Sing a Song of SETI
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.
Chorus:
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?
Chorus
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.
Chorus
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