Oswald Garrison “Mike” Villard Jr., who taught electrical engineering at Stanford for five decades, helped create some of the Cold War’s most advanced technologies, the kind of high-tech research that propels spy novels. His work led to “over-the-horizon” radar, in which signals are bounced off the ionosphere, a band of the atmosphere about 50 miles high. By 1959, he had transcended line-of-sight radar and learned to peer around the curvature of the earth.
He also retained a boyhood love for short-wave radios. Jim Barnum, a scientist at SRI International who was one of Villard’s graduate advisees in the 1960s, remembers when Villard’s backyard was full of receivers and antennas. “He worked in helping Voice of America with jamming problems. He designed some simple antennas that people could use overseas in Third World countries to hear V of A better.” One antenna was small enough to be hidden in a newspaper; instructions for making it were translated into Chinese after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
Villard died of pneumonia January 7 at a nursing home in Palo Alto. He was 87.
His family tree was illustrious: his great-grandfather was abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and his grandfather was publisher Henry Villard. His father, a longtime pacifist, left the family-owned magazine The Nation in 1940 when it stopped opposing the United States’ entry into the Second World War.
At his father’s urging, Mike Villard got a bachelor’s degree in literature at Yale, but thereafter pursued his interest in electricity, radio and radar. He came to Stanford in 1938 and studied in the electrical engineering department under Fred Terman, ’20, Engr. ’22. During World War II, he worked on radar jamming at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard, and then finished his doctorate at Stanford in 1949. He joined the faculty in 1946 and became a full professor in 1955.
In 1969, when the University banned work on classified defense projects, Villard moved most of his research to Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International. For his contributions to several Cold War technologies, he was awarded the Department of Defense’s highest civilian honor, the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.
At Stanford, Villard remained committed to teaching until the mid-1980s. Members of the Stanford Amateur Radio Club (W6YX), for which he was faculty adviser for nearly three decades, could count on him to buy extra supplies.
Villard is survived by one daughter, Suzanne; two sons, John and Thomas; and three grandchildren. His wife, Barbara Slater Letts, died in 1996.
