There is not specific date when the radar was invented, rather it has been studied and improved continuously since the 1880’s. Heinrich Hertz could be considered as inventing the first radar. He found that the distance between a transmitter and a receiver, two ships for example, could be calculated from the time it took a pulse of radio waves to travel between them. Although he presented his findings to the German navy, they did not receive much attention. The advantages of using radio detection were not apparent at the time. In 1912, The Titanic disaster revealed how radar could be helpful at sea, but due to the lack of technology not much was done. However, radar began to gain more and more interest as World War II approached. Many different countries sought to use it for defense, especially The United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan. (Dickey, 2004) During World War II the radar was used extensively for navigation and defense, and was continually improved and refined.

RADAR is an acronym that stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging. A radar works by sending out a short pulse of radio waves and measuring the reflected radiation. These reflections tell the radar where objects are around it, and the time needed for the reflections to return tells the distance to the object. Some radars can also measure the shift in the radio frequency of the reflection, known as Doppler shift, to determine the speed of the object, which is how a radar gun works.

*Pictures from Encarta Encyclopedia