Introduction
John Ashworth Ratcliffe CB OBE FRS (known to intimates as "Jar"; 12 December 1902 – 25 October 1987) was an influential British radio physicist. (Several sources misspell his name as Radcliffe.)
Career
Ratcliffe and his University of Cambridge group (which included physicist Frank Farmer) did much pioneering work on the ionosphere, immediately prior to World War II. He was one of many leading radio scientists who worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment during WW2. Martin Ryle, Bernard Lovell, and Antony Hewish were co-workers there, and Ryle and Hewish joined his radio-physics group at Cambridge after WW2. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1951. He chaired the Tracking Analysis and Data Recovery (TADREC), a subcommittee of the Royal Society's British National Committee for Space Research (BNCSR).
In 1953 Ratcliffe was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on The Uses of Radio Waves.
He served as President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers from 1966 to 1967.
From 1960 to 1966 he was Director of the Radio & Space Research Station at Slough.
Ratcliffe was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1976.