Ten experts decide who and what changed the course of music history.

So much of our current musical technology dates back to the space programme. There were all sorts of electronics that couldn’t be taken up into space because of the restrictions on size. Electrical engineers were forced to reimagine how they could persuade electrons to move in order to make things function in the same way that they had with tubes.

This kind of research ushered in the era of the transistor and the idea of silicon chips. All of a sudden, things that were thought unfeasible became achievable, a prime example being Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio. When the idea came out in the 1930s everybody said, “Well that’s impossible, you can’t make tubes that small!” With today’s iWatch it all seems ridiculous to us now, but so much came about because of the research that went into “How can we make things really reliable and small?”

This is something I know about because my father worked on a number of things that were to do with the lunar modules they landed on the moon before they sent the Apollo missions. He was working with people who were...