 It was at this point that the team had yet another stroke of luck . Bowen 's former thesis advisor at King 's College , London , was Edward Appleton , who had worked with Watt and Harold Pye during the 1920s . Pye had since gone on to form his own radio company , Pye Ltd . , and was active in the television field . They had recently introduced a new television set , using an innovative vacuum tube developed by Philips of Holland , the EF50 <unk> . Appleton mentioned the Pye design to Bowen , who found it to be a great improvement over the EMI version , and was happy to learn there had been a small production run that could be used for their experiments . The design became widely known as the Pye strip . 
