OU on the BBC: Personal Passions - Horology: Dick Stephen

Production team

Profile Dr Stephen studied physics at Oxford University and did a PhD in theoretical physics. He then moved over to studying biology and has spent most of his career working on the application of physics to biology. He is now retired from Department of Physiology in the medical school at the University of Leicester where he was Senior Lecturer and consultant in physiological measurement for nearly twenty years.

Throughout his career, Dr Stephen sought to applied his knowledge of physics to the study of human biology. He studied the acoustics of procidic heart valves and developed ways of monitoring heart valves by listening the sounds that they make. He was interested in acoustics and made a study of the way that little insects called bush crickets detect sound. This turned out to have an application for the study of human hearing. Elderly people often have difficulty extracting information from the sounds that they hear not because they are going senile but because they find it difficult to discriminate between different sounds. Dick Stephen designed an instrument to help people like this, measuring their ability for hearing what people are saying - auditory discrimination.

Organisations
David Thompson Clock Gallery at the British Museum

Also the Horological Student’s Room
Bloomsbury, London WC1 0207-636-1555

The British Horological Institute
Upton Hall, Upton,
Newark
NG23 5TE
01636-813795

Clockmaker’s Company Library
Guildhall Library
Aldermanbury
London EC2P 2EJ

The Antiquarian Horological Society
New House
High Street
Ticehurst,
Sussex TN5 7AL
01580-200155

The Science Museum
Exhibition Road
London SE1

The Royal Greenwich Observatory
Course in Antique Clock Restoration c/o The Administrator, West Dean College, West Dean, Chichester
Sussex PO18 0QZ

Books And Other Literature
Longitude
Dava Sobel (Fourth Estate 1995)

Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World
G. Baillie (Robert Hale)

The History of Clocks and Watches
Eric Bruton

First broadcast: Thursday 8 Oct 1998 on BBC TWO

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