During the 1920s and 1930s he served in a variety of service and government posts and became Officer Commanding the RAF Fighter Command, so through CSSAD he was able to initiate the funding for the work which culminated in the development of the Chain Home radar system. Dowding had served in World War 1 and had direct experience of aerial combat - in 1915, Captain Hugh Dowding became the first Briton to receive radio signals in the air - so was well aware of the difficulties encountered. Wimperis formed the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD) ( also known as the Tizard Committee as he was the Chairman) and his immediate superior was Air Chief Marshal Dowding. In 1924 the then new Royal Air Force created a Directorate of Scientific Research whose first Director was Henry Wimperis, who came to learn of the work of Robert Watson Watt on ionospheric radio research at the National Physical Laboratory. the bomber will always get through" Notwithstanding, work continued including the formation of an organisation "Air Defence of Great Britain" or ADGB to coordinate air defensive and offensive forces. However, the general feeling at the time was summed up in a statement by Stanley Baldwin ". A very interesting description is available here. This resulted in the creation of the world's first strategic air defence system, the design of which influenced the work throughout the 1920s and 30s, and featured the use of aerial radio telephony, and the development of a central command structure to gather and disseminate information to regional control rooms with plot spotting on a map. The first aerial bombing of England was in 1914 and continued through until 1918. The genesis of this is a complex story and and covers a long period of time - there are several books (see reading list below) which cover it in great detail, but for the present purpose it is useful to have just a summary of the main points. ![]() In point of fact there was also a third arm, a nation-wide installation of addition telephone lines by the General Post Office, itself alone a massive undertaking. In the modern era through mergers in the now electronics industry virtually all of the other companies involved became part of the Marconi group and therefore are included in this wiki. Among others Marconi was extensively involved in both areas based on its work on radio telephony during the First World War and its capabilities in research and engineering in wireless and television and management of large-scale systems. The solution was to bring science into the arena, and comprised two areas of technological developments - the new ability to detect the incoming enemy bombers and their fighter escorts sufficiently early together with the ability to then get the defending fighters into position in time to destroy them in sufficient numbers. ![]() This bears its name as being the brainchild of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding that enabled the Royal Air Force with more limited resources in 1939 at the start of WWII to defeat the intention of the much larger Luftwaffe to clear and command the skies over the English Channel and United Kingdom, a prerequisite to Operation Sealion, Hitler's invasion plan.
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