John Randall (physicist)
John Turton Randall ( born March 23, 1905 in Newton -le- Willows, Lancashire, † June 16, 1984 in Edinburgh ) was a British physicist.
The son of a landscape gardener, he had studied at the University of Manchester and worked at Wembley laboratory of the General Electric Company of luminescence.
During World War II, the British used radar system Chain Home radio waves, for which there 110 m high antennas needed on the coast.
1939-1943 Randall worked on the improvement of radar microwaves. Since he did not consider the performance of the klystron for gradable, he developed together with Henry Albert Howard Boot the cavity magnetron. It was made of a copper block, which led away the heat well. In order to tune the wavelength they drill special holes ( called cavity ) in the block. Between February and July 1940, they increased the power from 500 watts to 10 kW at 3 GHz. It abruptly improved the accuracy of the former radars.
In 1944 he was appointed to the University of St Andrews in Scotland, professor of natural philosophy.
In 1946 he became head of the Department of Biophysics (now Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics ) of the Medical Research Council at King's College London, where Wilkins and Franklin based on the research results of the molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix structure of DNA. Randall himself worked to collagen. After his retirement in 1970 he went to Edinburgh University, where he founded a research group.