The value of this new discovery was lost on the "professional" astronomy community that continued to ignore the potential of radio astronomy for the pursuit of optical observation. Radio astronomy was pioneered by a young radio engineer from the suburbs of Chicago. By day he designed mass produced radio sets and by night he surveyed the radio sky.

By 1937, Grote Reber had set the paradigm for radio astronomy. He had designed a fully steerable parabolic antenna operating a VHF frequencies. He would wait for the wee hours of the nights when the electric trolley buses would stop running and the radio bands were quiet. He would the sweep his recevier across the sky, laboriously charting the signal strength at each location. He created and published the first radio map of the night sky.