Eric Laithwaite

Eric Laithwaite was an English electrical engineer, known as the Father of Maglev for his development of the linear induction motor and the maglev rail system that followed the earlier work of Hermann Kemper. He was born in Atherton, Lancashire, in 1921, served in the Royal Air Force from 1941 and studied electrical engineering at the University of Manchester after the war. He became professor of heavy electrical engineering at Imperial College London in 1964 and continued to develop the linear motor there, including a self-stable magnetic levitation demonstration called the Magnetic River, and he worked on applying linear motors to the Tracked Hovercraft until its cancellation. He was a well known communicator, giving the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1966 and 1974, though his later claims about gyroscopes were rejected by the Institution. He retired from Imperial in 1986, held a visiting professorship at the University of Sussex from 1990 and died in 1997.