Gerald Stillit

Stillit was born in London, the youngest of four children to Joseph Stillitz, subsequently anglicising his name by deed poll. Stillit was educated at Highgate School in North London, leaving at 16 after having obtained O-Levels to train as a Chartered Accountant. He thereupon attended the London School of Economics, reading towards a Bachelor's in Economics under logicians Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos – however left aged 25 before completion of his degree as the success of his inventions overtook him. Concurrently, he also worked in his father's company Gor-Ray, at the time Britain's foremost skirt manufacturer, and while there introduced innovative retailing concepts such as Britain's first boutique concession store, operating within House of Fraser. Travelling throughout Western Europe as a young man retailing and distributing for Gor-Ray, Stillit quickly achieved multilingualism; this asset eventually evolved into the development of his own Stillitron language courses. Stillit later married the Company Secretary of Stillitron in 1986, with whom he has one son.

As a linguist, in order to fully realise employment of the corrector, Stillit applied the Stillitron System to foreign languages and published multi-volume language learning courses containing thousands of humorous, attention capturing illustrations throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Arabic, English (as a foreign language), French, German, Italian and Spanish which sold millions of copies worldwide, distributing initially through encyclopædia publishers Grolier International before marketing and distributing through his own successful publishing house Stillit Books Ltd, operating from within Gor-Ray's Bond Street head offices. Each course additionally comprised multi-volume audio-learning cassettes (eventually updated to Secure Digital) and dictionaries and lexica to aid learning and pronunciation; in addition, Stillit developed an English Synopticon, a novel methodology of consolidating grammatical analysis.

Printed on durable, lightweight, rigid plastic requiring no maintenance and with the initial cost of equipping a classroom very low, the innovative corrector was particularly suited to the classroom environment, and with no writing – just applying the stylus to the corrector and receiving immediate visual indication of success or failure – the Stillitron System was immediately attractive to children. Throughout the 1960s Stillit published his multiple choice programmed learning books covering a wide range of subjects in biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and elementary language exercises from school to university level, which were taken up throughout the British schooling system.

Gerald Barry Stillit FCA (born 1938) is a British-born inventor, publisher and polyglot, who founded and was chairman of Stillit Books Ltd of Bond Street, his former educational publishing company. In 1963, Stillit invented an electronic corrector (Stillitron Teaching Aid) which was first applied as a teaching tool in conjunction with mathematics, science and language textbooks, used extensively throughout the British schooling system in the 1960s. This device was the first of its kind to combine circuit-board electronics with the ability to provide students with immediate positive feedback in monitoring answers to multiple choice questions. Subsequently, the electronic corrector was developed alongside a series of language courses which sold millions of copies worldwide throughout the 1970s and 1980s.