Obituaries

Science fiction has lost one of its great heroes. It was revealed today that widely revered author Ray Bradbury passed away in his Los Angeles home on Tuesday at the age of 91. Bradbury's groundbreaking works, such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, influenced the science fiction genre as a whole and placed him among the ranks of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark.  Read More

Automotive legend Carroll Hall Shelby passed away yesterday at age 89. Born in Texas on January 11, 1923, Shelby was a leading race car driver, then race and performance car designer who became a household name for his exploits.  Read More

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, Grandson of the founder of Porsche, the designer of the Porsche 911, the founder of the Porsche Design studio and the architect of Porsche design culture, passed away yesterday, April 5 in Salzburg, aged 76. His design credo was that “design must be functional and functionality has to be translated visually into aesthetics, without gags that have to be explained first.” Some of his other well known statements on design include, “a coherently designed product requires no adornment; it should be enhanced by its form alone”, and “Good design should be honest.” Vale F.A. Porsche.  Read More

Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs has passed away aged 56. This sad news comes just a little over a month after Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple, the company he co-founded in 1976. Apple's new CEO Tim Cook summed up the loss in an email to the company's employees today: "Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being."  Read More

Owsley “Bear” Stanley, pioneering audio engineer for the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash near his home in Australia on March 13. The sound designer, artist, and counterculture icon was perhaps best known for producing massive amounts of LSD during the psychedelic 1960s. But it was his groundbreaking sound work that may have the most lasting effect on rock musicians and audiences.  Read More

To any who work in audio or communications, the name Sennheiser is synonymous with the absolute top quality in sound; indeed there are many who wouldn't dream of using anything less. So it is with regret that this year the industry loses the founding father of the brand, Fritz Sennheiser, who died on May 17th a few days after his 98th birthday.  Read More

The inventor of the ‘flying taxi’, Michael Robert Dacre, has died after a newly-assembled Jetpod prototype crashed during a test flight at Tekah airstrip, Taiping. Dacre, 53, was British-based Avcen Ltd’s managing director. He died at the scene.  Read More

February 17, 2007 The man who invented the remote control for the television, Dr. Robert Adler, died this week, giving us a timely reminder of just how fast technology is progressing. Dr. Adler's "Space Command" ultrasonic remote control for TV sets was introduced by Zenith in 1956 and two years later saw him win the 1958 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award of the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE) for his "original work on ultrasonic remote controls" for television. Though he was best known as co-inventor of the wireless remote control for television , along with fellow Zenith engineer Eugene Polley), Adler was responsible for a large number of significant scientific contributions to the electronics industry, including landmark inventions in sophisticated specialized communications equipment.  Read More

May 2, 2006 As extraordinary as it may seem, one of the people who created the first television died last week when Elma G. "Pem" Farnsworth, author of the Distant Vision: Romance and Discovery on the Invisible Frontier and wife of Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, died in Bountiful, Utah at the age of 98. Pem married Philo Taylor Farnsworth in 1926. She was on her husband's lab team, handling technical drawings for his experiments with transmitting pictures through the air and was present on September 7, 1927, in San Francisco when his invention of electronic television was first demonstrated successfully. Pem was the first person ever to appear on television and is often referred to as "The Mother of Television", given that her husband is recognised as one of the last lone inventors. Her technical drawings of those early experiments are part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Institute. A devout Mormon, she derived her greatest satisfaction in encouraging young people, saying "if you believe you can do it, anything is possible."  Read More