American radio engineer

One of the ways modern astronomers study the Universe is by tracing light waves through telescopes; another is by studying radio waves. The man who discovered the existence of these extraterrestrial radio waves, and thus founded radio astronomy, was Karl Jansky. Employed as an engineer in Bell Laboratories, New Jersey, Jansky was assigned the job of reducing static noise on transatlantic radio transmissions, and it was while inquiring into the origin of this static that he made his discovery.

The third of six children, Karl Guthe Jansky was born in Norman, Oklahoma, while that region was still a territory. His father, Cyril Jansky, was a college professor who taught electrical engineering and eventually became the head of the School of Applied Science at the University of Wisconsin. Jansky was named after Karl Guthe, a German-born physicist under whom his father had...