In April 1931, two companies, the Gramophone Company (HMV) and the Columbia Graphophone Company, whose businesses were based on the recording and reproduction of gramophone records but who were also already interested in television, merged to form Electric and Musical Industries Ltd (EMI). One of the first projects of the combined research laboratories was the development of an all-electronic television system.

To do this, EMI assembled one of the finest groups of engineers and scientists in an industrial company the world has ever seen. People such as Shoenberg, Blumlein, Condliffe, McGee, Lubszynski and White. Their work caused the famous scientist, Lord Rutherford of the Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory, to say ‘they are carrying out almost pure laboratory physics and then applying it directly to industrial work.’ When they started their television work at EMI the state of the television art was mechanical scanning at 30 lines and a bandwidth of 5KHz; when they finished it was 405 lines and 3 MHz. In developing electronic television they had also invented the circuits that are still widely used today in electronic designs.

How this was achieved and how EMI progressed the development of television, through telerecording, 1000 line systems, transmitters, aerials and colour until they withdrew from television equipment design in 1978, will be told. This will be an audio-visual presentation, much of which has never been seen before by the general public.

Norman Green has had a long and distinguished career in UK broadcast television engineering, and is a long-standing Fellow of the RTS.