In 1950 Mr T B Tomlinson was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Electronics, and in 1952 Dr D J E Ingram joined the department as a Research Fellow and Lecturer. David Ingram’s research involved paramagnetic and electron spin resonance spectroscopies.

In 1952 a new 3-year BSc (Eng) course in Electronic Engineering was launched in the Faculty of Engineering. Most of that course was common with the existing course in Electrical Engineering, within the broad engineering curriculum offered by that faculty. Within such a broad course the teaching of electronics was necessarily limited in scope. Up to 1959 only 2 or 3 students graduated from that course each year.

Dr M E Spinks and Mr B H Venning were appointed as Lecturers in 1954 and 1955 respectively. In October 1957 Dr Spinks and Mr Tomlinson had gone, David Ingram became a Reader, and Dr W A Gambling was appointed as a Lecturer. In that month Greville Bloodworth embarked on the Postgraduate Diploma in Electronics course.

In October 1959 David Ingram moved to a Chair at the University of Keele, and Greville Bloodworth was appointed as a Lecturer to replace him. Dr E V Vernon, a physicist, was also appointed as a Lecturer at the same time. Dr H Stachera was appointed a year later.

The development of solid-state electronics during the 1950’s and 1960’s offered attractive careers for graduates. Therefore it was clear that undergraduate courses concentrating on electronics were needed, to enable students to study this challenging subject in more breadth and depth. Our department was the first one in Britain to respond to this need, by launching a new BSc course in Electronics in October 1959, in the Faculty of Science. In that year the first silicon integrated circuits were being developed in industrial research laboratories. By 1970 microprocessors would be made as integrated circuits that each comprised over 1000 silicon transistors.