Talk:Alan Blumlein

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Sabotage

I think it appropriate to include the bit about sabotage being suspected in Blumlein's death, especially since the government acted to hush the event just in case it was. However, the suspicion must be accompanied by the phrase "never proved" or similar. Binksternet (talk) 00:56, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Alexander's book devotes an entire chapter to the crash and, unlike the author of the 1990 New Scientist piece, he had access to the official RAF accident investigation report. Its conclusion is prosaic and there's no suspicion of sabotage at all. It appears that three hours before the flight, the starboard outer engine was serviced and that the lock nut on one of 48 tappet nuts was insufficiently tightened and worked loose during the flight, leading to an engine fire. That so many people should have died because of one slightly loose lock nut is a tragedy that hurts people still alive today. It isn't right or fair to the next of kin to perpetuate idle speculation that has been comprehensively debunked.--Harumphy (talk) 09:37, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

IIRC, the same AAIB Chief Inspector of Accidents, Vernon Brown, also lead the enquiries into the loss of the post-war Star Tiger and Star Ariel airliners. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 18:50, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

The aircraft carried a highly-secret cavity magnetron which is why Churchill 'hushed up' the accident. Bernard Lovell rushed to the accident site and retrieved the remains of the device later the same night of the accident.

At the time of the accident to V9977 Blumlein and his team from EMI were working on a version of H2S using a magnetron-based transmitter, whereas another team were doing the same with Halifax R9490 fitted with a version of H2S using a transmitter based on a Klystron. The magnetron was highly secret and was not permitted to be flown over Germany at the time, in case the Germans discovered it, and it was hoped that a klystron-based version of H2S would be usable, it not mattering much if the Germans' recovered the klystron, it being a relatively well known device. Unfortunately the klystron-based H2S was of such poor performance compared to the magnetron-based version (Or rather, the magnetron-based version was so much better) that development of the former was abandoned and the risk of the Germans eventually recovering a magnetron from a crashed bomber, grudgingly accepted, and H2S entered RAF service with the magnetron, albeit much delayed due to Blumelin and his colleagues untimely deaths. The magnetron was eventually discovered by the Germans when a Stirling equipped with H2S was shot down over Rotterdam, the Germans thereafter referring to the magnetron as the Rotterdam-Gerät. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.221.50 (talk) 16:48, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Also the cavity magnetron was a Czech invention, had been published in the Soviet Union pre-war, and the best magnetron design was the Japanese one, with bottle-shaped and strapped cavities rather than circular. Don't believe everything RV Jones published in the '70s! You might find Louis Brown's A Radar History of World War II an interesting read. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:53, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Actually the circumstances regarding the recovery of the magnetron after the crash were sourced from Sir Bernard Lovell in the 1977 BBC TV programme The Secret War: [1]

The secrecy of the magnetron and H2S equipment, as well as the development of two competing systems, klystron and magnetron, are detailed in Lovell's 1984 biography by Dudley Saward.

Whilst books written by historians are all very well, sometimes they do not have the technical knowledge to make judgements on equipment, tactics, etc., and so I prefer to put more weight on the views and opinions of qualified people who were there at the time.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.31.130.20 (talk) 15:55, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Why would a pre-war Czech inventor or scientist publish his work in the Soviet Union when he could just as easily publish it in the West and make some money for his trouble. BTW, Czechoslovakia wasn't aligned with the USSR pre-war and only became so aligned with the Communist take-over and subsequent alignment with Russia after 1945.

For a Czeck to publish in the USSR, another country behind the Iron curtain, in preference to the West only makes sense in the post-war context of the Cold War which did not arise until after 1945. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.172.230 (talk) 20:25, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

This looks like a misunderstanding. There many distinct lines of research - Czech, Japanese, Soviet; the comment above mentioned two of them but did not mean that August Zazek ever published in the USSR. That said, the Wall was erected in the early 1930s, while the above-mentioned research was done in mid-1920s, when Soviet-Western relations were sort of open.

Overall, the situation with Brits so cautious about things that were also known to the Japanese or Soviets is not unusual for the period. Information interchange in applied science was quite irregular even before the war. Inventions made, patented and duly used in one country often remained unknown in other countries. E.g. the working magnetophon was operational before the onset of WW2, it was sold to friendly Finns, but the Americans learnt of its existence only after the war. Or Blumlein's 45/45 stereo recording patent. And that's civilian, unclassified work. Retired electrician (talk) 10:36, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Ultralinear description

The explanation of the operation of the ultralinear design (which the article says is "one of Blumlein's greatest innovations") is very bad. It is clouded in murky language to make it sound mysterious and difficult. Yet, in spite of the impressively pseudo-boffin prose, it gets the thing wrong! If he could, I'm fairly certaiin Mr. Blumlein would read this description, chuckle, get out his spectacles and begin to explain how the ultralinear tapped output transformer is actually connected. He would then go on to reveal the difference between a triode, a tetrode, and a pentode and the impact of the screen grid tap on negative feedback. In the process, he would probably draw a precise schematic of the thing. Surely this isn't too much to ask Wikipedia to do, given Blumlein's gigantic contributions to modern technological life!--CoolBlueGlow (talk) 12:56, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

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