Bullard began his research at Cambridge, was seconded to the Admiralty during the Second World War, returned to Cambridge and, after a brief tenure of a Professorship of Physics at Toronto, became in 1953 Director of the National Physical Laboratory. In 1956 he returned to the Cambridge Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, remaining there until his retirement in 1974. His links with America had been strong throughout his career and he spent regular periods of research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego; after his retirement he and his second wife became American residents living at La Jolla. Among Bullard's important research interests were explosion seismology on land and at sea, marine and terrestrial heat flow, dynamo theory, continental drift and plate tectonics. He was active also in developing computer applications for the processing of large amounts of observational data. Throughout his life he took part in sea-going expeditions, not to mention his earliest famous research safari in Africa for gravity determinations in 1933-1934. Bullard served on many Government and professional committees as an advisor on science policy, and was also a consultant to several companies notably Shell and IBM UK (of which he was a director). In addition, he had a strong sense of history, shown in his assembling of material on the early days of the Cambridge Department, on Bushy House, in his own antiquarian book collection and in the leading role he played in the Royal Society's Halley Tercentenary celebrations. He was a lively writer and lecturer, and a fascinating correspondent.