R. V. Jones was a practical joker in peacetime – and a master of the arts of wartime deception, in a continuing battle of technology with technique and counter-technique. He worked out how incoming bombers were flying in along radio navigation beams to guide their night-time raids and produced a series of successful countermeasures.

He devised a method for RAF bombers to ‘blind’ enemy radio operators by dropping large quantities of metal foil strips – “chaff” – which generated thousands of fake radar echoes. He was cleared to receive ultra-secret reports from spies along with deciphered messages from Bletchley Park, and he was renowned for holding his own in meetings with ministers and Churchill.

In the post-war world he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen – where one of his students in the mid-1960s was Dr Tom Stevenson from Orkney. Tom, who went on to become a professor himself at Edinburgh in the field of microelectronics, tells the story of Prof. Jones’s secret war and his teaching methods – and some of the remarkable measurement techniques that he developed, including a way to show how the tide’s daily ebb and flow produces a very slight tilting of the whole city of Aberdeen.

Supported by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the IET)