John Paul Wild (17 May 192310 May 2008) was a British-born Australian scientist. Following service in World War II as a radar officer in the Royal Navy, he became a radio astronomer in Australia for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the fore-runner of the CSIRO. In the 1950s and 1960s he made discoveries based on radio observations of the Sun. In the late 1960s and early 1970s his team built and operated the world's first solar radio-spectrographs and subsequently the Culgoora radio-heliograph, near Narrabri, New South Wales. The Paul Wild Observatory at Culgoora is named after him.
In 1972 Paul Wild invented Interscan, a standard microwave landing system. From 1978 to 1985 he was chairman of CSIRO, during which time he expanded the organisation's scope and directed its restructuring. He retired from CSIRO to lead (from 1986) the Very Fast Train Joint Venture, a private sector project that sought to build a high-speed railway between Australia's two most populous cities. Lack of support from government brought it to an end in 1991. In his later years he worked on gravitational theory.
Early life John Paul Wild was born in Sheffield, England on 17 May 1923, the fourth son of wealthy cutlery manufacturer, Alwyn Wild, and his wife Bessie. But in that year, Alwyn's business collapsed and he went to the United States of America to sell his patents and technology for cutlery manufacture. In the event, he never returned. Bessie moved with her boys to Croydon, near London. About this Wild said "We went from riches to rags and the family was absolutely struggling"Quotes in this article from Paul Wild's interviews are from four sources, namely: two books containing a chapter on him – i.e., Moyal 1994 and Bhathal 1996, listed in full in the select bibliography above and using these short forms in the citations under "References" below (other than the first, full citation); and transcripts of the two original interviews on which the book chapters were based – i.e., Wild, interview, 1992 and Wild, interview, 1995 – also listed in full in the select bibliography above and using these short forms in the citations under "References" below (other than the first, full citation). The books provide accounts that are necessarily condensed. For serious study of the fields encompassed by Paul Wild's career and their political and historical contexts, the interview transcripts are a more detailed, and in places more candid, source. and "... right on the breadline, very, very poor." It was to be five or six years before a divorce settlement allowed the family to "live a reasonable middle-class life, reasonably well off".
His childhood was a happy one, with his "imperialistic grandfather" having a strong influence in his upbringing. At age six he was hospitalised for six months after being hit by a lorry when alighting from a tram, cracking his skull.Wild, Penelope R. (daughter of Paul Wild) 2012. Pers. comm. J.P. Wild remarks March 2008. Then at age seven he attended a Sussex boarding school, Ardingly College, the youngest boy in the school and very homesick. But after successfully "plotting to get out" with his elder brother for four terms he spent the rest of his schooling at Croydon: first at The Limes (Old Palace of John Whitgift School) – at that time a preparatory school – then at the associated senior independent school, Whitgift School.
The driving intellectual curiosity that was to distinguish Paul Wild was evident from an early age. He said, "[My mother] showed great appreciation if ever I was successful in anything but she didn't push me." He was interested in building things with model house kits, Meccano and cardboard; an early gift of a Hornby train from his mother started him on his lifelong love of trains. Then he "read about the great man Isambard Kingdom Brunel and all his works, which were not only railways but the extraordinary ships that he built at the time. Well, I suppose he was the first source of inspiration to me."
He became an avid player and follower of cricket while at school and into adulthood: in his later life he was known as "a walking encyclopaedia of cricket knowledge", eventually owning all but one edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.
Wild developed a strong love of mathematics from a very early age. After matriculating he spent three years in the mathematical sixth form, most of the time on mathematics, with a little physics and world affairs. In free periods he and his friends would play bridge, under the chestnut trees in summertime. In an interview in 1992 he said: "We had three specialist mathematics teachers covering analysis, calculus and modern geometry, and I think I owe a lot to them."
Whitgift School is near what was then Croydon Aerodrome. In the summer of 1940, real excitement was added to the lives of the bridge-playing mathematics students: the Battle of Britain was going on overhead. "There was no sense of danger, it was all marvellous fun. Croydon [a Spitfire and Hurricane base] was right in the thick of it, and we used to watch the air battles going on."
Physics by accident World War II determined Paul Wild's specialisation and intruded to foreshorten his entire university life to only five terms. In 1942, Wild went to the University of Cambridge (Peterhouse) to further his mathematics. However, after a year of mathematics he knew that he would only be able to stay on if he did something relevant to the national war effort. Thus he went straight into "physics with radio": Part 2 Physics. He saidthe great majority of people in Part 2 Physics had already done two years of it before, so it was a real challenge. But I enjoyed it very much, and I was very inspired by the sort of grandeur of the approach, the wonders of quantum mechanics and relativity …. It was hard work, it was six days a week. That's how I became a physicist.
After the second year, having concluded five terms in all, he had a choice of joining one of the three armed services or going into radar research or industry. On his "free" day each week he had been trained in the Home Guard, but his great interest in ships and the sea led him to join the Royal Navy. A wartime Bachelor of Arts degree was conferred a year later. A few years afterwards he paid five pounds to become a Master of Arts. Then ten years after that, he sent his research papers to the University of Cambridge and following a two-year deliberation the degree of Doctor of Science was conferred.
Wartime naval service
Paul Wild became one of the young radar officers who ensured the Royal Navy used its new technology to maximum effect. In July 1943, commissioned as a Probationary Temporary Acting Sub-lieutenant (Special Branch, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve), he started an intensive, six-month radar officer training course at the Royal Navy base, Portsmouth. His seagoing appointment for the following two and a half years, with 60 subordinates and 24 radar sets, was the battleship , which eventually became flagship of the British Pacific Fleet. The ship took part in the Okinawa campaign, followed by the assault on the Japanese mainland. In both campaigns the fleet was frequently attacked by Japanese suicide bombers, but because they tended to concentrate on aircraft carriers, his ship was not hit. The battleship entered Tokyo Bay just after the surrender of Japan and he was present when the peace treaty was signed.
The Royal Navy was innovative in the way it incorporated information from the ship's new radar into its gunnery, with a direct line of communication from the radar officer to the bridge. Wild described the thrill of seeing range-finding projectiles on his cathode ray oscilloscope in the darkened radar room, appearing as spikes straddling the target, then the third shot hitting the target in the middle.Huggan, Clive (VFT project consultant) 2012. Pers. comm. J.P. Wild remarks 1989.
Despite the Royal Navy's innovation in its use of radar, an underlying aversion to new technology persisted among some senior naval officers. He recalled a remark by his admiral at the end of hostilities: "Now we can get back, young Wild, to being a proper navy – without your radar".Nicolson, A. John (VFT Technical Manager) 2012. Pers. comm. J.P. Wild remarks 1986.
On returning to England, Wild taught radar to permanent naval officers until early 1947. During one of his wartime breaks in Australia he had become engaged to a young Sydney woman, Elaine Hull, whose family had offered hospitality; and on leaving the Royal Navy he immediately sailed for Sydney. He had asked his fiancée to go to England to be married, but she told him he would have to settle in Australia. As his future brother-in-law later observed, "Australia has my sister to thank for giving this country one of its greatest scientists".
"Humble" start in Australia From London, Wild had obtained an assistant research officer job with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Radiophysics Laboratory near Sydney. He described the position as "a humble one": to maintain and develop test equipment. But within a year he had, as he put it, "wheedled his way" into the new science of radio astronomy, and he described 1948–50 as a tremendously exciting time.... The only two really powerful groups in radio astronomy were the Australian one and Cambridge; and... we all thought we had the edge over the Cambridge group. [Australian wartime radio expert] Joe Pawsey was the sort of father of radio astronomy in Australia. He was a wonderfully inspiring leader, very self-effacing and taking no credit for himself, and he was a delight to work under. And he did something which I appreciated greatly: he left me alone to do my own research but I could come to him at any time and get his advice.This advice, Wild acknowledged, "was often very perceptive, very good". Pawsey's approach became a template that Wild would follow.
In the 15 years from 1949, the solar group that Wild had joined and which he soon came to lead achieved an international reputation in solar radiophysics. Their instruments revealed for the first time the presence of charged particles and shock waves travelling through the solar corona, and their potential effects on "space weather". The group's innovative design of observation equipment and ground-breaking investigations into the nature of solar radio bursts and the disturbances that gave rise to them cleared the way to classifying most types of bursts by their spectral appearance and presenting models to interpret their characteristics.
Solar burst discoveries The new breed of electronic astronomers that Paul Wild joined were applying their wartime skills to radiophysics research, the Radiophysics Laboratory having achieved a number of successes since it was established, early in the war, to bring radar to Australia. In 1948, groups at the laboratory were studying several fields in addition to solar. Wild's work arose from the phenomenon of embryonic radar technology sometimes being jammed by mysterious interference, later discovered, in England, to be radio noise coming from the Sun.
When Wild joined the solar group there were two teams from which to choose. He chose to work for Lindsay McCready in building a radiospectrograph, at the suggestion of Pawsey. As he later said, "I knew if I joined McCready I would be able to do my own thing … That's why I became a solar man".