radars, and ever-increasing frequencies that allow higher resolutions. Increases in signal processing capability due to the introduction of solid state computers has also had a large impact on radar use. Significance The place of radar in the larger story of science and technology is argued differently by different authors. On the one hand, radar contributed very little to theory, which was largely known since the days of Maxwell and Hertz. Therefore, radar did not advance science, but was simply a matter of technology and engineering. Maurice Ponte, one of the developers of radar in France, states: But others point out the immense practical consequences of the development of radar. Far more than the atomic bomb, radar contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. Robert Buderi states that it was also the precursor of much modern technology. From a review of his book: In later years radar was used in scientific instruments, such as weather radar and radar astronomy. Early contributors Heinrich Hertz In 1886–1888 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz conducted his series of experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic waves (including radio waves), predicted in equations developed in 1862–4 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In Hertz's 1887 experiment he found that these waves would transmit through different types of materials and also would reflect off metal surfaces in his lab as well as conductors and dielectrics. The nature of these waves being similar to visible light in their ability to be reflected, refracted, and polarized would be shown by Hertz and subsequent experiments by other physicists. Guglielmo Marconi Radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi noticed radio waves were being reflected back to the transmitter by objects in radio beacon experiments he conducted on March 3, 1899 on Salisbury Plain. In 1916 he and British engineer Charles Samuel Franklin used short-waves in their experiments, critical to the practical development of radar. He would relate his findings 6 years later in a 1922 paper delivered before the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London: Christian Hülsmeyer In 1904, Christian Hülsmeyer gave public demonstrations in Germany and the Netherlands of the use of radio echoes to detect ships so that collisions could be avoided. His device consisted of a simple spark gap used to generate a signal that was aimed using a dipole antenna with a cylindrical parabolic reflector. When a signal reflected from a ship was picked up by a