Alan Dower Blumlein was a remarkably versatile, prolific and creative engineer whose type of genius has had few equals this century. Following early work on telephony, during which he developed a transformer-bridge network, he turned his attention to audio engineering, developing moving-coil microphones and wax cutters which circumvented patents held by Bell Laboratories and inventing a system for binaural recording. Blumlein was largely responsible for the logical development of the overall system and transmitted waveform for the world's first public, all-electronic television service but also contributed many of the component circuits, such as an efficient line-frequency scanning circuit, the ‘Miller’ integrator, the long-tailed pair and the bootstrap circuit. Before his death in an air crash he had made significant contributions to the development of airborne interception radar, microwave radar and H2S ground-mapping radar. This paper comprises shortened versions of the papers presented on 26th October 1992 at a Discussion Meeting, Exhibition and Lecture on ‘The life and work of A. D. Blumlein’, organised by IEE Professional Group S7 and held at the IEE, London, to mark the 50th anniversary of Blumlein's death on 6th June 1942.*