holmdel horn antenna visit

How an NJ Antenna Changed Our View of the Universe

How an antenna in new jersey changed our understanding of the universe.

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In the 1950s, the scientific community was split by two competing theories explaining the origin of the universe. On one side, adherents of the Steady State Theory believed that the universe was static and would remain forever unchanged. In these theorists' minds, the universe had always existed in its current state.

Opponents of this explanation favored a more controversial history of the universe, known as the Big Bang. This theory, supported most notably by Georges Lemaître and George Gamow, suggested that the universe began with a cataclysmic explosion billions of years ago. In this scenario, the universe existed in an infinitely dense and infinitely hot state before the Big Bang caused its rapid expansion.

Though Edwin Hubble's observations of receding galaxies in 1929 supported the notion of an expanding universe, no definitive evidence of the Big Bang existed until Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson pointed the Holmdel Horn Antenna to the sky. Penzias and Wilson, a pair of radio astronomers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, first gained access to the instrument after advances in satellite technology made in 1962.

The antenna was originally built in 1959 to support NASA's Project Echo, which bounced radio waves off metallic balloon satellites in order to transmit signals from one part of the globe to another. A few years later, the antenna's sensitivity was increased in order to detect faint signals from Telstar, the first communications satellite capable of collecting, transmitting, and relaying signals rather than simply reflecting them.

With its high sensitivity and horn shape, which allowed for precise pointing, the antenna was ideal for conducting radio astronomy observations. This fact was immediately recognized by Penzias and Wilson, who began using the telescope to study emissions from the Milky Way. The astronomers soon became bogged down, however, by a mysterious background noise that was present wherever the instrument was pointed.

Penzias and Wilson made every attempt to explain the troublesome 'static.' They pointed the antenna towards New York City to check if humans were responsible. They even spent hours removing bird excrement (or as Penzias called it, "white dielectric material") from the horn where pigeons were roosting. After all of their tests, the two men concluded that the noise was not coming from the Earth, the Sun, or the Milky Way. The only remaining explanation was that the source was outside of our own galaxy.

At the same time, a team of Princeton astrophysicists led by Robert Dicke was preparing a paper on the possibility of detecting leftover microwave radiation from the Big Bang. Although the energy released by the Big Bang would have been unfathomably high, Dicke’s team reasoned that the universe’s subsequent expansion would have shifted this radiation into the relatively low-energy radio regime. Upon hearing about the Princeton researcher’s work, Penzias and Wilson began to realize the significance of their mysterious background noise. The researchers contacted Dicke, who sent them a copy of the unpublished paper and was then invited to Holmdel to listen to the noise.

During Dicke's visit, the scientists agreed that they had stumbled upon the cosmic microwave background radiation, the theorized remnants of the Big Bang. Dicke informed his team, "We've been scooped," and in an act of scientific solidarity the two groups decided to publish their results jointly.

The scientific community immediately recognized the importance of such a discovery and in 1978 Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Harvard physicist and Nobel Laureate, Edward Purcell, even said of the finding, "It just may be the most important thing anybody has ever seen." Aside from the implications for science and humankind in general, the discovery was also particularly important for cosmology: it represented a shift in the field from mostly theoretical work to the practice of direct observation.

Today, the Horn Antenna is a National Historic Landmark. Located just a few miles from Bell Laboratories, the 20-foot aluminum antenna is no longer in use and is open to the public. Though the entire apparatus weighs 18 tons, a force of only 100 pounds is sufficient to rotate the antenna along the horizontal axis. To ensure the instrument's safety, it was designed to withstand 100 mph winds and to rotate freely when not in use, allowing it to settle in a position of minimum wind resistance.

More on the Holmdel Horn Antenna can be found on Atlas Obscura.

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Where the Universe Began

A half-century ago, a radio telescope in Holmdel, N.J., sent two astronomers 13.8 billion years back in time — and opened a cosmic window that scientists have been peering through ever since.

The Holmdel Horn Antenna in Monmouth County, N.J., with its caretaker, Robert Wilson, a senior scientist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Mass. Credit...

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By Dennis Overbye

Photographs by Hiroko Masuike

Reported from Holmdel, N.J.

• Published Sept. 4, 2023 Updated Sept. 5, 2023

On a field just below the summit of Crawford Hill, the highest point in Monmouth County, N.J., almost within sight of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, sits a cluster of shacks and sheds. Next to them is the Holmdel Horn Antenna, a radio telescope somewhat resembling the scoop of a giant steam shovel: an aluminum box 20 feet square at the mouth and tapering to an eight-inch opening, through which the radio waves are funneled into the “cab,” a wooden hut on stilts. From a distance, the whole site could be mistaken for an old mining camp you might come across in Montana or Idaho.

What it once mined was the sky. While listening with the antenna in May 1964, two young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, picked up an eerie and persistent hum from the heavens. For a long time, they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings that had accumulated in the horn. Instead, they eventually learned, they had detected the beginnings of space and time. They were listening to the last sigh of the Big Bang, which birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago and is detectable now only as a faint, omnipresent hiss of microwave radiation.

Up until then, scientists had debated whether the universe even had a beginning; maybe it was timeless. That question was now settled. As important, the discovery brought the beginning of time into the lab, where it could be pinched, squeezed and dissected. Encoded in that microwave fuzz are vestiges of events that occurred when the cosmos was less than one-trillionth of a second old and brimming with energies far beyond the capacity of modern particle colliders.

The cosmic microwave background offered a new window into the nature of reality, one into which astronomers have been peering intently ever since. In 1978, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery, and in 1988, the antenna was designated a National Historic Landmark, a symbol of humankind’s ingenuity, curiosity and persistence, and of nature’s ability to surprise and humble us.

Dr. Wilson, now 87, lives in Holmdel and still has the keys to the telescope. When he offered an invitation to visit this spring, I jumped at the chance. The antenna was at the center of a real estate dispute: The new owner of the site wanted to build a senior housing development there and possibly displace the antenna. The neighbors and various citizen groups were in an uproar. As a photographer and I made our way to Dr. Wilson’s house, we passed lawn sign after lawn sign: “Save Crawford Hill,” they said. “Save the Horn Antenna.”

The trouble with pigeons

The Holmdel Horn was built in 1959 by Bell Laboratories for an experiment called Project Echo, which aimed to send messages from one place on Earth to another by bouncing microwaves off giant aluminized balloons. When the project was done, Bell turned the antenna over to two young astronomers: Dr. Penzias, who had left Nazi Germany before the Holocaust and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia, and Dr. Wilson, a radio whiz from Houston with a Ph.D from the California Institute of Technology.

The beginning of time was the last thing on their minds; they wanted to measure the brightness of galaxies. Astronomers often characterize the brightness of their sources by the temperature that a warm body — a so-called blackbody — would have to have in order to produce the same amount of radiation. To accurately measure the galaxies of interest, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson first had to calibrate the antenna by studying sources whose brightness or temperatures were known.

“On May 20, 1964, we got it all together,” Dr. Wilson said when I caught up to him in Holmdel; he was lanky and soft-spoken, with a meticulous manner and an imposing dome of a forehead. But, he recalled, there had been a troublesome surprise — a persistent hiss wherever they pointed the telescope. “The sky was too warm,” he said. “It should have been colder.”

The intrusive noise corresponded to a temperature of about 3.5 kelvin, barely yet clearly above the absolute zero that they had expected from empty space. It was present no matter in what direction they pointed the antenna. Try as they might, they could not get rid of the extra heat.

“And we, of course, were worried — ‘what’s wrong with this system?’” Dr. Wilson said.

On the long list of potential wrongs were two pigeons that had roosted in the narrow end of the antenna and the “white dielectric material,” as Dr. Penzias called it, that they had left behind. “And they had decorated it the way they decorate various statues,” Dr. Wilson said.

The pigeons were sent away. “A couple of days later, they were right back,” Dr. Wilson said. A more permanent eviction was arranged. But even after cleaning the telescope, the buzz remained, eluding all explanation for nearly a year. “We were at wit’s end,” Dr. Wilson said.

‘Boys, we’ve been scooped’

A few miles away, Robert Dicke, a physicist at Princeton, and his students had begun looking into the conditions under which the universe could have begun, if indeed it had a beginning. They concluded that any such Big Bang must have been hot enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions, at millions of degrees, in order to synthesize heavy elements from primordial hydrogen.

That energy should still be around, they realized. But as the universe expanded, the primeval fireball would have cooled to a few kelvin above absolute zero — which, they calculated, would put the cosmic radiation in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. (The group did not know, or had forgotten, that the same calculation had been made 20 years earlier by the physicist George Gamow and his collaborators at George Washington University.)

Dr. Dicke assigned two graduate students — David Wilkinson, a gifted instrumentalist, and James Peebles, a theorist — to try to detect these microwaves. As the group was meeting to decide on a plan of action, the phone rang. It was Dr. Penzias. When Dr. Dicke hung up, he turned to his team. “Boys, we’ve just been scooped,” he said.

The two teams met and wrote a pair of papers, which were published back-to-back in Astrophysical Journal. The Bell Labs group described the radio noise, and the Princeton group proposed that it could be leftover heat from the Big Bang — “probably each side thinking, Well, what we’ve done is correct but the other may not be,” Dr. Wilson said.

“I think both Arno and I wanted to leave open the idea that there was some other source of this noise,” he added. “But, of course, that didn’t work out.”

Over the next decades, other astronomers and physicists joined and competed in the quest to measure the cosmic microwave background at different frequencies and to fill in its electromagnetic spectrum. The effort migrated from Crawford Hill to mountaintops, the South Pole, balloons and space, where instruments could study the microwaves unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere.

In 1990, the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE, reported that the temperature of the microwave background was a consistent 2.7 kelvin — 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero — in every direction. The result pleased Dr. Wilson since it was close to his and Dr. Penzias’s original estimate. COBE also found that the microwave universe was not as uniform as it appeared: It was mottled with spots a few hundred-thousandths of a kelvin hotter or cooler than average. Astronomers now think these spots are the seeds of the galaxies and galaxy clusters that now dot the sky.

The COBE results produced two more Nobel Prizes, for John Mather of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley.

Continuing studies of the cosmic microwaves, along with regular astronomy, have cemented a view of what is sometimes called “a preposterous universe,” of which atomic matter — the stuff of stars and people — composes only 5 percent by weight. By analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of these spots and ripples, astronomers have been able to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the ancient philosophers weep. It now seems that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and consists, by mass, of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.

The microwaves detected by Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson date from 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the entire universe was as hot as the surface of the sun and the first atoms formed, releasing light in the process. That is as far back as optical and radio telescopes can reach.

But the patterns within these microwaves date from less than one-trillionth of a second into the Big Bang. Cosmologists speculate that in that tiny moment, the universe experienced a brief, violent burst of hyper-expansion known as inflation. Such a wrenching outburst would have left ripples — gravitational waves — imprinted on the microwave background. In 2014, astronomers operating a sensitive experiment called Bicep2 claimed to have detected those ripples, but they had been fooled by interstellar dust . So far, the smoking gun of inflation has not been detected.

A cosmic time capsule

Scientists continue to try to crack this cosmic time capsule open.

Suzanne Staggs, an astrophysicist at Princeton, points out that as the cosmic microwaves have traveled 14 billion light-years to our detectors, they have passed through all of cosmic history — through all of the galaxies and clusters of galaxies that have ever existed. Along the way, the microwaves would have been warped and distorted by the gravity of all of those massive objects through a process called gravitational lensing.

Dr. Staggs is the principal investigator on a multinational collaboration called the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, which is at an altitude of 17,000 feet in Chile and consists of dozens of telescopes and thousands of individual microwave sensors. For the last decade, the research team has used this lensing effect to map the distribution of matter, including dark matter, in the universe.

Recently, astronomers using the South Pole Telescope, another multinational effort, used a similar technique to “weigh” an entire cluster of galaxies that existed some 12 billion years ago, at the dawn of time. And a worldwide collaboration of scientists and experiments operating under the name CMB-S4 is gearing up for the deepest dive yet into the cosmic microwave sea: a seven-year search over the next decade for even fainter patterns within patterns. If found, these could bear testimony to the forces that prevailed at the beginning of time.

The effort will include the Simons Observatory, now under construction next door to the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, and other experiments at the South Pole and elsewhere. It will cost its sponsors, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, half a billion dollars. “As with any big projects, it has many gates to get through before the construction funding is secure,” said John Carlstrom, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and project scientist for the CMB-S4.

Lyman Page, a physicist at Princeton who has spent his career investigating the cosmic microwaves, added: “It’s just great physics.”

The sounds of creation

Dr. Wilson retired from Bell Labs in 1994 and joined the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian as a senior scientist. Dr. Penzias retired as the vice president and chief scientist of Lucent Technologies, which had absorbed Bell Labs, in 1998, and is now living in California. At the suggestion of a colleague, Dr. Wilson has signed up to be one of the 459 members of the CMB-S4 collaboration, though he doesn’t yet have specific research plans.

In the meantime, Dr. Wilson was in the middle of the fight to save the horn antenna. He has maintained cordial relations with Rakesh Antala, the new property owner, and credits him with allowing access to the antenna and protecting it.

“I’d like it to stay where it is,” he said, referring to the horn. “And I think the idea of making it into a park is a good one.” He noted that the antenna had suffered some vandalism, including broken windows. “So it needs some protection,” he said.

In June, Holmdel’s township committee voted to take the first step toward invoking eminent domain and claiming at least part of the 43 acres, including the antenna, as a park, citing “a ground swelling of public support for preservation of the Crawford Hill property.” Dr. Wilson said that he approved, but that it would be a long process. “I suppose that Rakesh will keep lawyers employed on both sides,” he said.

He unlocked a gate to the antenna, then led the way up a short flight of stairs into the hut at the tapered end of the horn. He pointed out the mechanism for aiming the antenna — not gears, but what looked like an oversize bicycle chain. “It was built in a hurry to get ready for the Echo satellite,” Dr. Wilson said. “There was no time to forge gear teeth.”

At one time, the hut had been full of radio equipment, set to receive data from the tail end of the horn. Now it was empty, and the floor was suspect. The eight-inch opening to the horn, and to the cosmos at large, was covered by a wooden plate to keep birds from flying in. A broken window looked out into the woods.

Dr. Wilson picked up a piece of paper that was nearly ripped in half; it bore the names and phone numbers of Bell Labs employees, circa 1964, his among them. A few lines above his was Dr. Penzias’s name and number. Dr. Wilson tucked it away to take home. He took another piece of paper hanging on a wall and frowned; it had lists and columns of numbers relating voltages and temperatures. “I don’t know what this is,” Dr. Wilson said.

Hanging above that was a hair dryer that had been used for warming up equipment that had been cooled in liquid helium. Dr. Wilson left it where it was.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote in the novel “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past.” The sounds of creation are still ringing, if you have the ears to hear them.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the journal in which the initial papers on the cosmic microwave background were published; it was Astrophysical Journal, not Physical Review Letters. The article also misstated the year in which Robert Wilson retired from Bell Labs; it was in 1994, not 1984.

How we handle corrections

Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” More about Dennis Overbye

Hiroko Masuike is a photographer and a staff editor for The Times. More about Hiroko Masuike

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Holmdel Horn Antenna: Where The Big Bang Was Discovered

Physicists and astronomers believe that the universe began with the Big Bang—a cataclysmic event that occurred roughly 13 billion years ago which gave birth to the universe. The Big Bang theory suggests that the entire universe was concentrated in an incredibly hot and dense state, called the singularity, which began to rapidly expand resulting in the formation of matter, including subatomic particles and atoms. These atoms then clumped together to form galaxies, stars, and other structures in the universe.

For a long time scientists wondered that an event as powerful as the Big Bang ought to leave some evidence, a “relic” radiation in the form of a cosmic background noise that permeates all of the universe. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) was first predicted in 1948 by American cosmologists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. The mainstream astronomical community, however, was not intrigued at the time by cosmology. The Big Bang theory itself was largely debated. The alternative being the Steady State theory which posits that the universe has existed for eternity and is roughly the same at any point in time.

The first published recognition of the CMB radiation as a detectable phenomenon appeared in a brief paper by Soviet astrophysicists A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Novikov, in the spring of 1964. The same year, Robert H. Dicke, and his colleagues at Princeton University, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson, astrophysicists began preparing to search for this microwave radiation. Dicke and his colleagues reasoned that the Big Bang must have scattered not only the matter that condensed into galaxies, but also must have released a tremendous blast of radiation. Given the appropriate instruments, they believed this radiation could be detected, albeit in the form of microwaves, owing to significant redshift.

Just 60 km away at Crawford Hill, in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were experimenting with a supersensitive horn antenna to map radio signals from the Milky Way. The Holmdel Horn Antenna was originally built as part of Project Echo to detect radio waves bounced off large balloon satellites. Project Echo was a NASA initiative, where large inflated mylar spheres up to 100 feet across were orbited some 1,000 miles above Earth passively reflecting radio signal directed towards its large shiny surface. NASA made these simple passive reflectors for intercontinental telephone, radio, and television transmission.

The Horn antenna at Holmdeal was constructed to communicate with these Echo satellites. This antenna is 50 feet long with an opening 20 feet square, that tapers to an 8 inch outlet, through which the radio waves were funneled into a receiver.

Shortly after Project Echo, the Telstar satellite was launched, rendering the Echo system obsolete with its integrated transponders. This advancement freed the antenna from its prior commercial constraints, making it available for research purposes. Seizing the opportunity, Penzias and Wilson decided to utilize it for the analysis of radio signals originating from the interstellar spaces. However, as they began their observations, they encountered a mysterious background noise in the microwave spectrum, seemingly emanating from all directions of the sky. They thoroughly examined their equipment and even cleaned the antenna of pigeon droppings to eliminate potential sources of interference, yet the noise persisted. They both concluded that the noise originated beyond our own galaxy, although they remained unaware of any known radio sources that could explain it.

When a friend and professor of physics at MIT, told Penzias about a paper he had seen by Jim Peebles on the possibility of finding radiation left over from the Big Bang that filled the universe at the beginning of its existence, Penzias and Wilson began to realize the significance of what they had discovered. Penzias got in touch with Dicke, and invited him to Bell Labs to look at the horn antenna and listen to the background noise. Dicke concluded that the characteristics of the radiation detected by Penzias and Wilson fit exactly the radiation predicted by him and his colleagues at Princeton University.

A pair of short papers appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters in July 1965 announcing the findings, first Dicke’s theoretical treatment and then Penzias and Wilson’s observational findings, each paper acknowledging the other. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, and the Holmdel antenna was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

The Holmdel Horn Antenna is now defunct and lies within a 43-acre site formerly owned by Bell Labs, among a few derelict structures built for communications research. In 2021, the site was sold to a local builder , who expressed desire to build high-end residences in the property. It’s believed that the antenna might get relocated to another place. In response, the town has agreed to buy part of the property where the antenna stands, leaving the rest for the owners to develop. The town wants to make this 35-acre chunk of the hill into a park, with the historic antenna and a visitor center.

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Holmdel Horn Antenna

Holmdel, New Jersey

The Large Horn Antenna and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation

As part of the APS historic sites initiative, on December 9, 2008, APS Vice-President Curtis Callan presented a plaque to Bell Labs to commemorate the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) that provided evidence for the Big Bang. Bell Labs radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using a large horn antenna in 1964 and 1965 to map signals from the Milky Way, when they serendipitously discovered the CMB. As written in the citation, "This unexpected discovery, offering strong evidence that the universe began with the Big Bang, ushered in experimental cosmology." Penzias and Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 in honor of their findings.

The CMB is "noise" leftover from the creation of the Universe. The microwave radiation is only 3 degrees above Absolute Zero or -270 degrees C, and is uniformly perceptible from all directions. Its presence demonstrates that that our universe began in an extremely hot and violent explosion, called the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

In 1960, Bell Labs built a 20-foot horn-shaped antenna in Holmdel, NJ to be used with an early satellite system called Echo. The intention was to collect and amplify radio signals to send them across long distances, but within a few years, another satellite was launched and Echo became obsolete. With the antenna no longer tied to commercial applications, it was now free for research. Penzias and Wilson jumped at the chance to use it to analyze radio signals from the spaces between galaxies. But when they began to employ it, they encountered a persistent "noise" of microwaves that came from every direction. If they were to conduct experiments with the antenna, they would have to find a way to remove the static.

Penzias and Wilson tested everything they could think of to rule out the source of the radiation racket. They knew it wasn’t radiation from the Milky Way or extraterrestrial radio sources. They pointed the antenna towards New York City to rule out "urban interference", and did analysis to dismiss possible military testing from their list.

Then they found droppings of pigeons nesting in the antenna. They cleaned out the mess and tried removing the birds and discouraging them from roosting, but they kept flying back. "To get rid of them, we finally found the most humane thing was to get a shot gun…and at very close range [we] just killed them instantly. It’s not something I’m happy about, but that seemed like the only way out of our dilemma," said Penzias. "And so the pigeons left with a smaller bang, but the noise remained, coming from every direction."

At the same time, the two astronomers learned that Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke had predicted that if the Big Bang had occurred, there would be low level radiation found throughout the universe. Dicke was about to design an experiment to test this hypothesis when he was contacted by Penzias. Upon hearing of Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery, Dicke turned to his laboratory colleagues and said "well boys, we’ve been scooped."

Although both groups published their results in Astrophysical Journal Letters, only Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the CMB.

The horn antenna was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Its significance in fostering a new appreciation for the field of cosmology and a better understanding of our origins can be summed up by the following: "Scientists have labeled the discovery [of the CMB] the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century."

Works cited and bibliography

• Hu, Wayne, " An Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background ", Lecture given at the Institute for Advanced Study, October 25, 1996.
• " A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Penzias and Wilson discover cosmic microwave radiation 1965 ," PBS.
• " This Month in Physics History, June 1963: Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background ," APS News, July 2002.
• Schoenstein, Ralph, " The Big Bang's Echo ," All Things Considered, NPR, May 17, 2005.

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Science Friday

The antenna that detected the big bang.

An excerpt from “The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive.”

The following is an excerpt from The Geek Atlas , by John Graham-Cumming. 

Horn Antenna, Holmdel, NJ

40° 23′ 26.61″ N, 74° 11′ 5.57″ W

Down a private road on top of Crawford Hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, is a 15-meter horn-shaped antenna built for Bell Labs and designed to pick up faint signals from an early NASA communications satellite. It achieved its purpose, and much more: the antenna ended up detecting signals that confirmed the Big Bang.

The Horn Antenna was built in 1959 as part of NASA’s Project Echo. Rather than using powered satellites for communication, as is done today, Project Echo involved placing 30- to 40-meter spherical balloons in orbit and bouncing microwave signals off them. In 1960 the Echo 1A satellite was successfully launched and placed in low Earth orbit. Echo 1A, weighing 76 kilograms and made of a mylar polyester film, showed that satellite communication would work: TV and radio signals were transmitted to it, bounced off it, and received.

The Ultimate Geek Road Trip

On August 12, 1960, the Horn Antenna at Holmdel received a message transmitted from California and bounced off Echo 1A: “This is President Eisenhower speaking. This is one more significant step in the United States’ program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interest.”

In 1964, two scientists working on calibrating the Horn Antenna to remove interference were unable to identify a source of random noise. The antenna’s design was intended to eliminate noise from the surroundings; it was cooled to just above Absolute Zero to eliminate noise from the heat of the receiver; and the scientists chased off pigeons that contaminated the antenna interior with their droppings. The scientists had even placed metal tape over protruding rivets to try to achieve silence.

The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive

But a microwave noise remained. The scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, determined that the noise was present day and night. By moving the antenna, which was built to examine any part of the sky, they found that the noise was present no matter where they looked.

In fact, they had discovered a trace of the Big Bang: cosmic background microwave radiation. The noise being received on a microwave wavelength of 7.35 centimeters (the wavelength at which the antenna’s receiver was built to operate) had been predicted since the 1940s. With its detection, the Big Bang theory prevailed over other rival explanations for the origin of the universe, and Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize.

Today the antenna is a National Historic Monument and is easily seen from the road. It sits on a rotating base and is attached directly to a small hut, where the receiving equipment was located. The entire antenna (but not the hut) can rotate on its axis to point at different parts of the sky. It is no longer in use.

Practical Information

At the entrance to Bell Labs’ old Holmdel site at 101 Crawfords Corner Road, there’s a water tower billed as the World’s Largest Transistor (Bell Labs was the home of the first transistor, although it looked nothing like the water tower). Continuing northwest on Crawfords Corner Road, you’ll reach a junction where you turn right onto Holmdel Road. The antenna is on a private road off of Holmdel Road; turn right after you’ve passed Longview Drive.

Copyright © 2009 John Graham-Cumming. All rights reserved. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.

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About john graham-cumming.

John Graham-Cumming is a p rogrammer and author of The Geek Atlas (O’Reilly, 2009) based in London, England.

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