John Paul Wild

John Paul Wild

Dr John Paul (Paul) Wild AC CBE MA ScD (Cantab.) FRS FTSE FAA (17 May 1923 – 10 May 2008) was a British-born Australian scientist. Following service in World War 2 as a radar officer in the Royal Navy, he became a CSIR radio astronomer in Australia. In the 1950s and 1960s he made discoveries based on radio observations of the Sun. In the late 1960s and early 1970s his team built and operated the world's first solar radio-spectrographs and subsequently the Culgoora radio-heliograph, near Narrabri, New South Wales. The Paul Wild Observatory at Culgoora is named after him.

In 1972 Paul Wild invented Interscan, a standard microwave landing system. From 1978 to 1985 he was chairman of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), during which time he expanded the organisation's scope and directed its restructuring. He retired from CSIRO to lead (from 1986–1991) the Very Fast Train Joint Venture, a private sector project that sought to build a high-speed railway between Australia's two most populous cities. Lack of support from government brought it to an end in 1991. In his later years he worked on gravitational theory.