Airborne Interception radar, Mark IV, was the first successful air-to-
air radar system, used in Britain's Bristol Beaufighter heavy fighters
by early 1941 in the Second World War. Early development of the Mk. IV
was prompted by a 1936 memo from the inventor Henry Tizard to Robert
Watt, director of the radar research efforts, who agreed to allow
physicist Taffy Bowen to form a team to study the problem of air
interception. The team had a test bed system in flights later that year,
but progress was delayed for four years by emergency relocations, three
abandoned production designs, and Bowen's increasingly adversarial
relationship with Watt's replacement, Albert Percival Rowe. The Mk. IV
had many limitations, including displays that were difficult to
interpret, a maximum range that decreased with the aircraft's altitude,
and a minimum range that was barely close enough to allow the pilot to
see the target. Nevertheless, the Mk. IV played a role in the Royal Air
Force's increasingly effective response to The Blitz, the
Luftwaffe 's night bombing campaign. The Mk. VIII largely
relegated the Mk. IV to second-line duties by 1943.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Mk._IV_radar>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1201:
John Komnenos the Fat briefly seized the throne of the
Byzantine Empire from Alexios III Angelos, but he was soon caught and
executed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Komnenos_the_Fat>
1703:
English writer Daniel Defoe was placed in a pillory for
seditious libel after publishing a pamphlet politically satirising the
High Church Tories.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe>
1777:
The Second Continental Congress passed a resolution allowing
French nobleman Marquis de Lafayette to enter the American revolutionary
forces as a Major General.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette>
1975:
The Troubles: In a botched paramilitary attack, three members
of the popular Miami Showband and two Ulster Volunteer Force gunmen were
killed in County Down, Northern Ireland.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Showband_killings>
1991:
The Soviet Union and the United States signed the bilateral
START I treaty (signing pictured), the largest and most complex arms
control treaty in history, which eventually removed 80% of all strategic
nuclear weapons then in existence.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
coppice:
A grove of small growth; a thicket of brushwood; a wood cut at certain
times for fuel or other purposes, typically managed to promote growth
and ensure a reliable supply of timber.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coppice>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the
power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine
better.
--J. K. Rowling
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling>