Robert Morris Page was born on 2 June 1903 in St. Paul, Hennepin, Minnesota.
1,2,3,4 He and
Esther Cornelia Strand Britt were married on 21 March 1963 in Arlington, Arlington, Virginia.
5 He died on 15 May 1992, at age 88, in Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota.
2,3,4 He was buried in Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis, Hennepin, Minnesota.
4 Robert Morris Page was a Physicist.
2,6,5 He was educated in Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, BS- Physics.
5 A professional physicist, he was a civilian director of research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. He received several Presidential citations for distinguished contributions to American science as inventer of both radar and bent radar. Upon retirement, Robert and Esther moved to Paradise, California and later to Bloominton, Minnesota .
Obituary- Star Tribune, May 17, 1992
Robert M. Page, 88, a physicist who rose from poverty to build the first successful radar system in the United States, died Friday at Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina. Page, of Fellowship Village in Bloomington, has been known as the "radar idea man" since the late 1930's, when he built a transmitter that could send a quick series of radio signals and a receiver that could detect the signals as they bounced back from an object. His device permanently changed the courses of war and travel. During World War. ll, the system enabled Allied military forces to detect enemy ships and planes and was a major tool in the defeat of German and Japanese forces. Page often said his life was shaped by religion and by science. He was born in St. Paul, "where Father was a Methodist preacher and a house painter", he recalled in a 1960 interview. When Page was 6 years old, poverty drove his father from the pulpit to a farm in Eden Prairie, where he stuggled to make a living for a family that included nine children. He attended a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and moved to St. Paul to live with a brother (Frederick Irving Page) who was an electrician and to work as his helper while attending Central High School. He moved to Minneapolis and attended the old West High School for a year and tended furnaces. Broke, he dropped out of school for a year. He drove a school bus from Eden Prairie to Bloomington for a year and attended a new consolidated school there. Page graduated from Minneapolis West High School in 1923 at age 20. Then came college at Hamline University in St. Paul. "I intended to study for the ministry," Page once said. "I got more enjoyment and did better work in science." Page went to work for the young U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., in 1927. The laboratory director, Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, and a colleague, Leo Young, had been studing shortwave radio. They had a transmitter near the Anacostia River in Maryland and a receiver across the river. In 1922, a ship came by and caused their signals to fluctuate violently. They wrote an excited report suggesting use at sea of this ship-detection method, but the Navy ignored it. In 1930, Lawrence Hyland and Young were again transmitting radio signals across the river when a plane flying overhead produced similar results. This time, the Navy paid attention. Work began on the project but there were many difficulties. On March 31, 1934, Taylor put the 31 year-old Page on the problem. His assignment was to make the detection method practical. He was to seek to bounce short pulses of radio energy off an object, then measure its direction and distance by the way the pulses came back. "Six months later, I had a transmitter built that would send short pulses," Page said. "It was only partly successful. In the summer of 1935, the bureau of engineering decided we were getting nowhere and canceled the project. But they permitted us to work on high-frequesncy communication, so Taylor smiled and told me to make the receiver so we could communicate. I put on a phone plug." By April 1936, I had all the parts of a complete system working and put it together for the first crucial test. We threw the switch and within a few seconds an airplane at an altitute of 3 miles stuck out on our set like a sore thumb." In Britain, Robert Watson-Watt had independently started work on a radar project in March 1935. Several Americans, including Page, and several Britons made radar into target-finding, gun-pointing system it was in World War ll. After the war, Britain strongly publicized Watson-Watt's work. Page won no public notice. But in 1960 he said, "Practically all the basic patents in radar are in my name. The patent office recognized my priority of concept and in most cases priority of reduction to practice." In 1958, Page was named director of the Naval Research Laboratory. In 1960, he developed a radar system that could peer over horizons. A New York Times article in 1960 said, "From the start, Dr. Pge has been the idea man behind radar." Religion had a strong influence on Page's life and he said tha God showed him how to invent radar. He led Bible classes and directed Methodist church choirs. Of the many awards and honors he received, he was particularly proud of one from Wheaton College in Illinois that hononred him for "uncompromising, consistent testimony for Christ among subordinates, scientific peers and military and public officials, as well as in local church work." He had received citations form four U.S. presidents and was honored during at least two White House receptions. Page and his wife moved to California when he retired in 1966. Thye returned to Minnesota three years later. They also had a winter home in sun City, Arizona. He was named Citizen of the Year in Bloomington in the 1970s.