The Anonymous Widower

Government to Sponsor Engineering Prize

This has been announced in The Times today and is also reported in The Engineer.

They ask if it should be called the Brunel, Boulton, Babbage or Bazalgette Prize.

I have my view and it should be called the Blumlein Prize after Alan Dower Blumlein.

I wrote to The Times and they published my letter on the 12th.  Here’s an extract.

Sir, I think we should choose the engineer who has probably had the greatest effect on everyone’s lives in the past 100 years. And that is the pioneer of electronics, Alan Dower Blumlein, who, after he perfected stereo recording and electronic television, went on to develop the electronics for radar. He was a true genius who was granted 128 patents before he died at the age of just 38, in a plane crash while testing an airborne radar in 1942.

I am an electrical engineer myself and I was horrified to see that at the new Olympic site there is no mention that it is alongside Bazalgette’s massive Northern Outfall Sewer and that this superb piece of Victorian engineering is being used as a public viewing platform for the works at the site. In due course the waste water from the site will be pumped into the sewer to continue its journey via the beautiful Moorish pumping station at Abbey Mills to the treatment works at Beckton. The Olympic site really is standing on the shoulders of a giant.

April 9, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | World | Engineering, Television