Alan Gordon-Finlay (8 June 1890 – 6 June 1959) was a British engineer and inventor of Scottish descent born in Australia. He is best known for having co-created the Filene-Finlay (incorrectly spelled Findlay) simultaneous interpretation system at the League of Nations in Geneva after the First World War, the first of its kind and the fore-runner to modern interpretation systems in use throughout the world today. A patent was purchased by IBM in 1930, taking it to global production.
Early life
Alan Gordon-Finlay was born on 8 June 1890 at Blytheswood in Turramurra, seven miles north of Sydney, Australia. In 1896 the family moved to London, where Finlay attended a number of private schools to nurture a young prodigious talent. In 1898, at the age of 8, Finlay announced that he would like to be an inventor and to earn money by publishing patents. He then proved his point by presenting his first patent: an electrical device for lighting a gas flame. Two years later, Finlay contracted meningitis and stayed with his Aunt (Adeline Finlay) in Geneva, to take advantage of its healthier air. He remained in his aunt’s care in Switzerland for the rest of his formative years, learning both French and German fluently and attending Lausanne University in 1906/07, before attending an English boarding school in Montreux from January 1908 – 1911.
With his formal education over, Finlay wanted to fly aeroplanes, no doubt encouraged by his life-long friend Philip Joubert. After his father had died in 1906, Finlay's future was set by his mother, who determined that he would never fly. A reticent Finlay entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in England in 1910. Though exemplary in conduct, he never responded well to authority and was distracted, narrowly graduating in 1911. Finlay was awarded a commission with the Gordon Highlanders and was transferred to Delhi initially, serving as a second lieutenant along the Northwest Frontier with Afghanistan. By 1913, he is missing from the Army Lists and may have returned to England having decided to change his career by entering the Diplomatic Service.
First World War
The outbreak of War in Europe in 1914 interrupted Finlay's diplomatic service training and in April, we see him restored to the Army lists as a second lieutenant in the 2nd King Edward's Horse "on probation", promoted to full lieutenant by November of the same year. He joined the 2nd Battalion in the trenches at the front in Ypres, where he served with great gallantry and was awarded the Military Cross with a bar. By the end of 1914, Finlay had been promoted to Captain and in 1915 having been badly gassed at the Second Battle of Ypres, he was returned back to England to recover from chlorine inhalation. In the same year, we find Finlay assigned to work on the development of Tanks with William Foster & Co. out of Lincoln before reporting to Battalion and Brigade staff.
On 26 June 1916, Finlay married Florence Mary Gallagher in London. The couple were immediately transferred to Paris to work with the French on continued tank development, making frequent trips to Foster's at Lincoln in an effort to coordinate between parallel English and French initiatives. In 1917, Finlay was "invalided out" of the Army and was appointed "Chief of Service" to Inter-Allied and Anglo-American Commissions in Paris from 1918 to 1919.
League of Nations
After the war was over, Finlay was assigned to work in Geneva with the language interpretation unit for the League of Nations in 1919 as a bilingual précis-writer at the newly formed International Labour Organization (ILO). Not content with translation alone, he left the commission in the same year and spent the next five years travelling around Europe, giving lectures on physics and doing consultancy work designing scientific instruments for manufacture. In March 1926, Finlay returned to the League of Nations in Geneva with high hopes of an appointment as General Registrar. His wife was six months pregnant, which encouraged Finlay to think about settling down to a career that combined his passion for science with his language skills as a communicator and a leader. Initially, he was only able to get his old job back at the ILO as a précis-writer on successive short-term contracts. Finlay’s opportunity for advancement came in April 1927 when he identified critical weaknesses in an experimental telephonic translation system being trialled at the ILO. He diagnosed the problems with the system, suggested some key alterations with cost estimates and concluded with a plan for doing the work.