Today Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two.
Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands.
The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believe that it was true. But, as Churchill learned at a dramatic meeting in Whitehall in June 1940, the beams were scientifically plausible. The man who told him this was an extraordinary 28-year-old physicist. His name was RV Jones.
RV Jones is the central character in Tom Whipple’s enthralling new book. The Battle of the Beams: The Secret Science of Radar That Turned the Tide of WW2 is out this week.
For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.
Show notesScene One: 21 June 1940. RV Jones attends a meeting at the cabinet room in Whitehall
Scene Two: June 1940. With Flight Lieutenant Bufton/Corporal Mackie on a mission to find Jones’s ‘beams’ over Britain
Scene Three: 6 November 1940. At the crash site of a Heinkel III bomber at Chesil Beach in Dorset
Memento: Vera Cain’s (RV Jones’s wife) diary
People/SocialPresenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Tom Whipple
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
See where 1940 fits on our Timeline
Felipe Fernández-Armesto; The Year Our World Began (1492)
Paul Fischer: Motion Pictures and the Rise of Modern Britain (1888)
Dr Suzie Sheehy: The Matter of Everything (1932)
Nicholas Guyatt: The Dartmoor Massacre (1815)
Bronwen Riley: Journey to Britannia (130 AD)
Katherine Rundell: John Donne, Super-Infinite (1601)
Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands (1413)
Nick Higham: The Mercenary River (1837)
Margaret Willes: In The Shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1666)
Daniel Levy: The Great Fire of New York (1835)
Matthew Green: Shadowlands (1965)
Seb Falk: The Astronomer and the Astrolabe (1327)
Nadine Akkerman: Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts (1620)
Anthony Tucker-Jones: Winston Churchill and Victory in North Africa (1943)
Christopher de Bellaigue: Suleyman the Magnificent (1534)
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: A History of the Library (1850)
Lulu Jemimah: The Last Pre-Colonial King of Buganda (1885)
Ronen Steinke: The Arab Doctor and the Jewish Girl (1943)
Dr Priya Atwal: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire (1837)
David Bosco: The Struggle to Rule the Ocean (1982)
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