[12] Finlay was awarded a commission with the Gordon Highlanders and was transferred to Delhi initially,[13] serving as a second lieutenant along the Northwest Frontier with Afghanistan.

[17] By the end of 1914, Finlay had been promoted to Captain[18] and in 1915 having been badly gassed at the Second Battle of Ypres, he was returned to England to recover from chlorine inhalation.

In the same year, we find Finlay assigned to work on the development of Tanks with William Foster & Co. out of Lincoln[19] before reporting to Battalion and Brigade staff.

[22] After the war was over, Finlay was assigned to work in Geneva with the language interpretation unit for the League of Nations in 1919 as a bilingual précis-writer at the newly formed International Labour Organization[23] (ILO).

[25] His wife was six months pregnant, which encouraged Finlay to think about settling down to a career that combined his passion for science with his language skills as a communicator and a leader.

[27][28][29] Finlay's opportunity for advancement came in April 1927 when he identified critical weaknesses in an experimental telephonic translation system being trialled at the ILO.

His plans were submitted to Edward Filene, a wealthy, well-connected, philanthropic, American entrepreneur who had devised the original telephonic concept and had been underwriting the costs of development.

[35] Finlay collaborated with the Bell Telephone Company to manufacture component parts, including his own innovations like the Stethophone and for the first time, automatic voice recording.

[36] By the spring of 1928, press releases announced ground-breaking new developments evolved by an "English Scientist attached to the International Labour Office"[37] (ILO), referred to as Professor Gordon-Finlay,[38][39] who was addressing a number of technical issues which needed resolving.

Finlay had worked tirelessly to develop and deploy solutions, which was recognised[44] and by 1929, the system had proved both successful[45] and popular, particularly amongst delegates unfamiliar with the two official languages, and began featuring at multiple conferences.

At the same time, Reginald Victor Jones started making regular calls to Finlay's Kensington Court apartment, becoming a close family friend.

In June of that year, his wife Florence and his second daughter, Dione, were catastrophically buried in the remains of the house they were living in at Beckenham after it was hit by a V-1 flying bomb.

Hours later, the only survivors of the explosion, Florence and Dione were dug out, having fallen from the kitchen in to the cellar under the rubble of a three-storey house and spent the next few weeks recovering in hospital.