Author: David Barber

This was back in 1937, in Wheaton, Illinois, where Grote Reber built a radio telescope to track down persistent background noise that was annoying Bell Telephone Labs.

The Depression still lingered and Bell wouldn’t employ him, but in his spare time Reber built a 30-foot dish in his mother’s back yard and hooked it up to a home-made receiver. Hanging his weight on the dish swung it about, but wherever it pointed he picked up a muted babbling from the heavens.

It was like hearing a school playground in the distance, he recalled when the writer Irwin Keller visited him in Australia to research a book.

For a while Reber was the world’s only radio astronomer, then Pearl Harbor meant no one had time for the stars. It was the Fifties before the new steerable dishes heard signals from everywhere.

Reber was handicapped by lacking an astronomy degree and was left behind as universities and governments poured money into Contact Studies.

Though monologues were all that the light years allowed, we hoped for a welcome and the offer of wonders. Those were innocent times. Consider domestic radio and TV and ask yourself why anyone broadcasts to strangers.

We shook our heads at the endless Finnegans Wake of numbers booming out of Andromeda; even
the signals we could understand exhorted us like preachers, or tried grooming us with symbolic logic. Some threatened us with planet busters unless we beamed messages onwards like chain letters.

In the Sixties, Reber moved to Tasmania. For the quiet, he told Keller, who misunderstood him.

The writer jetted into Sydney from LAX, caught a prop-driven DC4 to Tasmania, then drove a battered hire-car inland to Dennistoun township, where Reber had built a house in the hills. It seemed like a journey backwards in time.

Reber was more weather-beaten than in his photographs. He frowned at Keller’s long hair but said nothing.

He was keen to show off the dipole array in the field behind his house. On winter nights the ionosphere would briefly disperse, allowing through 3MHz waves. It was an area of radio astronomy ignored by the mainstream.

This part of the world had very little terrestrial radio interference, Reber explained.

Sheep grazed amongst the home-made antennae and a blustery wind whipped Keller’s hair.

Elsewhere on the planet, huge dishes listened to messages from the stars, while Grote Reber obstinately charted 3MHz radio maps of the sky. Perhaps it was the amateurishness of it all that made Keller most sad.

Back in the house, he was shown a valve amplifier from Reber’s first radio telescope, the perished rubber insulation hard and crumbly.

“Is this the sort of thing you want to see?” Reber asked. The man was surprisingly shy.

As Keller was leaving, Reber suddenly became talkative. He didn’t mind being a footnote in encyclopedias, or having old snapshots of his telescope on show in the Museum of Contact, he just wished things had turned out differently.

Keller already had plenty for this chapter, but he had to ask.

“Building all those dishes was a mistake,” Reber explained. “And we should have enforced radio silence.”

Keller refrained from saying it was Reber who started it all, though technical progress made radio astronomy inevitable in the long run. Besides, we’d already trumpeted our existence by beaming out the early-warning radars of the Cold War.

Reber lived long enough to witness the plagues of alienware, smarter than we are, encrypted in signals from the stars and now loose in the Internet.

“If only I’d found the skies empty,” he said.