The Lovell Telescope stands in the fields of Cheshire at Jodrell Bank, a white dish 250 feet across. When it was finished in 1957, it was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Today only two are larger, at Green Bank in West Virginia and Effelsberg in Germany. It exists because of a war, a machine built to find enemy aircraft and a man that decided to point it at the sky.

Radio Waves from Space

Stars and galaxies send out more than visible light. They also send out radio waves, invisible and much longer than light waves. The first person to notice was not an astronomer. In 1932 Karl Jansky, an engineer at Bell Laboratories in the United States, was searching for the sources of static that disturbed telephone calls. He built a rotating antenna to find the direction of the noise. Most of it came from thunderstorms. One faint hiss did not. Its strongest point rose and fell every 23 hours and 56 minutes. That is the length of the Earth’s turn relative to the stars, not the Sun. Jansky matched it to star maps and concluded that the hiss came from the Milky Way, strongest toward its centre in the constellation Sagittarius.

A few years later an American amateur, Grote Reber, made the first rough map of the northern sky in radio waves. Then war came, and it pushed the science forward by accident.

Bernard Lovell

Bernard Lovell grew up in a village on the edge of Bristol. His father ran a barber’s and cycle repair shop. As a schoolboy he built his own radio receivers and a transmitter. At fifteen he went to a public lecture at the University of Bristol, where Professor A. M. Tyndall demonstrated electrical discharges. The lecture turned him to physics. He studied at Bristol and earned his PhD there in 1936.

He wanted to work with the physicist Patrick Blackett on cosmic rays, high-energy particles that arrive from space. Only Manchester offered him a job, so he went there, disappointed. Then in 1937 Blackett became head of physics at Manchester and invited Lovell into his cosmic ray group. In the summer of 1939 Lovell was preparing an expedition to the Pic du Midi observatory in the Pyrenees when the war stopped it. On Blackett’s instructions he joined Britain’s secret radar program.

The War

Radar sends out radio waves and listens for the echoes that bounce back from objects. Lovell spent six years on airborne radar. In 1939 he worked on Chain Home, the line of coastal radar stations that watched for German aircraft. There he trained operators and noticed unexplained echoes, which he suspected might come from cosmic rays striking the upper air.

His main work was H2S, a radar carried inside bombers. It gave crews a rough picture of the ground below, so they could find targets at night or through cloud. It was also used against enemy shipping. The work had a heavy cost. In June 1942 a Halifax bomber testing the system crashed, killing all eleven people on board, among them several of Lovell’s colleagues and the engineer Alan Blumlein. The government considered H2S critical, so the work continued. In 1946 Lovell received the OBE, “Order of British Empire” a national honor awarded by the monarch, for this work.

Designing the bowl-shaped reflectors for these radars taught him how to build large dishes that gather radio waves. That skill shaped the rest of his life.

The war also produced the first radio signal from the Sun. In February 1942 severe jamming blinded British coastal radars for several days. Stanley Hey, a British Army research officer, investigated. He found that the enemy had not caused the interference. It came from sunspots on the Sun. Wartime secrecy kept the discovery unpublished until after the war.

Pointing a Radar at the Sky

In 1945 Lovell returned to Manchester and went back to the strange echoes he had seen in 1939. Through Stanley Hey he borrowed an army gun-laying radar, a set built to aim anti-aircraft guns, and set it up at the university’s physics department. The electric trams on Manchester’s Oxford Road flooded his receiver with interference. He moved the equipment about twenty miles south, to Jodrell Bank, where the university’s botany department had an outstation.

Lovell first switched the radar on on 14 December 1945, at the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. He picked up echoes at once, but far too many to come from cosmic rays. With the help of a friend named Manning Prentice, an amateur meteor observer, he showed that the echoes came from meteors. As meteors burn up high in the atmosphere, they leave trails of charged gas that reflect radio waves. Radar could now detect meteor showers in daylight, when no one can see them. On 13 December 1946, Lovell, Prentice and Hey gave three linked talks to the Royal Astronomical Society. Those talks established radio astronomy as a field of science.

Jodrell Bank grew from war surplus. Lovell collected ex-military radio equipment and a portable cabin, and in 1946 the army lent him a searchlight to use as a mount for antennas. He soon realized he needed a far larger aerial. He built a fixed dish 66 meters across, but it could only watch the strip of sky passing directly overhead.

The Big Dish

His next plan was a giant dish that could turn and tilt to follow any point in the sky. The engineer Charles Husband designed it. Construction began in 1952. The mechanism that tilts the bowl reused the gun turret racks from two retired battleships, the Royal Sovereign and the Revenge.

Nobody had built anything like it, and the cost grew. The original estimate was £335,000. The overspend reached £260,000. Critics called it Lovell’s Folly, Members of Parliament accused him of misusing public money, and at one stage he was even threatened with prison. By 1957 the project seemed close to collapse and his reputation was at serious risk.

Sputnik

The telescope began trials in the summer of 1957. On 4 October the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. The new dish was the only telescope in the world that could track the satellite’s carrier rocket by radar. The world’s newspapers turned to a field in Cheshire. Overnight the expensive folly became a national asset. Work planned to take two months was finished in two days.

The debt did not disappear at once. The government paid about half. A public appeal followed, and schoolchildren sent in their pocket money. In 1960 the telescope tracked the Soviet and American Moon rockets and controlled the American space probe Pioneer V. That year Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors, telephoned Lovell and asked how much was still owed. Lovell said about £80,000. Nuffield said he would send a cheque, and told him he hadn’t done too badly. The observatory was renamed the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories.

After Sputnik

Tracking spacecraft took up less than two percent of the observatory’s research time. The rest went to astronomy. In 1962, working with a second antenna linked by radio, the telescope identified a new class of compact radio sources, later recognized as quasars, the brilliant cores of distant galaxies. A new, smoother surface later let it work at shorter wavelengths. In 1987, on its thirtieth anniversary, it was renamed the Lovell Telescope. Lovell directed the observatory until he retired in 1981, and he died in 2012 at the age of 98. The telescope became a Grade I listed structure in 1988, and in 2019 Jodrell Bank became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2026 a funding cut put the telescope’s future in question.

The First Light Pavilion

The visitor centre is the First Light Pavilion, which opened on 4 June 2022. The architects, Hassell, built it as a grassy mound rising out of the fields. It is 76 metres across, the same size as the dish of the Lovell Telescope, and its round shape copies the dish.

The building follows an old tradition of building in line with the sky, like Stonehenge and Newgrange. Its entrance faces due south. A single slim vertical window is cut into it, and sunlight through that slot falls on a meridian line on the floor of the foyer. A meridian line runs exactly north to south, and the Sun crosses it at midday. As the day passes, the band of light moves across the floor, and the foyer works as a giant sundial.

The café opens onto a round courtyard cut into the mound. Its direction follows the bearing at which the telescope tracked Sputnik in 1957, 102 degrees from north.

The exhibition inside tells the story of Jodrell Bank through letters, diaries, plans, films and photographs. The designers, Casson Mann, built it from the telescope itself. When the Lovell Telescope’s original 1957 dish surface was replaced, they saved large sections of it. The rusted metal panels, over four metres tall, now line the exhibition, and films of Jodrell’s scientists are projected onto them. The same steel once collected radio waves from deep space.