horn antenna

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner  · 15 Mar 2012  · 550pp  · 154,725 words

, some built from concrete blocks and others from steel girders, most located on hillsides (or in some cases on tall urban buildings), topped by special horn-shaped antennas, vaguely resembling megaphones, which had been invented at Bell Labs largely under the direction of Harald Friis, the head of Bell Labs’ Holmdel, New

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Jersey, research office.22 Usually, two horn-shaped antennas on the towers would receive calls; a repeater apparatus inside the tower would amplify them; and then two other horn

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-shaped antennas, facing the opposite way, would instantly relay them to the next tower in the phone

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moved across the sky. In this regard, a third existing technology appeared vital. It was the horn antenna, which had been designed by Bell Labs’ Harald Friis at the rural Holmdel lab in southern New Jersey. Horn antennas were already a crucial component in microwave towers across the country: They allowed for the reception

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rushed over to tell John, and he agreed right away that the maser would make all the difference.”5 So now there were transistors, the horn antenna, the traveling wave tube, solar cells, and the maser. Even with the right electronic components, though, communications satellites weren’t going anywhere yet. There was

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the ground might be so faint—perhaps a millionth of a billionth of the originally transmitted signal—that the task demanded extraordinarily sensitive equipment (huge horn antennas, expensive masers, and the like) for receiving even a single voice transmission. That wouldn’t be the case with an active satellite, which could broadcast

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Hill but on Jakes in Holmdel, thirty miles south. Holmdel was where Pierce’s friend Harald Friis had worked and where he had invented the horn antenna. And it was where Pierce’s other good friend Rudi Kompfner, the traveling wave tube inventor, had now taken charge upon Friis’s retirement in

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engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Goldstone, California, just south of Death Valley. The Echo team, meanwhile, had also designed and requisitioned an immense horn antenna (the cost was about $128,000) resembling a kind of huge empty tobacco pipe, which would receive signals sent from the Jet Propulsion station in

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was, in essence, a simple two-way conversation, but one made possible through an immensely complex electronic infrastructure on each edge of the continent. The horn antenna on Crawford Hill would be “steerable.” That is to say, it would be mounted on a circular track so that it could swivel according to

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the predicted path of the satellite. Near the base of the horn antenna, the Echo team would install the supercooled maser that would amplify the faint signals. It was true, to a large extent, that the satellite project

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the transmission and receiving equipment. Jakes would park himself in front of a laboratory bench loaded with equipment that showed whether the satellite dishes and horn antenna were tracking properly. He would watch the dials constantly. On May 12, Jakes and his colleagues spent the night there following the countdown from Cape

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projects he rarely doubted the capability of his fellow Bell engineers.36 As it happened, the crowd he joined at Crawford Hill was using their horn antenna only as voyeurs. Officially, Telstar was being tracked and guided at a new installation, built on a thousand acres purchased by AT&T in a

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. Dubbed “Space Hill,” the Maine installation was located in a bowl of mountains that minimized radio interference. The centerpiece of the site was a mammoth horn antenna, 177 feet long, far larger than the one at Crawford Hill, that sat atop a rotating base. To make sure that the Maine weather would

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balloon during summer nights in 1960, is sometimes used for wireless research. Atop the hill, light breezes blow in from the Atlantic, and the old horn antenna, though rusted now, remains intact. A plaque nearby designates the site as a national historic landmark. And at the bottom of the hill, there is

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, Jean, 181 Holmdel, 213–17, 278, 281 Black Box, 284–85, 331, 338, 339, 340, 354 Crawford Hill, 214–18, 220, 223, 258, 259, 340 horn antenna, 173–74, 206, 207, 209, 215, 223 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 354–55 How to Build and Fly Gliders (Pierce), 189, 190, 192, 200 Hughes

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romantic. Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images Bettmann/Corbis Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center FAINT AND DISTANT SIGNALS: TOP: The large horn antenna atop Crawford Hill—located a few miles from the Black Box in Holmdel—that was built for the Echo satellite experiment and later served to

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

by Emma Chapman  · 23 Feb 2021  · 265pp  · 79,944 words

, American astronomers Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Allan Penzias were wondering what to do about the two pigeons nesting in their 6m (20ft) square horn antenna. The antenna at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in New Jersey had been built five years before as a communication conduit to satellites. They designed the strange sideways

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the latest episode of The Archers ends up covering our desired astronomical signal. The restricted focus of the antenna on the sky made the Holmdel Horn Antenna an excellent device for taking astronomical observations of the sky, without ground-based interference. Penzias and Wilson had decided to co-opt the communications antenna

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,420MHz because, if there was a halo of hydrogen, it would be sure to emit radiation at this wavelength. The previous users of the Holmdel Horn Antenna had left it set to receive a frequency of 4,080MHz. Coincidentally, the theorised Milky Way halo would be invisible at those frequencies. This was

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transparent to radiation. Together, the spectrum of the photons followed a blackbody distribution. It is this radiation that Penzias and Wilson measured with the Holmdel Horn Antenna. This cosmic microwave background radiation is every­where because it pervaded every part of the tiny, hot Universe when it exploded from a singularity. The

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-R) diagrams here, here, here Hill-Brown theory here Hindenburg airship here Hiroshima, Japan here Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) here Holmdel Horn Antenna here, here, here Holst, Gustav here Hubble, Edwin here Hubble flow of galaxies here Hubble Space Telescope here, here, here, here, here, here, here Hubble

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timescale of just over 100 years ‘The Cosmic Spectrum’ by Katie Paterson. Photo by Manu Palomeque. Cecilia PayneGaposchkin. Penzias and Wilson stare at the Holmdel Horn Antenna at Bell Telephone Laboratories The Planck cosmic microwave background map. Stromatolites in Shark Bay, Western Australia. The Cosmic Web. The simulated dark matter distribution (left

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past)

by Cixin Liu  · 11 Nov 2014  · 420pp  · 119,928 words

?” “It’s a sort of science toy we made for the Capital Planetarium. With our current level of technology, we could take the six-meter horn antenna used by Penzias and Wilson almost half a century ago to discover the cosmic microwave background and miniaturize it to the size of a pair

Big Bang

by Simon Singh  · 1 Jan 2004  · 492pp  · 149,259 words

, and after its completion he too abandoned academia and headed for Bell Labs. Wilson was partly attracted to Bell Labs because of its 6-metre horn radio antenna sited at nearby Crawford Hill, shown in Figure 96. This was originally designed to detect signals from the innovative Echo balloon satellite, which had

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in this sector of the communications industry persuaded AT&T to withdraw from the Echo project for economic reasons, leaving the horn antenna free to be transformed into a radio telescope. The horn antenna was doubly suited for radio astronomy: it was largely shielded from local radio interference, and its size meant that it

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the noise and, if possible, reduce it or remove it completely. Figure 96 Robert Wilson (left) and Arno Penzias posing in front of Bell Laboratories’ horn antenna at Crawford Hill, New Jersey. This radio telescope is essentially a giant glorified radio receiver. Its aperture is 6 metres square and the monitoring equipment

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were patched up with aluminium tape just to be sure. At one point, attention focused on a pair of pigeons that had nested inside the horn antenna. Penzias and Wilson thought that the ‘white dielectric material’ deposited by the pigeons and smeared on the horn might be the cause of the noise

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Barberini, Francesco 74 Barnard’s Star 240 BBC 351,352 Bell, Jocelyn 167-8, 400 Bell Laboratories 402-3, 406, 422, 424—5, 431—2; horn antenna radio telescope 425-9, 427, 437, 439 Bellarmine, Cardinal 74 beryllium 391-3, 392, 396 Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm 174-7, 176, 195 Betelgeuse 238 Bethe

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton  · 19 Sep 2016  · 1,048pp  · 187,324 words

studied by detectives in training. 900 West Baltimore Street, Baltimore. 39.289109 76.632637 Tiny forensic dollhouses train detectives to solve crimes. NEW JERSEY Holmdel Horn Antenna HOLMDEL In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered one of the greatest secrets of the universe. The radio astronomers were using the Bell

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Labs horn antenna to scan for radio waves being bounced off NASA communications satellites. To Penzias’s and Wilson’s annoyance, an ever-present low hum interfered with

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discovery provided the first observational evidence that the universe began with a Big Bang. The discovery earned them a Nobel Prize in Physics. The decommissioned horn antenna they used for their explosive discovery is now a National Historic Landmark. Holmdel Road and Longview Drive, Holmdel. 40.390760 74.184652 Once the pigeons

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Last Breath, 328 Electronic Museum, 80 Ether Dome, 372 Gottfried Knoche’s Mummy Lab, 411 Griffith Observatory’s Tesla Coil, 281 Hessdalen AMS, 107 Holmdel Horn Antenna, 356 IceCube Research Station, 447 Instituto Butantan, 394 Integratron, 279 Mapimí Silent Zone, 417 Marconi National Historic Site, 268 Mark I, 372 Moore Lab of

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, 44, 46 Historic Voodoo Museum, 346 Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, 183 Hoba Meteorite, 214 Hobbiton, 240 Hoegh Pet Caskets, 327 Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 281 Holmdel Horn Antenna, 356 Holy Land, USA, 366 Holy Right, 80 Holyrood Abbey Ruins, 20 Hook & Ladder 8, 359 Horca del Inca, 389 Horsetail Fall, 286 Hot Water

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

by Johnjoe McFadden  · 27 Sep 2021

Laboratories to work on a project to map the stars with microwaves. Both stare at the sky. Both are baffled. FIGURE 1: Bell Telephone Laboratories’ horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, with Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Microwaves, radiation with wavelengths anywhere between a millimetre and a metre, had been discovered nearly

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microwaves. With both emitter and detector technology available, a new means of wireless communication was on the cards. In 1959, Bell Laboratories built the Holmdel horn antenna to detect microwaves bounced off satellites. However, interest waned and shifted to alternative wireless communication technologies so Bell took to lending out the antenna to

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colleague of Penzias and Wilson attended one of these meetings and passed on news about the Princeton team’s efforts to the pair. Could the horn antenna’s persistent microwave hiss be the signal that Dicke was looking for? Penzias decided to give Robert Dicke a call. It came through when Dicke

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‘brown bag lunch’ meeting in his office at Princeton. His colleagues remember Dicke picking up the call and listening intently, occasionally repeating phrases such as ‘horn antenna’ or ‘excess noise’ and nodding. Finally, putting down the receiver, he turned to his group and said, ‘Well, boys, we’ve been scooped.’ Dicke realised

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that Penzias and Wilson had discovered the Big Bang. The next day, Dicke and his team drove to the Bell laboratories, to admire the horn antenna and take a closer look at the data. They returned convinced that Penzias and Wilson had indeed discovered the microwave remnant of the Big Bang

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beyond necessity’. ‘Entities’ refers to the parts of an hypothesis, explanation or model of any particular system. So, if you unexpectedly detect microwaves in your horn antenna, look for familiar entities to explain the phenomenon, such as radar facilities or pigeons, before inventing new ones, like Big Bangs. As far as we

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in the Big Bang to provide the flash of radiation that, 13.8 billion years later, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson detected with their horn antenna parked on a hilltop in New Jersey. Yet Penzias and Wilson would never have been on that hilltop, nor would there have been a hilltop

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

by Michael Spitzer  · 31 Mar 2021  · 632pp  · 163,143 words

. 284. 71Ian Mabbett, ‘Buddhism and Music’, Asian Music 25/1–2 (1993), pp. 9–28. Chapter 5 1Penzias and Wilson were using a twenty-foot horn antenna that had originally been designed to detect radio waves bouncing off Echo balloon satellites. ‘How Two Pigeons Helped Scientists Confirm the Big Bang Theory’, https

Collider

by Paul Halpern  · 3 Aug 2009  · 279pp  · 75,527 words

description of the genesis of the universe. A critical confirmation of the theory came in 1965 when Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson pointed a horn antenna into space and discovered a constant radio hiss in all directions with a temperature of around three degrees above absolute zero (the lower limit of

Day We Found the Universe

by Marcia Bartusiak  · 6 Apr 2009  · 412pp  · 122,952 words

's accomplishment resembled that of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson several decades later. In 1964 the two Bell Laboratory researchers were calibrating a massive horn-shaped antenna in New Jersey in preparation for some radio astronomy observations and registered an unexpected cosmic radio noise wherever they looked on the sky, spending months