"While at ISEC, Kaye and Blumlein encountered a member of staff who was 'very slow'. 'He was one of the old brigade [and] was so slow at getting any action going that it was almost unbelievable. For some reasons he had been nicknamed Beelzebubquite a decent bloke [really]. So we had a unit called the 'beelze' [which was the] ratio of the time it took Beelzebub to do a job to the time it took any normal [person] in the office to do it. But it was such an enormous unit [that] for all practical purposes we all had to work in decibeelzes.'"
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.
"As an aside: when a Greater London Council (GLC) commemorative 'blue' plaque, in memory of Blumlein, was unveiled at a ceremony held on
1st June 1977 at 37 The Ridings, Ealing, where he had lived, the press made much of the oft-quoted statement that he did not learn to read until he was 12. Sometimes this statement is given as: 'He could not read at 12 but he knew a lot about quadratic equations.' The story is apocryphal rather than anecdotal, as his school reports confirm. Miss Chataway's reports show clearly that Alan's reading was 'good'. Presumably he did not enjoy reading but he did enjoy mathematics."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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