Clifford Paterson Lecture. Radar: new techniques and applications

I was greatly honoured to be invited by the Council of the Royal Society to give the first Clifford Paterson Lecture, for I respect greatly the engineering achievements of Sir Clifford Paterson and admire his work as an outstanding pioneer of industrial research. Paterson was trained as an electrical engineer and his first investigations were concerned with the techniques of a.c. measurement. His years of service with the National Physical Laboratory, however, coincided with the introduction and rapid extension of electrical illumination and he devoted great effort to the problems of photometry and the creation of international standards. But Paterson was an applied scientist of great versatility, and during World War I he applied himself with equal vigour to a number of military problems including the improvement of aircraft altitude measuring devices for use with anti-aircraft guns.