scovil received his d. phil. in 1951 from university of oxford for his thesis "investigation of paramagnetic substances at centimetre wave-lengths", studied paramagnetic resonance at clarendon laboratory, then moved to bell labs where he, george feher, and h. seidel built the first tunable, solid state maser. in the late 1950s he and colleagues constructed ruby travelling wave masers, cooled to 4.2k by liquid helium, which were then the world's lowest-noise microwave amplifiers. they were used by arno penzias and robert woodrow wilson in their investigations of the cosmic microwave background.