ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the story of the planning and construction of the Giant Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire. Government departments promoted the instrument as an object of 'national prestige' and public spectacle for their own reasons. The media, press, film and radio, shaped both the content and interpretation of the instrument in transmitting its representation. The experience of Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar provided a template on which Hingston proposed a solution to the management of the telescope as 'a great public spectacle'. The 'canalizing' of visual representations of the telescope extended to the 'captioning of the photographs'. The presentation of the radio telescope, consisting of a dish aerial on a gun mounting, played on the familiar 'swords and ploughshares' trope. Lockspeiser, the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), judged that the Duke of Edinburgh would be a suitable symbolic personage to perform the ceremony.
