About the author. Bernard Bligh has had a career partly in University teaching but mostly in industry. His depth in understanding Thermodynamics has come about by research and by his application of Thermodynamics to many industrial processes. He is a past winner of the British Cryogenics Council Prize jointly with R.J. Allam. At Oxford University, his first degree was in Chemistry and his second degree was in Low Temperature Physics. Bligh's research project was the design and construction of a helium liquefier. This operated for 22 years at the Clarendon Laboratory and it now has an honourable retirement in the British Science Museum (Wroughton). After Oxford, Bligh went to CERN, Geneva, where he installed a hydrogen liquefier. He did a part-time course in Astrophysics at Queen Mary College. London. He is the named inventor in numerous patents relating to refrigeration, gas separation, distillation and energy-efficient processes.