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Alan Blumlein Railway enthusiast, music lover, and the man who gave us stereo sound.

In two parts

1903-1942
King George V 1910-1936 to King George VI 1936-1952
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

© Claudia Yang, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source

About this picture …

A recording session for piano and orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London. It was here that in 1934, Sir Thomas Beecham made his historic recording of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (No. 41 in C Major), and Alan Blumlein dropped in to record it in stereo. Blumlein’s recording can be heard at the British Library. However, he recorded it using the vertical-lateral method, which in the 1950s was dropped in favour of his own superior 45/45 stereo cut.

Alan Blumlein

Part 1 of 2

Alan Blumlein (1903-1942) is the acknowledged father of stereophonic sound recording. There were others working on stereo, notably Arthur Keller in the USA, but Blumlein was the first man to patent stereo recording equipment, and the man whose ideas best stood the test of time.

IN 1935 Alan Blumlein, an avid railway enthusiast, made a five-minute film of trains running through Hayes in Middlesex.

There was a serious purpose to Blumlein’s subject. A maddening feature of early talkies was that as actors moved around the screen, the sound of their voices and movements appeared rooted to one spot. On a visit to a cinema in 1931, Alan had remarked casually to his wife Doreen that he had found a way to let the sound follow the action, and the following December Blumlein had filed the world’s first patents in stereophonic sound.

Subsequent tests included a recording of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony in 1934,* since Blumlein was a keen music lover. However, Blumlein’s employers at EMI questioned the commercial value of stereo so early in the music industry’s evolution, and his distinctive 45º single groove modulation, a technique for recording stereo sound, lay forgotten until 1957, when Westrex made it the industry standard.

Jump to Part 2

Arthur C. Keller of Bell Laboratories in the US had by this time already recorded Leopold Stokowski in stereo, conducting Scriabin’s ‘Prometheus: Poem of Fire’ at Carnegie Hall in 1932. Amidst the secrecy of the recording industry, Keller and Blumlein appear to have been entirely ignorant of each other’s work.

Précis

Alan Blumlein developed the first stereo sound recording technologies, patenting his inventions in 1931 and subsequently testing them with both audio and video. Some of his ideas were twenty years ahead of their time, but his employers at EMI did not perceive the commercial potential of stereo, and Blumlein was moved onto other projects. (53 / 60 words)

Part Two

Photo by the RAF, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. Source

About this picture …

A Handley Page Halifax Mark II bomber of No. 35 Squadron RAF, based at Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Reginald Lane. This plane failed to return from a raid on Nuremberg in August 1942, shortly after Blumlein’s own Halifax went down in Worcestershire following an engine malfunction and fire.

WITH stereo mothballed, Blumlein was put to work on developing John Logie Baird’s raw television sets and cameras, using emerging technologies in electronics such as vacuum cathode ray tubes to replace moving parts, and on delivering the first High Definition broadcasts, made by the BBC from 1936 to 1985.

The outbreak of war in 1939 saw Blumlein moved on once again, this time to radar, a top-secret military technology developed in Britain by Robert Watson-Watt. Blumlein’s focus was on H2S, an airborne ground-scanning radar system which was still being used operationally in 1982 for the Falklands War.

It was while working on Britain’s war effort that Alan died. A Halifax bomber carrying Blumlein and several colleagues on a test run caught fire, and crashed near Welsh Bicknor in Herefordshire on June 7th 1942. Blumlein was just thirty-eight, but already he had enriched our world of sound, and much more importantly, he had helped to ensure that we still hear it as free men.

Copy Book

Précis

After working on the new technology of televsion for EMI, Blumlein was drafted onto ground-scanning radar for the British government during the Second World War. While working on the hush-hush H2S project in 1942, Blumlein was fatally injured when a Halifax bomber testing his equipment over the Herefordshire countryside caught fire and crashed. (53 / 60 words)

Related Video

A short extract from Blumlein’s test movie showing trains passing through Hayes in Middlesex. The idea was to show how stereo microphones pick up movement as the train crosses from right to left.

Suggested Music

1 2

Symphony No. 41 in C major (‘Jupiter’)

1. Allegro vivace

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Performed by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, directed by Lorin Maazel.

Media not showing? Let me know!

Symphony No. 41 in C major (‘Jupiter’)

2. Andante cantabile

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Performed by the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, directed by Lorin Maazel.

Media not showing? Let me know!

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