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www.southgatearc.org
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Page last updated on:
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
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Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes G5VF SKFormer Radio Amateur Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes, G5VF, who led the Cambridge University team that built the world’s first operational stored-program computer, died on Monday aged 97. The Daily Telegraph newspaper reports: Maurice Vincent Wilkes was born at Dudley, Worcestershire, on June 26 1913. His father was a switchboard operator for the Earl of Dudley whose extensive estate in south Staffordshire had its own private telephone network; he encouraged his son’s interest in electronics and at King Edward VI’s Grammar School, Stourbridge, Maurice built his own radio transmitter and was allowed to operate it from home. Encouraged by his headmaster, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, Wilkes went up to St John’s College, Cambridge to read Mathematics, but he studied electronics in his spare time in the University Library and attended lectures at the Engineering Department. After obtaining an amateur radio licence he constructed radio equipment in his vacations with which to make contact, via the ionosphere, with radio “hams” around the world. Wilkes took a First in Mathematics and stayed on at Cambridge to do a PhD on the propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere. This led to an interest in tidal motion in the atmosphere and to the publication of his first book Oscillations of the Earth’s Atmosphere (1949). In 1937 he was appointed university demonstrator at the new Mathematical Laboratory (later renamed the Computer Laboratory) housed in part of the old Anatomy School. When war broke out, Wilkes left Cambridge to work with R Watson-Watt and JD Cockroft on the development of radar. Later he became involved in designing aircraft, missile and U-boat radio tracking systems. Read the full Daily Telegraph obituary at • G5VF used to be a member of the Cambridge University Wireless Society (CUWS).
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