates who spent time working with Appleton before returning to join the ionospheric research team in Sydney, as did Fred White from New Zealand.Footnote 16 Jack Piddington interrupted his Walter and Eliza Hall Research Fellowship to gain experience at Cambridge with Appleton. Board scientists were connected to Sir Robert Watson-Watt’s program of research in atmospherics,Footnote 17 with Munro and others training at Watson-Watt’s research station at Slough.

But their connections were not only with the UK. The scientists encouraged correspondence and visitors from the USA, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere. Lloyd Berkner (1905–1967), the prominent entrepreneurial American ionospheric researcher, spent 6 months at the Watheroo Observatory in Western Australia (Evans, 1973, p. 115; Home, 1983) and then some weeks at Sydney and Melbourne, as part of a world tour on behalf of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and prepared a report jointly with Martyn on collaboration between the Radio Research Board and the Carnegie Institution. This international outlook and especially the US connections, would become important in the post-war years.Footnote 18

In the end, Board scientists published more than 110 papers in the period 1928–1940, developed impressive experience in instrument design and adaptation, built extremely close links with British radio science and an identity in the global networks beginning to develop in radio and meteorology.

Having sketched the organisational environment and scientific colleagues of the institution where Joe Pawsey was to begin his research career, we turn to a brief history of the research questions and methods in ionospheric research (such as the “frequency change” and “pulse-echo” methods of ionospheric sounding), and the role played by significant British researchers Sir Edward Appleton, J.A. Ratcliffe, and Reginald Smith-Rose, to understand the intellectual background to his early career.