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RADIO ACTIVIST: Villard’s
simple antennas helped would-be democrats.
Stanford News Service |
Oswald Garrison “Mike”
Villard Jr., who taught electrical engineering
at Stanford for five decades, helped create some of
the Cold War’s most advanced technologies, the
kind of high-tech research that propels spy novels.
His work led to “over-the-horizon” radar,
in which signals are bounced off the ionosphere, a band
of the atmosphere about 50 miles high. By 1959, he had
transcended line-of-sight radar and learned to peer
around the curvature of the earth.
He also retained a boyhood love for short-wave radios.
Jim Barnum, a scientist at SRI International who was
one of Villard’s graduate advisees in the 1960s,
remembers when Villard’s backyard was full of
receivers and antennas. “He worked in helping
Voice of America with jamming problems. He designed
some simple antennas that people could use overseas
in Third World countries to hear V of A better.”
One antenna was small enough to be hidden in a newspaper;
instructions for making it were translated into Chinese
after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
Villard died of pneumonia January 7 at a nursing home
in Palo Alto. He was 87.
His family tree was illustrious: his great-grandfather
was abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and his grandfather
was publisher Henry Villard. His father, a longtime
pacifist, left the family-owned magazine The Nation
in 1940 when it stopped opposing the United States’
entry into the Second World War.
At his father’s urging, Mike Villard got a bachelor’s
degree in literature at Yale, but thereafter pursued
his interest in electricity, radio and radar. He came
to Stanford in 1938 and studied in the electrical engineering
department under Fred Terman, ’20, Engr. ’22.
During World War II, he worked on radar jamming at the
Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard, and then finished
his doctorate at Stanford in 1949. He joined the faculty
in 1946 and became a full professor in 1955.
In 1969, when the University banned work on classified
defense projects, Villard moved most of his research
to Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International.
For his contributions to several Cold War technologies,
he was awarded the Department of Defense’s highest
civilian honor, the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding
Public Service.
At Stanford, Villard remained committed to teaching
until the mid-1980s. Members of the Stanford Amateur
Radio Club (W6YX), for which he was faculty adviser
for nearly three decades, could count on him to buy
extra supplies.
Villard is survived by one daughter, Suzanne; two sons,
John and Thomas; and three grandchildren. His wife,
Barbara Slater Letts, died in 1996.
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