Barrie Chaplin

G B B “Barrie” Chaplin, whose funeral took place on 11 March, was a British engineer, inventor, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Essex. He was possibly the last survivor of the group of truly great innovators that represented the golden age of modern electronics which flourished in the aftermath of World War Two. He was a founding father of modern electronics, having been one of the first to devise circuits for the transistor which, in its initial form, saw the light of day in 1949. These circuit designs, devised by Chaplin (some with co-authors) principally in the 1950s, have since become standard building blocks for the complex analogue and digital electronic systems of today. His remarkably creative career continued unabated until retirement in 1989, during which, he pioneered many seminal technology breakthroughs such as the creation of the world’s first transistorised digital computer and the invention and development of active noise and vibration cancellation technologies.