The Lemon Fool

I finally got round to watching the first of the most recent Royal Academy Christmas lectures last night. Well worth watching. The subject is forensics.

What really surprised me was the definition (quite early on in the lecture) about the age of bodies. It seems that anything earlier than 1953 is classed as "archeological" (as opposed to "recent"). I know I'm getting on a bit, but being born in 1954, I didn't realise how close I came to being an archeological specimen.

...I think I'm starting to feel "archeological".

I found the back catalogue online the other month
https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures ... es-archive

...Memories!

1972 Geoffrey G. Gouriet: Ripples in the ether: the science of radio comunication

"In his 1972 CHRISTMAS LECTURES, Geoffrey G Gouriet explores the past, present and future of radio communications, and the science that lies behind it. Radio waves are all around us, continuously being produced and received through man-made devices enabling us to connect with each other and communicate information. Geoffrey Gouriet, through the course of six Lectures, takes us on a journey through history from the first telephone to the 'Viewphone' and with the aid of exciting demonstrations, he explains how devices in our house like the TV translate broadcasted signals into moving pictures."

That's 'mine', so to speak. "Viewphone" - Whatever happened to that?

Sadly, he didn't last long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_G._Gouriet

...Idly rereading the above I noticed this in the Gouriet entry:

"Geoffrey George Gouriet C.B.E., M.I.E.E (9 April 1916 – 1973) joined the Drive Section of the Transmitters Department of the BBC in 1937, and in 1937/38 he was the inventor of a high stability crystal-controlled variant of the Colpitts oscillator. With the outbreak of war imminent, his circuit was put to immediate use by the BBC to drive its Medium Wave broadcast transmitters, allowing the implementation of Britain's wartime single-frequency synchronised radio services from multiple transmitters."

Reminded me that, if you watched the 1980s Seoul Olympics on TV(?), the sound downlink from the satellite to UK was brought to you using a crystal oscillator got up by none other than...