Robert Hanbury Brown is widely known

for his invention and astronomical

exploitation of the intensity interferom-

eter and his clarification of the quantum nature

of light. He also played an important role in

the development of radar and in stimulating a

wide range of researches in the formative years

of Jodrell Bank; he was a respected statesman

in the scientific community in Australia and in

international astronomy.

Robert Hanbury Brown was born on 31

August 1916 in Nilgiri Hills, India, into an

Indian Service family. He was educated at

Tonbridge School, took a first-class degree in

electrical engineering at Brighton Technical

College and then embarked on a research

degree at Imperial College (IC). He indulged

his interest in flying by making the inaugural

flight of the newly formed London University

Air Squadron. While still a research student,

his talents were spotted by Sir Henry Tizard,

the Rector of IC, who encouraged him in 1935

to apply for a post in the Air Ministry which he

discovered later was involved with the secret

development of radar.

Hanbury Brown’s background and natural

abilities were given full rein in the hand-picked

team doing pioneering research in radar under

the leadership of Robert Watson-Watt. As a 20-

year-old he was assigned to the receiver section

of the Radio Location and Direction Finding

group at Bawdsey Manor and its outstation at

Orfordness on the east coast. With a good head

for heights, he readily installed equipment on

the 240 ft high masts surveying the North Sea.

He moved on to Air Interception radar where

he vividly recalled the challenges of installing

and testing radar systems in aircraft bristling

with Yagi aerials. At the onset of war there was

an urgent requirement, at Churchill’s insistence,

to develop and install user-friendly radar equip-

ment in aircraft. Hanbury Brown enjoyed the

challenge of applying this new technique to an

operational problem. It also resulted in his

losing the hearing in one ear when, in 1941, he

became disconnected from his oxygen supply in

a Beaufighter at 20 000 ft.

He worked for some time on developing bea-

cons for aircraft and ground stations to identify

friend from foe. The beacons used in the allied

invasion of Europe in 1944 were based on his

designs. After a period as head of a scientific

liaison team in the USA during the second half

of the war and then four years as a research con-

sultant, he was keen to explore new pastures.

Hanbury, as he was known to all, came to

Jodrell Bank in 1949 on the invitation of

Bernard Lovell, who by then had established a

research programme of radio and radar astron-

omy and had recently constructed a 218 ft

fixed-reflector radio telescope with a tilting

mast. Hanbury threw himself into the research

programme, using the telescope to make the

first radio detection of the Andromeda Nebula

and to detect radio sources in the galactic

plane. His fertile mind spawned relevant

research student projects that generally

involved building your own receivers and

aerial systems. His experience from radar days

was a great help to me personally in building

our first H-line receiver.

He soon became intrigued by the emerging

debate as to whether the radio sources were

galactic or extragalactic – stars were small,

galaxies were large, or so it was then thought.

A radio interferometer of several kilometres

baseline should distinguish between them. The

idea of an intensity interferometer with a

100 km baseline became a dream; in such an

instrument it was not necessary to preserve the

radio frequency phase over long baselines and,

furthermore, scintillation was not the problem

it was for Michelson interferometry. Hanbury,

with two research students Roger Jennison and

M K Das Gupta, made this dream a reality and

successfully measured the diameters of the two

brightest radio sources, Cassiopeia A and

Cygnus A, both of which were several arc-

minutes in diameter. The concept of an inten-

sity interferometer was thereby vindicated

experimentally and a rigorous theoretical treat-

ment was developed in a collaboration with

Richard Twiss from the Services Electronic

Research Laboratory. An application to optical

interferometry then became a major ambition.

The classical work by Michelson had come to

a halt in 1920 when his baseline reached 20 ft.

The intensity interferometer should work out

to kilometre baselines, Hanbury argued.

Before such a project could be launched,

Hanbury Brown and Twiss realized that a labo-

ratory demonstration using these principles

would be necessary. However, on publication of

the results of this experiment there was wide-

spread disbelief. Ultimately the “Hanbury

Brown and Twiss effect” was accepted and

enabled the physics community to think more

fundamentally about the photon nature of light.

In the meantime Hanbury was laying the

foundations of long baseline Michelson inter-

ferometry of radio sources using radio links to

transfer the phase. With Henry Palmer and

research students, he identified a family of

extremely small-diameter sources which ultim-

ately were identified as quasars. Also, in one of

the first observing programmes on the new

250 ft steerable telescope, he and Cyril Hazard

mapped the radio emission from 32 normal

galaxies. At about this time Hanbury made a

sortie into optical astronomy to Pic-du-Midi

Observatory, where he and I used a fish-eye

camera with an H-alpha filter to photograph

the giant radio loop, now known as the North

Polar spur. I came to appreciate Hanbury as a

most innovative and entertaining colleague.

The intensity interferometer came to absorb

most of Hanbury’s time. Following the suc-

cessful laboratory experiment, he and Twiss

built an optical intensity interferometer based

on two war-time search-light mirrors each 5 ft

in diameter. They resolved Sirius on a 30 ft

baseline, giving a diameter of 7.1 milliarc-

seconds. The technique was thus a proven

success; with a flux collector of such a size it

was possible to measure clear correlation even

from a twinkling main-sequence star at low

elevation at Jodrell Bank. Hanbury’s ambition

was then to measure the diameters of a large

number of main-sequence stars on baselines of

100s of metres on a good site. Using his con-

siderable skills of persuasion and his many

contacts from his radar days and later, he

eventually realized his dream in the rolling

farmland of Narrabri, Australia, in a collabo-

ration between the Universities of Manchester

and Sydney. With his team of ex-Jodrell Bank

scientists Cyril Hazard, John Davis and Roy

Allen and the support of Richard Twiss, he

built two 22 ft diameter segmented mirrors on

a circular track of 618 ft diameter. The story of

the heroic effort by this small team to build a

world-leading instrument in an Australian out-

back location are told in his books Boffin and

3.35June 2002 Vol 43

OBITUARIES

Robert Hanbury Brown (1952)

Robert Hanbury Brown 1916–2002Eddington medallist and Associate of the RAS.

The Intensity Interferometer. In all, the diam-

eters of 32 stars were measured to provide the

first temperature scale for hot stars. In his last

years in Sydney, Hanbury worked with John

Davis in designing a Michelson interferometer

which could work with a factor of 10–100

times higher sensitivity.

Hanbury’s contributions to astronomy and

physics were recognized by many awards and

honours. He was an Eddington medallist and

an Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society;

a Fellow and Hughes medallist of the Royal

Society. The award which particularly pleased

him was the Albert Michelson medal of the

Franklin Institute which recognized the mea-

surement of the angular diameter of stars. He

was awarded the Fellowship of the Australian

Academy of Science and he was appointed

Companion of the Order of Australia for

leadership in Australian science. On the inter-

national level, he was president of the Inter-

national Astronomical Union (1982–85),

appropriately when its General Assembly was

held in India, his birthplace; it was a pleasure to

welcome him to the Manchester 2000 GA and

to see the wide regard in which he was held.

During a fruitful and varied career in astron-

omy, Hanbury was supported by his wife

Heather (née Chesterman) who had the same

resourcefulness and sense of adventure; they

had three children. The 15 years of retirement

spent in their home in Hampshire were

characteristically busy; Hanbury wrote his

autobiography Boffin (1992) and his interest in

the relation between science and wider issues

in The Wisdom of Science (1986) and Thereare No Dinosaurs in the Bible, the book

completed just before he died.

Rodney Davies.

3.36 June 2002 Vol 43

OBITUARIES

David Wynn-Williams was a microbiol-

ogist of extraordinary enthusiasm. He

was born in 1946 in Kirby on the

Wirral and at the age of 24 he led his first

university expedition to Iceland from the

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth,

where he had completed his BSc in botany and

microbiology and was working on his PhD in

environmental microbiology.

His taste for adventure and fieldwork

became insatiable and soon found formal

expression when he joined the British Antarctic

Survey in 1974 and overwintered at Signy

Island in 1975 and 1976. During his time at

BAS he pioneered new work on the microbial

communities of Antarctica. He established a

new field site on Alexander Island at 72°S as

head of the Terrestrial Microbiology Section.

The focus of his research was on the survival of

cyanobacteria in extreme polar environments

and the mechanisms they employ to survive

these extremes, including temperature, desicca-

tion and exposure to UV radiation. But

“Wynn” was harbouring other aspirations.

From the age of seven he had a profound

interest in all things astronomical. As the direc-

tion of the space programmes around the

world became focused on the realization that

Mars and the Jovian moon Europa might have

conditions that make them conducive to life, so

David Wynn-Williams saw a new opportunity

to indulge his interests to the full. He never

found such an expression of professional

enthusiasm as he did in the Antarctic

Astrobiology project at BAS, where he made

great efforts to help British leadership in this

emerging area of scientific investigation.

As a person who had worked closely with the

Americans in the Dry Valleys of the Antarctic,

he now expanded his collaborations with

NASA and other organizations as part of his

new focus on the search for biomolecules on

Mars. A miniature FT-Raman spectrometer

coupled with other techniques, such as epi-

fluorescent microscopy, was to be his method

of seeking UV-screening compounds and other

signatures of past life in the subsurface of

Mars. Collaborations with the University of

Montana and the University of Bradford made

this new research possible.

Like all things in which David Wynn-

Williams was involved, he expressed an enjoy-

ment of team involvement. He was frequently

the glue that held together groups of people; his

infectious enthusiasm, consideration and inter-

est in people made him a rare individual. These

attributes were an unusual asset for his work in

Antarctica and found particular importance in

astrobiology, which required an appreciation of

interdisciplinary thinking and the ability to

hold groups of people together who might not

otherwise communicate on a professional level.

From these new space-science directions

Wynn-Williams made significant contributions

to the debate on how to search for life in these

extreme extraterrestrial environments and

advocated strongly the search for signatures of

photosynthetic life on Mars. It would be easy

to focus on astrobiology – it is a noisy science

of enormous interest to the public – but Wynn-

Williams had achieved international recogni-

tion long before his more recent work in this

field. In 1980 he was awarded the Polar Medal

for his contributions to Antarctic science. By

the time he had reached a total of 10 visits to

the Antarctic, he had visited the Ross Island

and Dry Valleys regions as a guest scientist

with the University of Canterbury in New

Zealand and with the American polar pro-

gramme. Further fieldwork took him to Terra

Nova Bay and Northern Victoria Land with

the Italians. As Secretary of the BAS Club he

expressed his love of Antarctic camaraderie

and the traditions of that region of the work,

traditions that are heavily embedded in an

extraordinary history that he relished.

The breadth of his research interests is repre-

sented by his involvement on the editorial

boards of Polar Biology, Extremophiles and

the International Journal of Astrobiology. He

published over 80 research papers. He enjoyed

imparting this knowledge to young people and

he ran a lunchtime science club at Chesterton

Community College in Cambridge that drew in

eminent people from across the country. He

also chaired the parent–teacher association of

the college. This love of teaching followed him

throughout his career, beginning in the 1970s

when he spent a period teaching biological sci-

ence in schools in London and Tonbridge, Kent.

David always found time for singing. Making

full use of his Welsh ancestry, he could be

heard with many groups, among others the

Cambridge Philharmonic Choir.

David Wynn-Williams is survived by his wife

Elizabeth and his two daughters, Cherry and

Rosanna.

Charles S Cockell.

David Wynn-Williams (1946–2002)Fellow of the RAS, adventurous polar microbiologist and leader in the

emerging field of astrobiology.

David Wynn-Williams

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