Karl Guthe Jansky
Brief Biography of the Father of Radio Astronomy
On October 22, 1905, Karl Jansky was born in Norman, Oklahoma. His parents, Cyril M. Jansky and Nellie Moreau Jansky, named him Karl Guthe Jansky to honor Karl Guthe. Guthe, a physicist, was Cyril Jansky's teacher, mentor, and coworker. Perhaps Karl Jansky was destined to become a famous scientist.
Jansky's Childhood
Jansky was of English, French, and Czech descent. Jansky's mother was English and French; his father's parents immigrated from Czechoslovakia. Jansky's father was an engineering professor and a dean at the University of Oklahoma.
Jansky, however, did not stay in Oklahoma long. Three years after his birth, his father took a job at the University of Wisconsin. Jansky lived the rest of his childhood in Madison, Wisconsin. He went to the local schools and after high school, the University of Wisconsin.
Jansky's College Years
Karl Jansky attended the University of Wisconsin where he majored in physics. He received his bachelors degree with honors in 1927. As a superb student, Jansky was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After completing his BS, Jansky started studying for a masters degree at Wisconsin. He completed the coursework but not a masters thesis, so Jansky did not graduate with an MS degree. However in 1936, the University of Wisconsin counted Jansky's early papers on radio astronomy for the thesis requirement and Jansky finally earned his masters degree.
Jansky had athletic as well as academic interests. He was a star player on the university ice hockey team and was a good tennis player.
During his college years, Jansky also first learned that he had chronic kidney disease. This disease limited Jansky's lifespan to 44 years.
Jansky's Work at Bell Labs
Karl Jansky took a job at Bell Labs in 1928. He was initially assigned to the Cliffwood, New Jersey laboratory, but moved to the Holmdel, New Jersey laboratory after two years. Jansky worked on minimizing the noise in short-wave radio receivers, which Bell Telephone Company (forerunner of AT&T) used for telephone communications.
Jansky built the necessary receivers and analyzed the noise in detail. Some of the noise was from thunderstorms, but there was also a component to the radio noise that did not seem to be terrestrial in origin. Jansky recognized that this component was celestial because the strength of the signal varied with Earth's rotation period. The radio waves were coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Jansky wrote several scientific papers during the 1930s on his discovery of celestial radio waves. These pioneering papers on radio astronomy make Jansky the father of radio astronomy.
During World War II, Jansky, like most American scientists and engineers, worked full time on the war effort. Defense projects, such as the development of radar, had to take priority over radio astronomy.
After the war ended, Bell Labs started to work on using microwaves for telephone communication purposes, rather than the short radio waves that Jansky had been studying. Jansky contributed to this microwave work, but his health was failing.
Jansky's kidney disease started becoming worse beginning in 1945. When he died on February 14, 1950, Karl Jansky left behind his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1929, and their two children.
Working on the applied problems of telephone communications, Karl Jansky unexpectedly made the pioneering discovery in radio astronomy, which has led to many additional important astronomical discoveries.
Further Reading
Friis, H.T., "Karl Jansky: His Career at Bell Telephone Laboratories", Science, Vol. 149, p. 841-842, August, 1965.
Sullivan, W.T., Classics in Radio Astronomy, Springer Verlag, 1982.
Zeilik, M. Astronomy: The Evolving Universe, 9th ed. Cambridge, 2002.
Karl Jansky
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