Re: Blumlein book

He lives on in the trillion op-amps made each year! I think he used the long tail pair topology not only as linear low-drift diff amps but also as a fast current steering switch. Thanks for heads up, I will get the book.

piglet

It seems to be you that cannot read.

"As an aside: when a Greater London Council (GLC) commemorative 'blue' plaque, in memory of Blumlein, was unveiled at a ceremony held on

The above relates to his time at primary school.

At secondary school a contemporary states:-

"'Alan was, I well recall, a voracious reader, and [it] seems that this could well have been his defence against the eternal small cricket and the like which left him so cold. 'I can see him now, sitting with his nose in a novel, completely oblivious of the bear-garden around him in the House common room. And I can well re- call too his quick impatience, softened with a smile when I once offered him a book. A glance, then: "Oh, I have read that." — and he was gone, no doubt in search of something more attractive."

You are the creep here. JM is no less an electronic designer than you are, and much better informed on the history of the subject. He used to correspond with Peter Baxandall, which is an honour I never aspired to.

I have talked to Jim Williams, Barry Gilbert and Bill Percival but what they had doesn't seem to have rubbed off onto me.

Creeps want attention. Unfortunately, they often get it here.

Jeroen Belleman

What sad lives they must lead, to need such crude hostility.

They don't have to. The usual approach is to start off with an expensive product aimed at niche market which can make a lot of money out of it, and once you've got a regular income out of them, work on making the product cheaper and better.

The electron-beam tester project that I got drawn into got the first stage right, but boss - the original inventor - was obsessed with making the product easier to sell, rather than easier to use, and one of his ex-engineers wiped him out with a version of his machine that was more reliable and easier to use.

Yeah, Brits talk and spell funny.

I guess you are a lot smarter and more inventive than Blumlein was.

Don't read the book. You know everything already.

Well Mr. Larkin, given that the two quotes I gave are from the book you name (page 28 and 33 of the linked chapter) perhaps you will enlighten us all as to why the author is mistaken.

Americans do think that. Noah Webster did publish an American dictionary with oddly spelled words. His excuse was that he was rationalising the spelling, but it looks more like a scheme to squeeze English-published dictionaries out of the American market. There are a bunch of America accents, as there are a range of British accents. They all sound funny to Australians - we do have regional variations in accent, but it takes a phoneticians to pick them out.

Seems unlikely. Blumlein got his name on 128 patents and he died at 38. It doesn't strike me that Fred was asserting anything of the sort.

The bit of the book that JM put on-line, about Blumlein's family, his education and first steps in his career, wasn't all that inspired and did put me off buying it, but it does cover an interesting bit of technical history.

' John Larkin being rude again.

I did order the books - in hardcover, so it wasn't cheap, and it finally arrived last night. The first part - as put on-line by JM - is heavy going.

I do know more than John Larkin - not an extravagant claim - but, unlike him, I am willing to learn more.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, john larkin snipped-for-privacy@650pot.com writes

Funnily

Brian

The rests of the book isn't much better. The author isn't good at setting up any kind of narrative or organising the the information he is presenting.

The subject matter is fascinating, and I found the book held held my attention - I read it in one sitting (which took me a couple of hours, not a lot for 521 pages).

It doesn't provide a lot of insight into what Blumlein was actually doing - the author doesn't seem to have had much of a clue. Bill Percival's distributed amplifier gets a mention, but the idea that he's the father of the travelling wave tube doesn't come up. Percival (who I met in 1978) is also mentioned for his involvement in transversal filters, but not in any informative way.

The world probably does need a good biography of Alan Dower Blumlein, but this isn't it.