his recent academic success, Bolton did a tour of the key astronomy and radio engineering labs of the Northern Hemisphere in 1950. He was met with a frosty reception at the Cavendish by Martin Ryle and Lawrence Bragg, who were having too many guests visiting the lab at the time. However, during his Cambridge visit Bolton got to know the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, which started a lifelong friendship and collaboration. After returning from his trip, Bolton decided sea-cliff interferometry had reached its limit in terms of discovery, and decided to emulate the 220-ft parabolic aerial used by the Jodrell Bank group. At Dover Heights, New South Wales, they built a 72-ft parabolic dish into the soil. Using this instrument in 1953, Bolton and new CSIRO recruit Dick McGee surveyed the Galactic Plane, identifying the centre of the Milky Way - Sagittarius A. Despite Bolton's academic success, Radio Astrophysics could only afford to build one large telescope in the 1950s. While Bolton insisted on building a larger dish modeled on his Dover Heights prototype, the laboratory favoured the Mills Cross radio interferometer. This decision led Bolton to direct conflict with his immediate boss Pawsey, after which he was reassigned by Bowen to the Cloud Physics division of Radio Astrophysics. This allowed Bowen to alleviate the conflict and provided the expertise of Bolton to his Cloud Physics group. During Bolton's detour away from radio astronomy, he worked on understanding how to seed rainfall using silver iodide smoke jettisoned from aircraft. However, Bolton was aware during his brief stint in Cloud physics of the potential opportunity to start the radio astronomy group being established in California. Bolton accepted the position to set up a large radio telescope near Caltech offered by Lee Alvin DuBridge in 1954. Caltech and Owens Valley On joining Caltech as head of the radio astronomy program, Bolton set about establishing an American radio observatory using funds from the Office of Naval Research and Caltech. Along with Gordon Stanley, Bolton identified Owens Valley as an ideal site for a radio observatory because its natural mountain ranges shielded interference from coastal Californian cities and since it was reasonably close to Caltech. Bolton's priority for the type of instrument to build at Owens Valley was one that could accurately localise the position of sources to find their optical counterparts and resolve their radio structure, building on the many poor resolution detections coming