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Bernard Lovell (1913-2012), British radio astronomer and founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, received an OBE in 1946 for his work on radar, and was knighted in 1961. His steerable radio telescope tracked Sputnik and is now named the Lovell telescope. [Listeners: Alastair Gunn and Megan Argo; date recorded: 2007]

TRANSCRIPT: I'm often asked what I think was the most important work, research work, done with the 250ft steerable telescope, and I... it's very difficult for me to answer that because I... so much work has been done I don't like to offend all the people who've done their own splendid work with the telescope. Of course, it's easy to say, well, of course the recording of Sputnik, which is true because that saved us. I mean, I doubt if that hadn't happened, that Jodrell would exist.

I... I still believe that the use of the telescope for the first few years after 1957 by Henry Palmer and his group on the measurement of the angular diameters of the radio sources turned out to be most important. The position was this. I think by that time Ryle had carried out many of his intergalactic measurements in Cambridge and it was perfectly clear that after this tremendous argument that went on between the people who believed that all the apparently point sources, or sources of small diameter, which were being rapidly discovered and revealed by the interferometers, they... they were... the great argument emerged as to whether they were all confined to the local galaxy or were... or were extra-galactic. And... and there was a most violent argument in a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society some time in the 1950s between Gold, Tommy Gold, and Hoyle on the one hand, and... and Ryle and his people on the other, who argued. Gold particularly was a vehement that these point sources, we often call them, or localised sources were mainly from an extra galactic nebulae. But incidentally, both worked independently, and... and Ryle had published other papers attempting to prove that they were unknown star like objects with... in the local galaxy. Well, we did not get directly involved in that argument because it... by the time the... Henry Palmer started his work on... on the measurement of angular diameters, it was being fairly well established that most of these localised or point sources were indeed extra galactic.