Magnet Academy: John Daniel Kraus

For a man whose career involved the entire known universe, John Kraus had a remarkably insular upbringing. He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics, all at the University of Michigan. Throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s, the budding scientist was an avid radio amateur who 70 years later would be named to the Amateur Radio Hall of Fame. Kraus experimented with different means of radio exploration of space and is credited with several inventions, including the helical antenna.