John Sargrove (1906–1974) was a British

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...

and

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

pioneer.

Life and career

His parents were ethnically Hungarian, and he was originally named John Adolphe Szabadi, but changed his name to Sargrove in 1938. While employed at British Tungsram Radio Works Ltd (originally British Tungsram Electric Lamps Ltd) he experimented with the idea of creating circuits by spraying metal onto bakelite. He was able to create resistors,

capacitor A capacitor is a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field by virtue of accumulating electric charges on two close surfaces insulated from each other. It is a passive electronic component with two terminals. The effect of ...

s, and

inductor An inductor, also called a coil, choke, or reactor, is a passive two-terminal electrical component that stores energy in a magnetic field when electric current flows through it. An inductor typically consists of an insulated wire wound into a c ...

s, as well as the electrical connections between them, on a single bakelite blank by this process. This work was carried out around 1936 and 1937, several years prior to the development of the printed circuit board by

Paul Eisler Paul Eisler (1907 – 26 October 1992, London) was an Austrian inventor born in Vienna. Among his innovations were the printed circuit board. In 2012, ''Printed Circuit Design & Fab'' magazine named its Hall of Fame after Eisler. Early life and e ...

in 1943. Sargrove also experimented with the development of a 'universal'

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied. The type known as ...

. His long-term goal, however, was automating the production of

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...

s by the development of what he termed Electronic Circuit Making Equipment (ECME). By 1947 Sargrove had completed the design of all the ECME, and formed a company, Sargrove Electronics Ltd, to build the equipment and then produce radios. The ECME built by Sargrove produced all of the radio circuitry by the sprayed-circuit process, and assembled all of the radio parts except for inserting the vacuum tubes into their sockets and attaching the speaker, thus greatly reducing the amount of human labour required and thereby lowering the cost of the radios. An ECME device could produce three radios a minute, and even test the radio circuitry. Sargrove continued to design increasingly sophisticated ECME to produce more complex radios, and began work on ECME for the production of

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

s. However, a large order of radios by the

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

n government was cancelled in 1947 following Indian self-governance, and investors withdrew their backing of Sargrove Electronics Ltd, which then went into liquidation.

References

Popular Science article on Sargrove's ECME
* * : ''Method of manufacturing electrical network circuits'' 1949-07-05 1906 births 1974 deaths British electronics engineers {{UK-engineer-stub