Grote Reber

Grote Reber (1911 to 2002) was an American inventor and radio astronomer who built the first substantial radio telescope dedicated to astronomy. His instrument used a large dish modeled on an optical mirror, with a radio receiver attached that amplified faint cosmic signals by a factor of several million so that they could be recorded and charted. After two years of building and testing receivers and surveying the sky each night, he published a series of articles titled Cosmic Static in The Astrophysical Journal, which many scientists use to mark the birth of intentional radio astronomy. In 1944 he produced a contour radio map of the sky in which the brightest source was the center of the Milky Way. He studied at the Armour Institute of Technology, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, and at the University of Chicago, worked at the National Bureau of Standards in the late 1940s, and later continued his observations in Hawaii and Tasmania.