Ronald Ernest Aitchison

Ronald Ernest Aitchison was an Australian-born British physicist and electronics engineer who was born in Hurstville, New South Wales, Australia on 29 December 1921. He studied mathematics and economics at the University of Sydney and joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1941. He worked as an engineer with the Amalgamated Wireless Valve Company on the design and production of klystrons and radar magnetrons, which were new devices important to the war effort. He was also involved in work on semiconductor diodes, which were the forerunners of the revolution in electronics brought about by the advent of solid-state semiconductor components. In 1945 he joined the National Acoustic Laboratories where he worked on the design and construction of hearing aids for children. Aitchison was appointed as senior lecturer in Communications Engineering at the University of Sydney, which was the start of his 25-year teaching experience at that institution, culminating in his appointment as associate professor. His interest in solid-state physics took him to Bristol University, UK, for a year, and he also spent a year at Stanford University, California, on a Fulbright scholarship, working at the forefront of electronics research. In 1970, he accepted an offer from Macquarie University to become the founding professor of electronics and took up the post in 1971. At Macquarie, he created a state-of-the-art electronics laboratory and led several successful projects of a highly practical nature including pioneering work on the reception of satellite weather pictures that were shown every evening in Sydney's TV newscasts. He also worked on developing talking typewriters for blind people using speech synthesis technology. He retired from Macquarie in 1986 and died in Sydney on 9 March 1996.