While the centenary of Alan Turing's birth has, deservedly, received a huge amount of attention and even prompted a petition calling for the AI pioneer and codebreaker to be featured on a banknote, today's anniversary of the birth of another Alan who was a key contributor to Britain's WWII engineering effort looks likely to attract little publicity.

Despite being responsible for a host of innovations in communications, sound recording, stereo, television and radar, electronics engineer Alan Blumlein, who was born on 29 June 1903, remains relatively unknown. He died on 7 June 1942 when the Halifax bomber on in which he was flying to carry out secret trials of the H2S airborne radar system crashed, killing all on board. A letter published in the June 2012 issue of E&T calling for his achievements to be given the treatment that Bletchley Park has received in recent years attract widespread support from readers.

When the 90th anniversary of Blumlein's tragic death came round earlier this month, we reported here on how mixing engineers are still finding new ways of exploiting his technique of mid-side recording. Now, coinciding with his birthday, comes more news of how his pre-war work on audio is being revived as the British Library makes some of the earliest known experiments in two-channel recording available on the web. The recordings were captured on vinyl discs in 1933 and 1934 to demonstrate Blumlein's technique for altering the perceived width of a stereo signal electronically,

Like E&T, it's published by the IET, but anyone interested in finding out more about this and other aspect of Blumlein's life work is recommended to take a look at Russell Burns's authoritative 1998 biography. IET members can buy 'The Life and Times of AD Blumlein' at a discount price of £26 from the IET website (full price £40).

Edited: 28 August 2012 at 10:27 AM by Wirebound Moderator