Alexander MacRae

Born Portree, Skye, Scotland 12-09-34, where he attended the local high school. He then studied Electronics in London, and, on qualifying, joined EMI as a trainee development engineer under Godfrey Hounsfield (later Sir Godfey Hounsfield, Nobel Laureate, F.R.S, Ph.D.). At EMI he worked on the development of early digital computers using (then) state-of-the art devices.

Later, he joined Westinghouse in Chippenham and worked as a design engineer, where he was responsible for projects of the order of £50, 000 plus, (1960s values) - from initial client contact and a feasibility study with basic experiments, to completion of development with field trials and environmental testing, through into pre-production and into the first batch of production units. He also read patents fior wstinghouse to advise them of competitive positions. One of the projects of which he was most proud was to design a voice communication radio system for London Underground which would operate even when the trains were in tunnels. Not an easy problem.

In 1966 he was recruited by General Dynamics Electronics Division in Rochester NY as a senior engineer working on the development of early ATE for the F-111, in particular the voice communications radio transceiver testing. Due to networking and some ingenuity, he was able to bring in his $1.5M project home ell within time and budget, and sell it off complete with documentation package to the main contractor at Carsewell AFB in Dallas-Fort Worth. That year there was a disastrous fire down on the Cape and three astronauts were burned to death, due to the use of a pure oxygen atmosphere. It was immediately decided to use a mixed atmosphere and he was recruited by SRT in Palo Alto, California as a Research Associate, and was assigned to the helium-oxygen speech communications problem, carrying out several research contracts for USN (Sealab 2), Wright-Patterson AFB (Classified), and NASA - although originally designed for the Manned Orbital Laboratory (canceled), you can still see the result being used by astronauts in the Shuttle for voice enhancement. During that time he became one of the five leading experts in speech research in the world - one was Japanese, two French, and one Russian.

With a downturn in the market, and family problems at home, he returned to the UK, and worked in a variety of roles, and then decided to work on a contract basis - the first contract being on a Polaris upgrade, at Sperry in Bracknell. Other jobs included lecturer in micro-electronics for the Swedish Government at Telub in Vaxjo, and following a family bereavement, at Lews Castle College in Stornoway.

When that contract ended he started Skyetech Ltd and got back to speech-related research - and development.

More recently, he has worked in a consultancy role in various countries for major clients such as Motorola Communications, NCR, Hewlett-Packard, Olivetti computers, Phillips, British Aerospace, Ultra Electronics and Smiths Industries Aerospace.

He is now working on what may well be a key patent in the area of Brain-Machine Interfacing.