Alan Blumlein
Great Britain- Biography of Alan Dower Blumlein
- Marriage and Personal Life
- Contributions and Achievements
- Tragic Death
Biography of Alan Dower Blumlein
Alan Dower Blumlein was an English electrical engineer known for his numerous inventions in the fields of telecommunications, sound recording, stereo, television systems, and radar. He was born on June 29, 1903, in Hampstead, London. Blumlein's sister claimed that he couldn't read properly until the age of 12. However, he clarified that by that time, he already knew a lot of quadratic equations. After attending Highgate School, Alan enrolled in the City & Guilds College, part of the Imperial College.
Marriage and Personal Life
In the mid-1930s, Blumlein met Doreen Lane, a primary school teacher. After two and a half years of courtship, they got married in 1933. There was a term coined among Alan's friends called 'Blumlein-itis', where the suffix 'itis' turned the noun into the name of a disease. This 'condition' called 'Blumlein-itis' meant that a person, especially Alan himself, did not want to associate with anyone who was not intellectually inclined. However, J.B. Kaye, a close friend of Alan and the best man at his wedding, believed that Lane and Blumlein were a suitable couple.
Contributions and Achievements
In 1929, Alan joined the Columbia Graphophone Company, where he worked under the direct supervision of its managing director, Isaac Shoenberg. He was entrusted with the development of record cutting, and he invented a cutting head with a moving coil. These improvements greatly enhanced the sound quality. In the early 1930s, Alan and Herbert Holman created a series of moving coil microphones used by the EMI recording studio.
In the early 1930s, while attending a local cinema with his wife, Alan noticed a problem with the sound reproduction. The sound was not properly synchronized with the actors on the screen. This led him to develop the theory of stereo sound. While Harvey Fletcher from Bell Labs was working on multi-channel sound systems, Blumlein focused on systems with only two channels. Some of Alan's ideas in the field of stereo, including the 'Blumlein Pair' recording technique, are still used today.
Tragic Death
On June 7, 1942, Alan Blumlein was killed in the crash of a Handley Page Halifax bomber during a test flight. A fire in one of the engines quickly caused the plane to lose control. It started descending and eventually flipped over, crashing into the ground. An investigation led by Senior Inspector Vernon Brown found that the cause of the crash was a weakened nut in the right outer engine. This nut created an excessively large gap in the valve, leading to a valve stem defect. In turn, this caused fuel to ignite along the outside of the engine. The commission concluded that the fire blocked the plane's exit. Additionally, it is unknown how many parachutes were on board and whether they were distributed.
