Sir Martin Francis Wood (19 April 1927 – 23 November 2021) was a British engineer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Oxford Instruments, one of the first spin-out companies from the University of Oxford and still one of the most successful. He created this business out of his research into magnets, and went on to build the first commercial MRI scanner,[1] an invention that has saved millions of lives throughout the world.[2]
Life
Martin Wood was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read engineering, and Imperial College, London.[3] In 1945 he joined the Coal Board as a Bevin Boy for his National Service, working underground at the coal face first in South Wales and later in the Midlands. From 1955 to 1969, he was a Senior Research Officer at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford. He used the knowledge he acquired on high field magnets to form Oxford Instruments in 1959, at his home in Northmoor Road, North Oxford.[4] Two years later new superconductors were developed in the US, and he soon acquired some material and made the first superconducting magnet outside the US in 1962.[citation needed] Oxford Instruments has since developed these magnets for research and NMR analysis and eventually developed the whole-body superconducting magnets which made possible the development of magnetic resonance imaging.
He died after a short illness on 23 November 2021, at the age of 94.[8] His work pioneering the development of superconducting magnets facilitated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), leading to millions of lives being saved every year.