John Baden Woodroffe designed an Electro-Magnetic pickup for Shellac 78' recordings in 1927, it is arguably the single & most important pickup that gave momentum to the early Electric Home Audio arena.

 J.B.Woodroffe was an English Designer / Inventor born on July 4th 1900 in Chelsea, London. He was mentioned in a 1925 Wireless world article where he collaborated with a Capt. H.J. Round of Marconi fame who was on the team that invented Marconi's Indirectly heated Triodes, which transformed wireless in the 1920's. Round had a previous pickup design that was already being used by the B.B.C to broadcast Shellac Recordings but which suffered from the complicated method of needle change & required timely Needle bar damping adjustment for each record being played. The 1925 Round / Woodroffe collaboration made some advancement in this area & produced a more visually attractive & easier to use pickup, but in very limited numbers, according to the Wireless world article of Nov 4th 1925, these were Designed by H.J. Round & skillfully constructed by J.B. Woodroffe in his own workshop, but it was the pickup that J.B. Woodroffe designed 2 years later in a further simplified version of the H.J. Round design that impacted the Early Electric Era like no other pickup of it's time. 

J.B. Woodroffe's actual Education in Design / Invention is unknown & it may have been his time spent at the end of WW1 in the Royal Air Force where he gained his technical skills & great interest in mechanisms. 

He lived in a 5 storey house at 93 Harwood Road, Fulham & turned his top floor into a makeshift Laboratory that was full of Technical equipment, of which many items were made from Brass one being a Brass Microscope under a Glass dome, according to Descendants of the Woodroffe family. Woodroffe was regarded as a Luddite as he refused to have a refrigerator & instead relied on a chalk bed with an evaporation sleeve over it to keep his milk cool, or rather "Lukewarm" in the summer.

As well as the Celestion pickup, J.B. Woodroffe designed a "Matchbox" Radio for Marconi & by the early 1930's He sold the patent for this Invention as well as others & subsequently never had to take another paid position.

During WW2 J.B. Woodroffe worked on "night flying" projects for the Ministry of Defense & was 1 of the team working on the Barnes Wallace sighting mechanism that was immortalized by the WW2 Film Classic

"The Dam busters" .

The work he undertook during this period left him concerned about being a subject of spying & bugging which his family thought nothing more than Paranoia, However,  In his final months he was repeatedly burgled at his 93 Harwood road Address & strangely there was a pattern to these burglaries where items of value were not removed but instead, papers were taken.

John Baden Woodroffe passed away on April 10th 1987 at Wimbledon hospital.

The Gramophone magazine showcased the Woodroffe / Glasscoe pickup in their September 1927 issue . This appears to be identical to the Celestion release. Information regarding the Glasscoe collaboration is limited but Celestion's founder, One  Cyril French worked for J.E.Jaccard, a manufacture of talking machines & had an understanding of this Technology. The collaboration between this loud speaker maker & J.B.Woodroffe was a logical one as speaker drivers of the late 1920's & pickups were very similar in design & function albeit in reverse.

The major advantage of the Woodroffe / Celestion pickup to it's contemporaries above & beyond the physical attributes & subsequent desirability was the seemingly  makeshift needle bar armature damping arrangement that was comprised of 4 short lengths of Soundbox diaphragm gasket tubing on the central pivot. From an Industrial Designer's perspective it looks like J.B. Woodroffe lived by the maxim= " use what you have & get on with it !" This damping arrangement even appears un-obscured in the illustration on the Patent application. 

The use of the gasket tubing "on-end" was genius as the tubing by definition is hollow, the damping effect was made more flexible / sensitive than would be the case with a solid rubber block, something that makers R.I & Varley used on their 1928-29 electro-magnetic pickup that was an obvious, but really excellent, elaboration of the Woodroffe / Celestion design.

The actual composition of the Varley rubber damping block is unknown as surviving examples have hardened beyond practical examination & restoring one of these requires a very soft rubber such as Silicone which shows how critical to these 1920's designs the choice of rubber was to dampen the needle armature action.

The Woodroffe / Celestion received a great review in the Wireless world in March 1929 

 "The principle of this pickup was developed by Mr J.B. Woodroffe & is almost too well known to need description. The armature, which is pivoted centrally is allowed exceptionally free movement & is damped at it's upper extremity by attachment to a rubber band. The output is fairly uniform up to 2,000 cycles & is sufficient to operate a 2 valve amplifier: 3 valves should be used if it is desired to incorporate a volume control. The workmanship is above the average & can be fully appreciated as the movement is unenclosed. For many years this has been regarded as the standard pickup & is used by many electrical Gramophone manufacturers."

J.B.Woodroffe's personal collection of his Celestion pickup.

After his passing, upon clearing out the house at 93 Harwood road, J.B. Woodroffe's Nephew found a box full of the Woodroffe / Celestion pickups , hidden in a cupboard, under the stairs . One is the earlier 1927 design (top left in the image above) that lacks the HMV / DECCA tonearm adapter , another is a double resistance output model that may have been made as a test 

These look like production samples as the paper band usually glued around soundbox / pickup cartons of the Era are absent. There are 14 in total.