In northwest England, the ground rises on land that was owned in the fourteenth century by William Jauderell, an archer in the army of Edward, the Black Prince. The rise became known as Jodrell Bank.

Credit: © UNIV. MANCHESTER

By 1939 it had been colonized by the botany department of the nearby University of Manchester. In 1945, Bernard Lovell arrived at the site with various bits of left-over war-time equipment with which he intended to study cosmic rays — escaping the trams that caused electrical interference as they passed the Manchester physics department — and founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory.

By mid-1957, Lovell had built — using bits of left-over battleship — the 'Mark I' telescope, at the time the largest steerable-dish radio telescope in the world and the only device capable of tracking the launch of the Sputnik satellite. In 1966, it eavesdropped on Luna 9, the first spacecraft to land on and transmit from the Moon.

A host of astronomical observations followed too, including the first complete Einstein ring in 1998. Renamed the Lovell telescope, and now part of the MERLIN array, this landmark in both radio astronomy and the British countryside is testament to the inventiveness and determination of its creator.

Bernard Lovell died on 6 August 2012 at the age of 98.