Early Years
Born in Brechin, Angus, Scotland, Watson-Watt was a descendant of James Watt, the famous engineer and inventor of the practical steam engine. After attending Damacre Primary School and Brechin High School, he was accepted to University College, Dundee (which was then part of the University of St Andrews but became the University of Dundee in 1967). Watt had 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 of one 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.
In 1949 a Watson-Watt Chair of Electrical Engineering was established at University College, Dundee.
Read more about this topic: Robert Watson-Watt
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