The life and work of A.D. Blumlein

Alan Dower Blumlein was a remarkably versatile, prolific and creative engineer whose type of genius has had few equals this century. Following early work on telephony during which he developed a transformer-bridge network he turned his attention to audio engineering, developing moving-coil microphones and wax cutters which circumvented patents held by Bell Laboratories and inventing a system for binaural recording. Blumlein was largely responsible for the logical development of the overall system and transmitted waveform for the world´s first public, all-electronic television service but also contributed many of the component circuits, such as an efficient line-frequency scanning circuit the `Miller´ integrator, the long-tailed pair and the bootstrap circuit. Before his death in an air crash he had made significant contributions to the development of airborne interception radar, microwave radar and H₂S ground-mapping radar. These aspects of Blumlein´s work are described