The Inventor of Stereo

Chapter 1

Earliest days

Alan Dower Blumlein was born on 29 June 1903, at 31 Netherhall Gardens (just off the Finchley Road), in Hampstead, London. A modest house, it was leased by his father Semmy Joseph Blumlein, who, originally a mining engineer, had recently enjoyed some success as a merchant and was beginning to prosper. Semmy Blumlein was a naturalized British subject having been born in the Alsace region of Germany in 1864. His wife, Jessie Edward Dower, was the daughter of a Scottish missionary, the Reverend William Dower, who had been working in South Africa where Jessie had been born. Semmy Blumlein had left Alsace in 1871, to avoid the conflict of the Franco-Prussian War and possible conscription into the German army. He travelled to ...