a successful time as a student, winning the Carnelley Prize for Chemistry and a class medal for Ordinary Natural Philosophy in 1910. He graduated with a BSc in engineering in 1912, and was offered an assistantship by Professor William Peddie, the holder of the Chair of Physics at University College, Dundee from 1907 to 1942. It was Peddie who encouraged Watson-Watt to study radio, or "wireless telegraphy" as it was then known, and who took him through what was effectively a postgraduate class on the physics of radio frequency oscillators and wave propagation. At the start of the Great War Watson-Watt was working as an assistant in the college's Engineering Department. Early experiments In 1916 Watson-Watt wanted a job with the War Office, but nothing obvious was available in communications. Instead he joined the Meteorological Office, which was interested in his ideas on the use of radio for the detection of thunderstorms. Lightning gives off a radio signal as it ionizes the air, and his goal was to detect this signal to warn pilots of approaching thunderstorms. The signal occurs across a wide range of frequencies, and could be easily detected and amplified by naval longwave sets. In fact, lightning was a major problem for communications at these common wavelengths. His early experiments were successful in detecting the signal and he quickly proved to be able to do so at ranges up to 2,500 km. Location was determined by rotating a loop antenna to maximise (or minimise) the signal, thus "pointing" to the storm. The strikes were so fleeting that it was very difficult to turn the antenna in time to positively locate one. Instead, the operator would listen to many strikes and develop a rough average location. At first, he worked at the Wireless Station of Air Ministry Meteorological Office in Aldershot, Hampshire. In 1924 when the War Department gave notice that they wished to reclaim their Aldershot site, he moved to Ditton Park near Slough, Berkshire. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) was already using this site and had two main devices that would prove pivotal to his work. The first was an Adcock antenna, an arrangement of four masts that allowed the direction of a signal to be detected through phase differences. Using pairs of these antennas positioned at right angles, one could make a simultaneous measurement of the lightning's direction on two axes. Displaying the fleeting signals