Jim Warman

Bloomfield James Warman, ( 25 July 1924 – 21 November 1984) who was known as Jim Warman and was a most gifted English electrical engineer. He was born at Westcombe Park in South London. During the Second World war he served in the REME.

Jim was a charismatic character and leader of men who was at the forefront in the design of electronic telephone exchanges in the 1960s and 70s. He was responsible for the design of both TXE1 and TXE3 which were reed electronic exchanges. The ideas in these exchanges were later developed in the successful TXE4 exchanges, although, for political reasons, not by Jim.

Jim held over 100 patents but the recognition that he truly deserved eluded him and some say that it was because of his quest for perfection. His career started off at Siemens Brothers at Woolwich and he remained there when AEI took over the company. AEI was then taken over by GEC who, in 1968, closed down the development of TXE exchanges in favour of crossbar.This turned out to be a big mistake, as Jim was only too aware. All the AEI staff were sacked, including those on the TXE project and it was then that Jim joined GTE International, the American company, as European technical director based in Milan, along with some members of his team from AEI. Some time later, GTE decided to closedown the development team in Europe and so Jim’s work came to an end, at least for GTE. He returned to the UK and set up his own company but it was not a success and his health failed which led to an early and impoverished death.

It was a sad end to one of the most gifted and unrecognised engineers of recent times, whose ideas eventually led to providing an electronic telephone exchange system (TXE4) that, at its peak in the early 90s, catered for more than 25% of the UK subscribers.

Jim did receive one award and that was the Prince Phillip Medal of The City and Guilds Institute in 1966.

External links

* [http://www.wikipatents.com/gb/1059582.html JW Patent for Magnetic switches]
* [http://www.wikipatents.com/gb/1080622.html JW Patent for Automatic exchange systems]