FACTUAL
The Man Who Invented Stereo
Saturday 2 August 2008 20:00-21:00 (Radio 4 FM)
Alan Blumlein is a true lost genius, an engineer, who during his brief life propelled Britain to the vanguard of the modern electronics world.
Working for EMI in the 1930s, he was at the forefront of a revolution, which gave us recorded sound, television, and radar.
In the field of audio he devised an entire recording system for EMI, the basis of its fortune for decades.
Immediately afterwards he invented stereo, and went on to make experimental stereo films and records in 1934. These include a stereo recording of Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the LPO at EMI's Abbey Road studios playing Mozart.
The work was so far ahead of its time it was shelved, and Blumlein then moved on to television and was at the heart of the team which produced the first modern TV system, which was adopted by the BBC in 1937. Some colleagues even claim Blumlein should be regarded as the true inventor of modern TV.
At the start of the war he switched to radar. In 1942 he was part of top secret project designing a revolutionary radar system for Churchill, which enabled the RAF to bomb through clouds.
Tragically a Halifax bomber carrying the system on a test flight crashed in Wales in 1942 killing Blumlein and 10 others on board. He was 38 years old. But the radar system he helped design was posthumously put into production and proved to be a 'war-winner', enabling the RAF to both defeat U-Boats, and launch devastating bombing raids on German cities.
Drawing on a range of archive material, much of it never broadcast before, the programme paints a intimate picture of Blumlein as a family man, who according to his widow and son, struggled with spelling and could not read until the age of 12.
But he was also a genius who was granted a patent every 6 weeks of his working life and who, according to one distinguished colleague, 'had he lived would have be considered the Faraday of our age'.
The BBC would like to thank The British Library Oral History Section and EMI archives for permission to use extracts in this programme. Special thanks to Rob Alexander, Roger Beardsley, Lester Smith, Mary Stewart, Marie Fowler, Paul Lilley, Simon Vaughan and Simon Blumlein.
Related links:
The British Library Oral History Section
Abbey Road Studios
Alan Dower Blumlein
