Ted Cooke-Yarborough was born at
Campsall in the
Yorkshire West Riding, northern
England, the only child of barrister George Eustace Cooke-Yarborough (1876–1938),
JP, of Campsmount, Yorkshire, and his wife Daphne Isabel (died 1984), daughter of Henry Cordy Wrinch. The Cooke-Yarborough family were a branch of the family of
Cooke baronets, of Wheatley Hall, Yorkshire. Cooke-Yarborough was educated at
Canford School in
Dorset, southern England, where he built his first
wireless equipment, and studied
Physics at
Christ Church, Oxford, where he was president of the
University Physics Society. During
World War II, he worked as part of the secret Air Ministry RDF radar project, initially in
Dundee and then at
Swanage within the
Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE). He led a team that produced an automatic airborne radar system, used to warn aircrews of aircraft approaching from behind. He continued his work in radar at
Malvern and then on guided weapons in the United States. After WWII, he was sent on a Combined Intelligence mission to interview German scientists concerning their development work on radar and guided weapons and. In 1946, Cooke-Yarborough joined UK Atomic Energy programme to work on nuclear instrumentation. Soon after his transfer to the
Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell (AERE Harwell) in 1948, he supervised the production of the
Harwell Dekatron Computer, working with fellow designers Dick Barnes and Gurney Thomas. All three visited the
EDSAC computer in
Cambridge during the design stage. In 1951, Cooke-Yarborough attended the first
Bell Labs symposium on the
transistor. Afterwards he developed the
Harwell CADET computer, which was one of the first
digital computers to use transistors. in 1957, Cooke-Yarborough was appointed as head of the Electronics Division at AERE Harwell, and published "
An Introduction to Transistor Circuits". In 1980, Cooke-Yarborough was elected Fellow of the
Fellowship of Engineering (later to become the
Royal Academy of Engineering) and was appointed chief research scientist at AERE until he retired in 1982. On 20 November 2012, Cooke-Yarborough attended the reboot of the Harwell Dekatron Computer at the
National Museum of Computing, the last time that he appeared in public. In 1953, Cooke-Yarborough married Anthea Katherine (1928–2007), daughter of John Alexander Dixon, of Whirlow, Hook Heath,
Woking,
Surrey. They had a son and daughter, and also grandchildren. ==Selected publications==