High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! William Webster Hansen (May 27, 1909 May 23, 1949) was a U.S. physicist who was one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics. Hansen's father, an immigrant from Denmark, was a hardware store owner in Fresno, California and encouraged his son's early talent in mathematics and enthusiasm for electronics. Entering Stanford University at the age of 16, he received his doctorate in 1933. He went on to become interested in the problem of accelerating electrons for X-ray experiments, using oscillating fields, rather than large static voltages. At the University of California, Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence and David H. Sloan had worked on an accelerator driven by a resonant coil. Hansen proposed replacing the coil with a cavity resonator. However, in 1937, the brothers Russel and Sigurd F. Varian came to Stanford to work on the foundations of what was to become radar. Hansen exploited some of the Varians' work to develop the klystron and during the years 1937 to 1940, along with collaborators such as John R. Woodyard, founded the field of microwave electronics.