General Knowledge 1: Inventors

Alan D. Blumlein

Alan D. Blumlein was born in Hampstead in London on 29 June, 1903. He was born to German parents of Jewish descent. He was a famous British electronics engineer who was known for his important inventions of sound recording, telecommunication, radar and, most importantly, stereo. He was a noteworthy engineer and inventor of his time, who alone had 128 patents under his name.

In 1931, he invented the stereophonic sound (stereo) which was also known as ‘binaural sound’. He became a famous name for his invention. In the earlier inventions the sound recording system had only a single speaker, which was very disconcerting. The genesis of his idea of making a stereo was very uncertain at the beginning, but he was given patent under the title of sound recording and sound reproducing system. Some of the features of the stereo designed by him at that time are still in use today. He passed away on 7 June, 1942.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and is considered as the pioneer of computer science. He introduced the concepts of algorithms and computation, paving the way for the modern digital computer. He is noted for the discovery of ‘Turing machine’, which was able to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. Turing studied mathematics at King’s college in Cambridge where he received the Smith’s prize for his research in the field of probability and the Gaussian error function.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) where he was instrumental in decoding German codes by an electromechanical machine named ‘bombe’. After the war, Turing contributed in the designing of the first stored-program computer ACE. Later, he joined the Max Newman’s Computing Laboratory and assisted in the designing of the Manchester computers. Alan Turing is considered as the father of artificial intelligence. He computed the algorithm for testing artificial intelligence called the Turing Test. Alan Turing was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) is highly recognized for his exceptional contribution in diverse inventions. This great man with brilliant scientific intellect came to the world on 14th March 1879, in Germany. He derived immense fame being a supreme physicist till date. He gave many eminent theories and discoveries in the major scientific fields, which are, namely gravity, time, energy and light. Amongst the various contributions made by him, the ‘Brownian motion’ ranks first where he offered predictions based on statistics, which explained the theory of distribution and the movement of particles in solution. He also obtained massive popularity for his ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He even worked on the basic and essential strata of science like photons and thermodynamics.

The year 1916 was marked as the year of Einstein as he had coined the ‘General Theory of Relativity’, which was related to the extensive effect of gravitational force. He also invented the Law of Photoelectric effect with