What were the origins of radio astronomy at Bell Labs? I like to start the story in 1928. That was the year Bell Laboratories hired people of interest to us, Art Crawford and Karl Jansky. Karl was tasked with understanding the sources of noise on a proposed transatlantic short wave radio-telephone circuit. He built a large, rotating, directional antenna and sensitive radio receiver and recorded his output for a long time. In addition to thunderstorms and man-made noise, just like old AM radios used to produce, he found
