Part 1 of 2
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.
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
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.
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)