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.