Page, Robert Morris

Robert Morris Page, (born June 2, 1903, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.—died May 15, 1992, Edina, Minnesota), American physicist known as the “father” of U.S. radar.

Page changed his major from theology to physics in his senior year at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating in 1927, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and attended George Washington University (M.A., 1932). In 1934 he began work on developing pulse radar. In spite of its receiving low priority and limited support from the U.S. Navy administration, he successfully demonstrated a radar in 1936 and tested it at sea in 1937. By the time the United States entered World War II, there were 79 radars installed on various ships of the U.S. Navy. These radars, and those that followed, were credited with providing the U.S. Navy a significant advantage over the Japanese navy in the Pacific.

Page, who held 75 patents on inventions in precision electronics, developed the first radar duplexer capable of using a single antenna for transmitting and receiving. He invented the monopulse tracking radar, which is still the preferred approach for precision tracking radars and for military applications. He also obtained the patent on the widely used plan position indicator (PPI) radar display, which provides the location and direction of a target on a maplike presentation that is easy to interpret. Page conceived and initiated the first successful demonstration of high-frequency over-the-horizon (HF OTH) radar, whose propagating waves are refracted by the Earth’s ionosphere. The detection of ships, aircraft, and ballistic missiles was thereby extended out to about 3,200 km (2,000 miles), approximately 10 times the range of microwave radars, which are limited to the line of sight by the horizon.

Page successively served at the NRL as a physicist and head of the Radar Research Section (1938–45), superintendent of Radio Division III (1945–52), associate director of research in electronics (1952–57), and director of research (1957–66). He was the recipient of several national awards and the author of The Origin of Radar (1962).