Dr. R. L. Smith-Rose

Abstract

THE Radio Department of the National Physical Laboratory is, as were the two organizations by the fusion of which it was formed in 1933, occupied almost wholly on work within the programme of the Radio Research Board, and Dr. R. L. Smith-Rose, whose appointment as superintendent of the Department was announced in these columns last week, has been associated with the work of the Board from its formation. Dr. Smith-Rose, who was born in 1894, studied at the Imperial College of Science and has, alone and in collaboration with departmental colleagues, published an impressive array of important papers, some seventy in number, on radio direction-finding, the propagation and attenuation of radio waves, the properties of ultra-short waves, the screening of radio circuits and the measurement of radio field-intensity. His principal work has been in the laying of the scientific foundations of radio direction-finding, alike as an aid to navigation by sea and air and as an essential element in studying the properties and propagation of radio waves in general. From the first adequate survey of the accuracy of closed-coil direction-finding, when the instrument was the main contributor to the quite serious inaccuracies found, he and his co-workers have continued over the greater part of twenty years an advance which has brought them now, using “the most perfect direction-finder in the world”, to the estimation of the natural (propagational) limits to the accuracy of practical direction-finding. The greatest individual landmark on this road was the rediscovery and extension of the Adcock system for the reduction of errors due to horizontal electric forces in the received wave front. The National Physical Laboratory may justly be proud of the fact that the principle embodied in every good direction-finding installation in the world to-day is due initially to one member of its staff, Adcock, and owes its great development to two others, Smith-Rose and Bar field.