From 1922 to today: the Radar, an Italian story too

In June1922, in a historical conference held at the Radio Institute of Electric Engineers in New York, Guglielmo Marconi suggested, citing the Hertz’s studies, that a metal object can backscatter an electromagnetic wave and thus this event can reveal the presence of a distant object. In the early 1930s, Marconi verified that the radio link between the Vatican State and Castelgandolfo was disturbed by the few cars passing on the roads. Ugo Tiberio was the first researcher in Italy who picked up Marconi’s idea and in 1934 proposed to the Italian Navy the construction of a device, with the aim of qualitatively and quantitatively verify this intuition. Tiberio was able to derive the Radar equation on the basis of theoretical speculations, supplemented by experimental tests. It was the late ‘30s and since then, huge technical and financial resources had been used, whose results had been exceptional. In many countries confidential studies on Radar were conducted and Sean S. Swords had the merit of having objectively described them in his book Technical history of the beginnings of radar, published in 1986. In this book the role played by Italy is widely documented, however with the addition of the word “perhaps”. Our task is to remove that “perhaps” on the basis of documents found in subsequent years.