PAGE, ROBERT MORRIS

born June 2, 1903, St. Paul, Minn., U.S. died May 15, 1992, Edina, Minn. American physicist who, in the 1930s, invented the technology for pulse radar, a system that detects and locates distant objects through the use of short bursts of electromagnetic radiation. His invention was vital to the Allies during World War II for detecting enemy planes, ships, and other targets. Page changed his major from theology to physics in his senior year at Hamline University in St. Paul. After graduating in 1927, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and attended George Washington University (M.A., 1932). He conducted pioneering experiments in radar with other American scientists before combining forces with British researchers in the 1940s at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Page, who held 75 patents on inventions in precision electronics, developed the first radar duplexer capable of using a single antenna for transmitting and receiving. He also worked on the planned position indicator, the first radar technology to identify the direction and range of a target simultaneously, and Project Madre, a radar system that could bend its beam to follow the curvature of the Earth and detect objects beyond the horizon. He successively served at the NRL as a physicist and head of the Radar Research Section (193845), superintendent of Radio Division III (194552), associate director of research in electronics (195257), and director of research (195766). He was the recipient of several national awards and the author of The Origin of Radar (1962).