John Turton Randall

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John Turton Randall (born March 23, 1905 in Newton-le-Willows , Lancashire , † June 16, 1984 in Edinburgh ) was a British physicist.

The son of a landscape gardener, he studied at the University of Manchester and worked on luminescence in the General Electric Company's Wembley laboratory .

During World War II, the British Chain Home radar system used radio waves, for which it needed 110 m high antennas on the coast.

From 1939 to 1943, Randall worked on improving radar with microwaves. Since he did not think the performance of the klystron could be increased, he developed the cavity magnetron together with Henry Albert Howard Boot . It was made from a block of copper that dissipated heat well. To adjust the wavelength, they drilled special holes (called cavities ) in the block. Between February and July 1940, they increased the output from 500 watts to 10 kW at 3 GHz. It suddenly improved the accuracy of the radar devices of the time.

In 1944 he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland.

In 1946 he became head of the Department of Biophysics (now: Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics ) of the Medical Research Council at King's College London , where Maurice Wilkins (who was also his PhD student) and Rosalind Franklin carried out research leading to the discovery of the double helix Structure of DNA guided by James D. Watson and Francis Crick . Randall himself worked on collagen . After retiring in 1970, he went to Edinburgh University , where he founded a research group. He was a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

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  1. ^ Paul A. Redhead: THE INVENTION OF THE CAVITY MAGNETRON AND ITS INTRODUCTION INTO CANADA AND THE USA ( Memento of October 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ); In: LA PHYSIQUE AU CANADA, Nov./Dec. 2001, p. 321.
  2. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 1, 2020 .

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personal data
SURNAME Randall, John Turton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Newton-le-Willows , Lancashire
DATE OF DEATH June 16, 1984
Place of death Edinburgh