Abstract
During March-April 1945, solar radio emission was detected at 200 MHz by operators of a Royal New Zealand Air Force radar unit located on Norfolk Island. Initially dubbed the ‘Norfolk Island Effect’, this anomalous radiation was investigated throughout 1945 by British-born Elizabeth Alexander, head of the Operational Research Section of the Radio Development Laboratory in New Zealand. Alexander prepared a number of reports on this work, and in early 1946 she published a short paper in the newly-launched journal, Radio and Electronics. A physicist and geologist by training, Elizabeth Alexander happened to be in the right place at the right time, and unwittingly became the first woman in the world to work in the field that would later become known as radio astronomy. Her research also led to further solar radio astronomy projects in New Zealand in the immediate post-war year, and in part was responsible for the launch of the radio astronomy program at the Division of Radiophysics, CSIR, in Sydney, Australia.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This was very much a last-minute arrangement as the Japanese quickly advanced on Singapore, and Mary Harris (personal communication, 2015) remembers their plane being shot at.
- 3.
The Radio Development Laboratory was a Division of the Government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and was set up in 1941 under Dr Oliver Owen Pulley (1906–1966) with an initial staff of ~100. Based in Wellington, it had branches in Auckland and Christchurch (see Fig. 23.2). When Pulley returned to Australia in 1942, Dr Charles Norman Machell Watson-Munro (1915–1991) became Director of the Laboratory (for details, see Galbreath 1998). Elizabeth Alexander was ideal for the position of head of the Operational Research Section of the Laboratory. Through her work on radar in Singapore she was already well known to Dr Ernest Marsden (Director of Scientific Developments, DSIR) and Pulley, and to Joe Pawsey and Fred White who played key roles in the development of radar in Australia. Meanwhile, she and Taffy Bowen were old friends from their days at Cambridge (Mary Harris, personal communication, 2014).
- 4.
At an approximate longitude of 168°E and latitude of 29°S, Norfolk Island is located about 1400 km east of Brisbane (Australia) and 750 km northwest of the northern-most tip of New Zealand’s North Island. Although considerably closer to New Zealand, it is Australian territory. When the USA set up separate command areas in the Pacific in 1941 Norfolk Island fell within the New Zealand (South Pacific) command rather than the Australian (Southwest Pacific) command, and this explains why a Royal New Zealand Air Force radar station was established there. The radar station was located “… at a height of 1,000 feet near the north western corner of Norfolk Island … [with] an unobstructed view all round …” Alexander (1945d: 2).
- 5.
The author of this report, E.D.L. Marsden, was known to Elizabeth Alexander, and was the only son of Dr Ernest Marsden, who is mentioned above in Note 3 (Mary Harris, personal communication 2014).
- 6.
Elizabeth Alexander’s daughter, the London academic Mary Harris, has carried out a detailed investigation of her mother’s research on the ‘Norfolk Island Effect’ and thinks
… it is very likely that [in addition to the short paper published in Radio and Electronics] Elizabeth would have written up the work formally for DSIR, but that her report did not survive the writing of the Narrative and the destruction of the reports that became part of it. (Mary Harris, personal communication, 2014).
The ‘Narrative’ she refers to is the unpublished official history of New Zealand’s war-time involvement in radar (see World War II … 1948), and many classified documents were destroyed during and following its preparation. I also am convinced that Elizabeth Alexander prepared a detail report on the ‘Norfolk Island Effect’ for the DSIR.
- 7.
In my initial paper about Elizabeth Alexander (Orchiston 2005) I described her as the first female to carry out a successful radio astronomy research program (in 1945) and to publish a paper on radio astronomy (Alexander 1946). However, her Australian counterpart, Ruby Payne-Scott, and the head of the Radiophysics radio astronomy group, Dr Joe Pawsey, made an earlier unsuccessful attempt to detect solar radio emission. There is therefore some debate as to which lady should be identified as the world’s first female radio astronomer (e.g. see Goss and McGee 2009; Goss 2013), and although Woody Sullivan (2009) assigns priority to Elizabeth Alexander it is clear to me that both deserve full recognition for their pioneering efforts in 1945.
- 8.
Back in 1942 Bob Unwin (later Dr Unwin) had been appointed as Elizabeth Alexander’s assistant (Mary Harris, personal communication 2014).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following for their assistance: the late Gordon H. Burns (Wanganui, NZ), the late Professor E.R. Collins (Mahurangi East, NZ), Ross Galbreath (Tuakau, NZ), Professor Alan Maxwell (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), Dr Bruce Slee (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Sciences, Sydney, Australia), Professor Woody Sullivan (University of Washington, USA), the late Dr Bob Unwin (Wanaka, NZ), the late Dr R.M. Williams (Wellington, NZ), staff at the National Archives of New Zealand (Wellington), and especially Elizabeth Alexander’s three children, Mary Harris (London), Bernice Jones (Edinburgh) and Bill Alexander (Leamington Spa). I also wish to thank Mary Harris for reading and commenting on the first draft of this chapter, and Mary Harris and Alan Maxwell for kindly supplying Figs. 23.1, 23.2, 23.4 and 23.10.
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Orchiston, W. (2016). Dr Elizabeth Alexander and the Mysterious ‘Norfolk Island Effect’. In: Exploring the History of New Zealand Astronomy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22566-1_23
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