Grote Reber was a 25-year-old radio engineer in Wheaton, Illinois, working at a Chicago-area radio receiver manufacturer when he became interested in Karl Jansky's 1933 discovery of cosmic radio waves. He applied to Bell Labs for a job working under Jansky and was rebuffed. He approached universities about funding for a follow-up telescope and was rebuffed. The Great Depression had observatories cutting back rather than expanding into mysterious new fields. So Reber decided to build the telescope himself, in his back yard, with money he earned from his day job. The dish design was a parabola - the same shape that focuses light in a flashlight reflector, only scaled up and tuned for radio wavelengths. Reber fabricated the 72 radial rafters in a Chicago metal shop and assembled them at home. The dish was 31 feet in diameter, with a focal length of 20 feet, mounted on a pair of arched rails set on railroad wheels so he could tilt it up and down through the sky.

Reber spent the next decade conducting the first systematic survey of cosmic radio emissions. He worked at night - radio interference from cars and home appliances during the day swamped his signals. He could not observe the planets, the moon, or even the sun usefully with his equipment because they were too radio-quiet at the wavelengths he could detect. But what he could see was extraordinary: the same Milky Way radiation Jansky had discovered, mapped now in unprecedented detail, plus discrete radio sources that nobody had known existed. Cassiopeia A. Cygnus A. The first contour maps of the radio sky, published in The Astrophysical Journal in the early 1940s. The astronomy establishment finally took notice. Reber's papers were among the first peer-reviewed work in what would become a major scientific field. He was, for at least a decade, a one-person discipline.

Reber eventually sold the telescope to the U.S. National Bureau of Standards. The dish was moved from Wheaton to Sterling, Virginia, for further research. When the National Radio Astronomy Observatory took ownership, the telescope was moved again - this time to Boulder, Colorado. Its final move brought it to Green Bank, West Virginia, where it now stands on the observatory grounds as a working monument to the origins of radio astronomy. The 31-foot dish is dwarfed by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope nearby, which is essentially a vastly larger version of the same design. The same parabolic geometry that focused Reber's signals in 1937 focuses signals from the Ophiuchus Superbubble and PSR J0740+6620 today. The principle has not changed. Only the scale.

Reber's backyard dish was the prototype for every parabolic radio telescope that followed. The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in England, completed in 1957. The 300-foot transit dish at Green Bank, completed in 1962 and collapsed in 1988. The 305-meter Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, completed in 1963 and collapsed in 2020. The Green Bank Telescope itself, completed in 2001. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, completed in 2016. All of these descend, in design philosophy, from a dish that one man built in his backyard during the Great Depression on his own dime, because he could not get anyone else to pay him to do it. The Reber Radio Telescope was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989 - making it one of the very few National Historic Landmarks that started life in a residential subdivision.