In today’s world a number of fields use radar to help them observe the world around them, but how was this technology developed, and how does it work? Well as far as its development is concerned there isn’t one true inventor of radar, it’s more like a group of people who worked on the same project around the same time and shared ideas invented radar together yet separately. One thing we do know is that Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell composed the Electromagnetic Field theory, which states the shape and speed of electromagnetic waves. James Clerk Maxwell developed this theory in 1865; his ideas would be expanded on by other inventor and thinkers to come, including Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, who is now thought of as a pioneer of radio communication. Radar technology didn’t really become a viable field of study until around the Second World War, when the threat imposed by Germany grew into a race to defend allied countries and their borders. The first country to use radar in a defensive capacity was Great Britain, by the start of the war they had 19 stations that used radar to detect enemy aircraft, and by the wars end there were 50 stations setup. …show more content…
Radar works by sending out an ultra-high frequency wave in a specific direction and then calculating how long it takes for the signal to return and how far away the object it reflected off of is. They can tell this because an electromagnetic wave (EM wave) has a constant speed, so if it takes shorter or longer for that wave to make its return journey to the transmitter than they know that it hit something. Because electromagnetic waves (EM waves) travel at a known constant speed of 2.998 x 108 meters per second which is referred to as “c”, scientists can extrapolate the distance “r” based on the formula “r =