On This Day – 12th February

On this day in 1935, Robert Watson Watt delivered a secret memo to the Air Ministry titled ‘Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods’. In this paper, Watson Watt suggested that it was indeed possible to detect the location of aircraft using radio waves. This led to the Air Ministry investing further in the development of radar technology which was tested later in the month at Daventry. Much of the work to develop this radar technology took place at Bawdsey.