{"id":327,"date":"2015-01-23T14:01:28","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T14:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/?p=327"},"modified":"2015-01-26T16:53:18","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T16:53:18","slug":"churchills-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/2015\/01\/23\/churchills-scientists\/","title":{"rendered":"Churchill’s Scientists<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Winston<\/a>

Winston Churchill in 1942{credit}The US Library of Congress{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Science both shaped and was shaped by Winston Churchill<\/a> (1874\u20131965),\u00a0twice prime minister of Britain, iconic orator and writer. That relationship is explored in an exhibition at London\u2019s Science Museum marking the 50th anniversary of Churchill\u2019s death. Nature<\/i> spoke to Andrew Nahum, lead curator for Churchill\u2019s Scientists<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0about his favourites of the objects on show.<\/p>\n

Watson-Watt\u2019s radio receiver
\n<\/b><\/h3>\n

Much has been written about how radar may have given Britain the edge in fighting the Nazi Luftwaffe\u2019s bombing raids during the Second World War. But by the war’s start, radar was still an experimental technology in development by a number of nations, including the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and Germany.<\/p>\n

On display is a shortwave radio receiver used by Scottish radar pioneer Robert Watson-Watt and his colleague Arnold Wilkins in a secret experiment in 1935 \u2014 a time when the UK government was aware of the need for air defence against Nazi Germany. Explains Nahum, \u201cthe idea that you could get a radio reflection wasn\u2019t new. It was just a question of whether you\u2019d get a reflection off an aeroplane that was measurable.\u201d Watson-Watt and Wilkins drove the equipment to Daventry, in England\u2019s East Midlands, to a site near a powerful short-wave transmitter \u2014 a BBC radio mast. They then arranged for a pilot to fly a bomber past.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Watson-Watt’s original radio receiver, used in 1935<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cOn the ground the boffins were looking at their cathode ray tube and saw a green spot on the oscilloscope grow and diminish as the aircraft crossed. That showed they had detected the short-wave BBC signal reflected from the bomber,\u201d says Nahum. \u201cWatson-Watt allegedly said, \u2018Britain is an island once more.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Galley proofs of Churchill\u2019s war memoirs<\/b><\/h3>\n

Churchill\u2019s memoirs of the conflict, The Second World War<\/i><\/a>, were published from 1948 to 1953 in six volumes \u2014 undoubtedly contributing to his winning the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature.\u00a0 Alongside details of battles against Germany\u2019s \u2018Desert Fox\u2019, Field Marshall Rommel, in North Africa and politicking with Stalin, Churchill dedicated a not-insignificant amount of space to science.<\/p>\n

He personally corrected thousands of printers\u2019 proofs. Those on view \u2014 extracted from his chapter \u2018The Wizard War\u2019<\/a> \u2014 tell of the debt owed to wartime scientists, singling out the Battle of the Beams. This was the radio war that took place when the Luftwaffe started night bombing in the early 1940s. As Churchill wrote, \u201cUnless British science had proved superior to German, and unless its strange, sinister resources had been effectively brought to bear on the struggle for survival, we might well have been defeated\u201d.<\/p>\n

John Kendrew’s ‘Forest of Rods’<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"John<\/a>

John Kendrew’s 1960 ‘Forest of Rods’ model showing the structure of myoglobin{credit}The Science Museum, London{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

This 1960 model, the ‘Forest of Rods’<\/a>, shows the structure of myoglobin and was constructed by chemist John Kendrew. During the war Kendrew had met molecular biologist and X-ray crystallography pioneer J.D. Bernal in the Far East, \u201cwhile they were waiting for an elephant to bring up explosives\u201d, says Nahum. Kendrew thereafter set out to solve the structure of myoglobin.<\/p>\n

In his model, coloured clips on the rods indicate the electron density. Nahum avers that this \u201cicon of British molecular biology\u201d should be seen as on a par with Watson and Crick\u2019s DNA structure.<\/p>\n

Aldermaston high-speed camera<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"High-speed<\/a>

High-speed camera used to capture the detonation of ‘Churchill’s bomb’ in 1952{credit}The Science Museum, London{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

After the war, Churchill was eager for Britain to gain knowledge of atomic science. When the United States refused to share the fruits of the Manhattan Project, some of \u2018Churchill\u2019s scientists\u2019 were enlisted to build a British bomb by the new 1945 Labour government of Clement Attlee. \u00a0(See Richard Rhodes\u2019 review<\/a> of Graham Farmelo\u2019s 2013 book, Churchill\u2019s Bomb<\/i>, for more.)<\/p>\n

The Aldermaston high-speed camera was built to photograph the first test of the bomb in 1952. Shutter speeds in conventional cameras moved too slowly, so the camera sports a central mirror; film was laid around the outside. As the mirror spins, it projects the image to be captured onto the film, taking pictures at hundreds of frames per second.<\/p>\n

Churchill\u2019s Scientists is free and opens on 23 January.<\/b><\/p>\n

Correction: The clarification that Clement Attlee was British prime minister while the British bomb was being built has been added to this post.<\/em><\/p>\n

For <\/strong>Nature’<\/b><\/em>s full coverage of science in culture, visit <\/strong>www.nature.com\/news\/booksandarts<\/b><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science both shaped and was shaped by Winston Churchill (1874\u20131965),\u00a0twice prime minister of Britain, iconic orator and writer. That relationship is explored in an exhibition at London\u2019s Science Museum marking the 50th anniversary of Churchill\u2019s death. Nature spoke to Andrew Nahum, lead curator for Churchill\u2019s Scientists,\u00a0about his favourites of the objects on show.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3353,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}