Ugo Tiberio

Ugo Tiberio (Campobasso, 19 August 1904 – Livorno, 17 May 1980) was an Italian engineer, naval officer and university teacher, best known for his role in the development of the Gufo radar. He was the nephew of naval officer and scientist Vincenzo Tiberio.

Biography

Born in Campobasso in 1904 from Alberto Tiberio and Maria Rachele De Feo, he was directed to a career in the Navy by his maternal uncle Vincenzo de Feo. After graduating in engineering at the University of Naples in 1927, he specialized in electrotechnics at the Higher School of Engineering in Rome in 1932. In 1934-1935 he fulfilled his compulsory military service in the Royal Italian Army, with the rank of second lieutenant in the Engineering Corps, and in July 1935 he was transferred at his own request to the Royal Italian Navy, with the rank of lieutenant in the Naval Weapons Corps. He worked as a researcher in the Higher Institute of Radio Transmissions in Rome until 1936, when he was exonerated from active service. In the same year, together with his colleague Professor Nello Carrara, Tiberio developed a system for the localization of objects at a distance with magnetic waves called the EC1 "radio telemeter", an early form of radar. The commands of the Regia Marina, however, did not realize the importance of this discovery, and Tiberio was forced to relegate his radar studies to a "second job", with scarce funds and few collaborators.

Tiberio was recalled into service in January 1937, following Italy's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, resuming his studies within the Royal Electrotechnical and Communications Institute (Regio Istituto Elettrotecnico e delle Comunicazioni della Marina, RIEC) in Livorno, where he worked until 1943. From 1937 to 1953 he was also a teacher at the Naval Academy of Livorno; in 1938 he was promoted to the rank of captain of the Naval Weapons Corps, and in 1940 he became teacher of electrotechnics at the University of Palermo. He was able to solve the theoretical problem of calculating the intensity of the echo, giving substantial contribution to the development of the radar equation, which he described in an article published in 1939; he proposed and discussed two implementation schemes, one with frequency modulation and one with pulses, proposing to test both while giving preference to the first, on which he based his radar prototype. He also suggested the use of the Doppler effect for locating vehicles; he developed a device based on this principle which he called the radiotachometer, due to the greater accuracy in measuring the speed of objects.