Sir Martin Wood obituary
In 1959 Martin Wood asked his boss at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, if he could to start a company making specialist magnets for research. At that time the concept of a spinout was unheard of in that university, but the easy-going Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti offered every support. He asked only that Martin, the physics department's resident engineer, remain in the lab for another 10 years. Working out of a shed in his back garden, Martin, who has died aged 94, laid the foundations of the global business Oxford Instruments, his wife, Audrey, taking on the administration.
Martin's role in the Clarendon Laboratory was to manage the high magnetic fields facility, designing and making powerful electromagnets that Kurti and his colleagues used to investigate materials at very low temperatures. The generators to power the magnets ran only at night, as they required a substantial fraction of the local power station's output. As former students left to continue their work elsewhere, they would ask Martin to make magnets for their new labs. Starting a company was the realisation of his long-held ambition to create a productive and rewarding working environment.
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