David Mills, W3CHF, recently passed. He was widely recognized as the fellow who invented/developed the network time protocol, or NTP, which keeps all of the computers on the internet in sync. He was also a radio amateur. This is something that I was unaware of.
His New York Times obiturary says,
Throughout his life, Dr. Mills was an ardent ham radio operator; as a teenager he was in touch with Navy Seabees working in Antarctica and patched them through to their families in the United States.
His two-story clapboard house in Newark had an enormous antenna array on its roof. On his university website, he joked that “in emergencies, the rooftop antenna can be converted into helicopter rotor blades and lift the house to safety.”
I never had the pleasure of working W3HCF, but I imagine it would have been a very interesting contact.