In 1956 the architect Basil Spence was appointed by Southampton University to design several new buildings, including the Lanchester building and the Faraday building. When the Lanchester building opened in the summer of 1959 the Department of Electronics moved into it from the Physics Building, taking over the top floor for teaching and research laboratories. The next floor down was occupied by academic staff from Electronics and from other engineering departments.

When I joined the staff in October that year I moved into a small room that remained unoccupied at the end of the long corridor near the lifts. Eric Zepler asked me to teach solid-state devices and analogue transistor circuits. Bryan Venning was increasing his teaching of digital transistor circuits. We had 8 first-year students taking the new BSc course in Electronics, 6 third-year students taking the BSc (Eng) course in Electronic Engineering and 15 Postgraduate Diploma students. I needed to generate laboratory work and projects in my subject areas for all of these groups of students.

One project that I arranged was for a third year student to investigate the use of discrete silicon bipolar transistors in radio frequency amplifiers. In particular, he studied a technique for neutralising the internal feedback in a common emitter transistor through the capacitance from the collector to the base, by using external feedback to compensate for it. Eric Zepler was very interested in this technique, which puzzled me slightly at the time. Later I discovered that he had used a similar technique in 1927 in the Telefunken T9W radio receiver, to neutralise feedback through the capacitance from the anode to the control grid in triode valves. In later years the introduction of a screen grid between the anode and the control grid had obviated the need for external neutralisation. Bipolar transistors could not be fitted with screen grids!