Edward Bowles; MIT Engineer Helped Develop Radar

Edward Bowles, an electrical engineer who played an important role in developing radar in World War II, has died of Parkinson’s disease after suffering a series of strokes. He was 92.

His family said he died Wednesday in a Weston, Mass., nursing home.

As a consultant to the secretary of war, Bowles was asked to devise a way to combat German submarines that were sinking merchant ships in the North Atlantic.

Having been a microwave specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he set up a laboratory at Langley Field, Va., where Army Air Corps bombers were equipped with radar developed at the university.

In 1945, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his wartime efforts.

Bowles was born in Westphalia, Mo. He received a bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s from MIT, where he began teaching in 1921. He became an expert in what was then the new field of radio.

Bowles pioneered the development of the multi-vibrator, by which a tuning fork, and later a crystal, could be used to maintain a precise radio frequency. He started a division of electrical communications at MIT in the mid-1920s.