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At Harvard University in 1951
Harold Ewen pointed his antenna past the sun.
He used a waveguide horn, ten feet long and half that wide,
That drove a mixer with a 1N21 inside.
Ewen and Purcell caught the radiation line
Of interstellar hydrogen, a most important find.
A klystron signal generator as a switched LO,
At thirteen-ninety-three into the diode it would go.
At twenty-seven megs, they amplified a million fold.
Upon the Angus chart recorder, what did they behold?
Ewen and Purcell caught the radiation line
Of interstellar hydrogen, a most important find.
Ewen could detect the twenty centimeter line!
He showed his data to Purcell, who thought that it was fine.
He wrote a dissertation, and it wasn't very long.
It had as many pages as the lines within my song.