In 1937, twenty-six-year-old radio engineer Grote Reber built the world's first radio telescope in the side yard of his home at 212 West Seminary Street, now Karlskoga Avenue. For ten years he conducted nighttime experiments surveying the sky for radio waves with his home-built 31-foot-diameter dish antenna, and his discoveries during that decade established him as one of the founders of radio astronomy. Born in 1911, Reber built a transmitter receiver for amateur radio communications at age 15 and used it to contact more than 60 countries on all continents. He graduated from Wheaton Community High School in 1929 and completed a B.S. degree in electrical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in 1933. While working as a radio engineer in Chicago, he spent his free time following up on a scientist's discontinued work on static from space. After a quoted price for the radio telescope he designed proved too high, he built it himself from wooden rafters, galvanized sheet metal, and spare parts from a Ford Model T truck. About 20 feet high and 31 feet across, it drew great local speculation and interest, and on May 7, 1938, the local newspaper ran a front-page article on the project titled “No Wild Scheme From Mars-But Planned Scientific Experiment.” Reber used the radio telescope until 1947, when it was moved to the U.S. Bureau of Standards. He continued his work in radio astronomy in a field much changed and influenced by his efforts, and his original telescope is exhibited at the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
