An illustrated book has been launched about the life of Manx telephone engineer Sir Frank Gill, who was a ’fundamental driving force’ in setting up the BBC in 1922.

This week author and chairman of the Isle of Man Victorian Society Robert Stimpson formally presented the book to Lieutenant Governor Sir Richard Gozney, who wrote the foreword for it.

Sir Frank was born in Castletown in 1866, in the building that is now the Co-op.

Mr Stimpson said he was recognised as ’the greatest telephone engineer outside the USA in the first half of the 20th century’.

He added: ’Frank led telephony, saying Europe should be treated as a single country the size of America to develop its telephone systems across national boundaries, and he influenced and guided the development of international telephone services.’

He provided special telephones for the 1910 Scott Antarctic expedition and during the First World War he worked for Winston Churchill in the Admiralty.

He was a close friend of the man who invented the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and in 1926 he organised the world’s first transatlantic wireless telephone call from New York to London.

In 1935, the Isle of Man Examiner reported that: ’Mr Gill is today recognised as probably the highest authority on telephone engineering, both by the British Post Office and by telephone men throughout the world, and distinguished honours have been conferred upon him by his fellow-engineers.’

During the Second World War he ran the company which made the cryptographic machine called ’Type X’ - which was the British adaption of the German Enigma machine.

The book has been published by Ramsey-based Lily Publishers, and is available for £19.95 from its website at www.lilypublications.co.uk/product/sir-frank-gill-kcmg-obe/ or from the Lexicon Bookshop in Strand Street in Douglas, and the Bridge bookshops in Port Erin and Ramsey.