Abstract
Many of the male scientists of Australia had enlisted and were participating in the war in Europe beginning in September 1939. Thus as Australia became a major target for the Japanese armed forces in December 1941, women scientists had for the first time, an opportunity for employment outside the usual avenues in health services and education. In the 1930s, the University of Sydney Appointments Board had conducted surveys of job advertisements in major Australian newspapers, finding that sex was a major factor for most employers in choosing an applicant. Hence female science graduates were urged to learn to type and perform shorthand (Carey 2002). But Carey then writes of the 1941 Sydney Board:
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Notes
- 1.
“Departing from their Sphere? Australian Women in Science, 1880–1960.” In: Xavier Pons (ed.) Departures: How Australia Reinvents Itself, p. 181. (2002).
- 2.
Payne-Scott and Freeman. Rachel Makinson worked at University of Sydney, partially supported by RPL. The total staff at this time was about 300 (Evans 1970).
- 3.
The total number of women in the armed forces of Australia from 1941 to 1946 was about 65,000 (Thomson 1991) with 27,000 in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF), 24,000 in the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) and only 2,000 in the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS). About 4,000 women served as nurses in separate branches of the air force and army. The total number of males to serve in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in WWII was about 200,000.
- 4.
As was Payne-Scott, Florence McKenzie (née Wallace) was a graduate of Sydney Girls High School. She was the first woman radio amateur (ham) in Australia.
- 5.
In Australian Women at War, 1984, page 210 by Patsy Adam-Smith—an additional book with the same title as the Bayne volume.
- 6.
RDF (Radio Direction Finding) was the British term which evolved into the US acronym RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging). This term was invented by S. M. Tucker of the US Navy in 1940 (Louis Brown 1999). As Hanbury Brown (1991) wrote: “Some years later we [the British] adopted the name Radar which, as Watson-Watt [one of the UK inventors of Radar] used to say in mildly disparaging tones was a ‘synthetic palindrome invented by our friends the Americans’.” The British adopted the new term RADAR after 1 July 1943; likely the Australians also changed terminology at about this time.
- 7.
Sources for this text are: The WAAAF in Wartime Australia by Joyce Thomson 1991(former WAAAF Squadron Officer 1941–1944), the Bowen archive in National Archives of Australia-NAA: C4661,1, “History No. 1 Radio School, Section 17, RAAF Station Richmond”, written by an unnamed source from the RAAF Historical Section in 1987 and Simmons and Smith Radar Yarns, 1991.
- 8.
In the UK, women played major roles in the operation of the Chain Home radar stations, especially in the Battle of Britain (Rowe 1948). Rowe wrote: “All honour to the women who shared with the men the often primitive and isolated conditions at the radar stations and who carried on with their tasks when the stations were attacked by the enemy.”
- 9.
At first there was quite some reluctance to train the women: “Naturally, instructors sometimes found it embarrassing, but, generally speaking the WAAAF’s soon proved themselves capable operators.” (Bowen archive NAA: C4661,1, author unnamed source from the RAAF Historical Section). The first school for women was in June 1942 with a 4 week course followed by a 12 week trainee course at a radar station in Eastern Australia. Most of the commanding officers of radar units (with rank of Pilot Officer or Ground Radar Officer) were trained in longer courses at the University of Sydney, the “Bailey Boys” after Professor Victor A. Bailey (Fielder-Gill et al. 1999). The courses lasted 3–5 months and produced 249 graduates from September 1941 to March 1944. There were 160 RAAF, 14 in the Royal Australian Navy and 75 in the Army. At the end of the war there were about 300 radar officers among the roughly 5,000 men and women working in ground, air and naval radar.
- 10.
Excellent reminisces of RAAF and especially WAAAF veterans of WWII can be found on the web with the two series of Radar Yarns collections by Ed Simmons and Norm Smith www.radarreturns.net.au/archive/Radar%20YarnsRRWS.pdf (originally from 1991). Then More Radar Yarns www.radarreturns.net.au/archive/More%20Radar%20YarnsRRWS.pdf (from 1992). In addition their excellent history of the use of Allied air warning radar in the Pacific war, Echoes over the Pacific (1995), can be found at www.radarreturns.net.au/archive/EchoesRRWS.pdf.
- 11.
Based on the personnel file of Payne-Scott, this deliberation was likely the first occasion that F. W. G. White and Payne-Scott had an interaction. White had just arrived in Sydney a few months earlier (March 1941) on secondment from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Zealand. In a 17 June letter Martyn reported: “Professor White informs me that Dr. [E.] Marsden [the Director of Scientific Developments at the DSIR in Wellington, New Zealand] has told him that he does not propose to release Walker.” Thus the position for Payne-Scott opened up since Walker was to remain in New Zealand.
- 12.
Pawsey (1908–1962) was originally from Victoria and had studied at the University of Melbourne. He completed a Ph.D. degree with J. A. Ratcliffe at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in the years 1931–1934. He joined the RPL (also from EMI in the UK) as one of the first scientific appointments from late 1939, starting work on 2 February 1940. Pawsey was the major driving force (along with Bowen) for the development of radio astronomy in Australia at the CSIR/CSIRO starting in 1944.
- 13.
Other prominent appointments at RPL in mid-1941 were B. F. C. Cooper (graduate in 1941 from Electrical Engineering, Sydney University, who played a major role in the Darwin radar response to the Japanese attacks in early 1942, and had a long career at RPL working on radio astronomy instrumentation and aircraft landing systems), F. J. Kerr (from Melbourne University and the Radio Research Board with a later career at CSIR/CSIRO and the University of Maryland as one of the pioneers in 21 cm HI research), and Joan Freeman (from Physics, University of Sydney and later at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in the UK).
- 14.
Joan Jelley, née Freeman, left Australia on a CSIR Fellowship in August 1946; after gaining a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics at the University of Cambridge, she had an illustrious career at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, in Harwell, UK. In 1976, she shared the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics with R. J. Blin-Stoyle. Freeman married the physicist John Jelley (of Cerenkov radiation fame) in 1958; the two had met in Cambridge in 1948. John Jelley died in 1997, preceding his wife’s passing by 8 months; Joan Freeman died on 18 March 1998 in Oxford. Nessy Allen (1990) has written a fascinating account of the lives of Freeman and Makinson, “Australian Women in Science—A Comparative Study of Two Physicists”.
- 15.
In a few publications in Australia during the last 10 years, the claim has been made that Payne-Scott was also a smoker; this claim is quite unlikely based on comments from her family and friends.
- 16.
- 17.
Letter from Mills to Goss, 14 September 1997.
- 18.
This term was invented by Harold Friis of Bell Labs in 1944. Friis was the supervisor of Karl Jansky (Sullivan 2009). In the current era the common usage is “noise temperature” to describe the sensitivity of the radio astronomy or radar receiver. As an example, the typical 200 MHz receiver of the 1945 era would have a noise figure of about 6 dB or 860 K. A modern 3 GHz receiver in 2009 would have a noise figure of only about 0.22 dB, a noise temperature of only 15 K.
- 19.
The following six paragraphs have been provided by Robert Hayward.
- 20.
dB is a decibel, defined as ten times the log of the power ratio. For example 3 dB is a factor of 2, 10 dB is a factor of 10 and 20 dB is a factor of 100.
- 21.
From RP211 “A Thermal Generator for Absolute Measurement of Receiver Noise Factor at 10 cm”, 29 May 1944, author Ruby Payne-Scott.
- 22.
Bowen (1947, page 7 of the 1954 edition) has remarked on the remarkable dynamic range (the ratio of the maximum signal to the noise in the system) required by radar systems. The transmitted pulse was typically 105 W while the received energy from the target was roughly 10−14 W. “The overall operating efficiency is therefore 10−19 and it is a great tribute to the pioneers of radar that they persisted in their efforts to attain apparently impossible ends.” Note that this footnote in Under the Radar had an incorrect exponent of +14 for the received signal.
- 23.
In early 1941, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) had called a meeting of all Federal Unions with women members for a discussion of policy on the role of women in Australian industry. After adopting a resolution proposing that women be paid an equal wage, the full body of the ACTU adopted this position in June 1941 at a time when the average rate of pay for women was only 54 % of that of males. The resolution had six conditions including details about creating wage parity for women. Connected to Payne-Scott’s problems in 1950 about her marriage (Chap. 10), there was the important final provision, “…the removal of all restrictions on the employment of married women in gainful occupations and the recognition of their right to economic independence” (Bayne 1943, page 56).
- 24.
The story of Payne-Scott’s objections to the WEB decision of 1949 is described in Appendix H of Under the Radar (2009). This controversial decision was also confusing to CSIRO female employees; the decrease did not apply to individuals appointed before 6 June 1949. In addition the salaries of newly appointed or transferred female personnel were set at the reduced scale. Ruby’s suggestion (Payne-Scott 1949b) was simple: “The best advice to the women concerned is to stick like glue to their present fields of work till the situation is defined.” In the December article in the Bulletin, Ruby complained in a sarcastic tone about the new WEB and CSIRO ruling. The public meeting in late 1949 to discuss this problem with the new Chairman of CSIRO (Sir Ian Clunies Ross) is described in Chap. 10. In 1951, the professional women of CSIRO lost the case for wage parity in a decision made by the Public Service Arbitrator. Only in 1977 was the gender gap in wages substantially reduced. See Wilde, 1998 (Unions in CSIRO: Part of the Equation) and Under the Radar (2009).
- 25.
This advanced radar system remained the only military project at RPL after the war. (NAA: C3830, D1/2 “Programme of the Division of Radiophysics”, dated 8 August 1946) Bowen presented a report of the future activities of RPL. A detailed description of the AWH Mark II was presented: “The Radiophysics Laboratory was formed to develop radar equipment for the Armed Forces and during the war years its programme was determined by their requirements…. This development was started during the war and was so nearly completed at the end of hostilities that under pressure from the Air Force it was decided to complete the construction and perform field tests. [The new radar] … is approaching the test stage at our field station at Georges Heights [Middle Harbour]… It is expected that the design will form the basis of peacetime radar sets for the Air Force and for various civil purposes.”
- 26.
Letter to Goss from Mills, 14 September 1997.
- 27.
“Notes on the Research Colloquium held on 30/1/45” by Payne-Scott. (NAA: C3830, D4.) For the first time visibility was defined: “Visibility is in terms of the reciprocal of the power of the minimum visible signal” Thus the smaller the detected signal (for a more distant object) the higher the visibility. The presentation seems to have been controversial based on a number of questions. The advantages of the newer PPI displays compared with the more traditional A type display (simple display of the distance to the target based on the time delay of the echo with no determination of the direction to the target) were discussed by Payne-Scott. She answered questions about the signal to noise of the detection and also the role of the pulse repetition frequency in affecting the observed visibility.
- 28.
McCready in The Textbook of Radar, edited by E.G. Bowen (first edition 1947 and second edition 1954) Chap. 11 “Receivers”, described the results of the Payne-Scott research. He pointed out that the signal to noise of a radar receiver is not limited by the noise factor of the receiver but by the sensitivity of the cathode ray tube. He wrote: “Payne-Scott has shown that under these conditions we can detect a signal whose power is 15–18 dB below the noise power, depending upon the type of detector….” He summarised the 1948 publication of the Proc IRE publication by Payne-Scott and concludes “Although many existing radar systems can detect signals whose powers are of the same order as noise in the input circuits, it is preferable to calculate the sensitivity at the cathode ray tube making use of the basic theory and charts in Payne-Scott’s paper.”
- 29.
Interview B. Y. Mills with Goss, 1 April 2007.
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Goss, W.M. (2013). Wartime Research by Ruby Payne-Scott at the Radiophysics Laboratory. In: Making Waves. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35752-7_5
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