Hawkings: 'How I built a record player'

One of the world's greatest scientists told how he built a home-made record player at the age of 15 so he could listen to his first LP.

Stephen Hawking, 64 , Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, said he made the "crude" system after buying Igor Stravinsky's Symphony Of Psalms in a sale.

"I ripped out the mechanism of our old wind-up gramophone and put in a turntable and a three-valve amplifier," he said.

"I made a speaker cabinet from an old book case, with a sheet of chip-board on the front. The whole system looked pretty crude, but it didn't sound too bad."

"At the time LPs were very expensive so I couldn't afford any of them on a schoolboy budget."

"But I bought Stravinsky's Symphony Of Psalms because it was on sale as a 10" LP, which were being phased out."

"The record was rather scratched, but I fell in love with the third movement, which makes up more than half the symphony."

The piece is one of three Prof Hawking has picked for a music festival with a mathematical theme on Saturday.

He has also asked for Henryk Wieniawski's Violin Concerto No. 1 and Francis Poulenc's Gloria to be played at the Cambridge Music Festival - which has the theme "Mozart, Music and Maths".

Concert organisers asked Prof Hawking to choose his favourite three classical pieces for the concert in King's College Chapel, Cambridge.

Prof Hawking was diagnosed with the crippling muscle-wasting condition motor neurone disease at the age of 22 and is one of the longest-surviving sufferers.

He is wheelchair-bound and speaks with the aid of a computer and synthesiser.

Prof Hawking is a best-selling author, mathematician, cosmologist and theoretical physicist.

He obtained a first class honours degree in physics at University College, Oxford, and then went on to Cambridge to conduct research in cosmology.

Since 1979 he has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics - the same chair given to Isaac Newton in 1669.

He became famous with the publication of his book A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s.