William Gosling DSc, ARCS FIERE FIEE, September 1932 – August 2024

Obituary provided by Helen Haste, Ceri Gosling and Frank James (with grateful thanks also to the IET’s Archives team).

William had strong views on the education of engineers, its purpose and process, and on the importance of recognising the difference between technology and science and why it matters. He understood the significance of the developments in physics that challenged a world of prediction and certainty, and how this must inform the mindset of innovation in all fields. He was a brilliant communicator and teacher who inspired his students. He spoke vividly to a wide public audience through his accessible books and newspaper articles, and lectures both to his students and the wider public in which he talked without notes for an hour, with spellbinding wit and breadth of examples. His polymathic mind drew on philosophy, history and religion. His former Swansea student, high-tech industrialist Sir Terry Matthews, remembers: ‘William had an amazing ability to communicate and interact with all the people around him in a way that inspired and motivated them to do better and have fun in their lives”. His physicist friend Sir Michael Berry described him as ‘one of the very few philosophical engineers – a precious breed”.

William’s role as IERE President in the confluence of the IERE and IEE reflected both the different cultures of the two institutions and his own emerging conception of what it should mean to be an engineer in the contemporary world. As he pointed out in his University of Bath Inaugural Lecture in 1979, there were two traditions of electrical engineering, as Clifford and Sharpe describe in their history of the IERE,[1] “the old with its scientific basis of Newtonian Mechanics, and the new, as represented by the IERE, whose basis had been founded on quantum mechanics, which gave rise to the transistor and later to micro-electronics” (p.117). These two traditions implied different skills and knowledge, as well as different ways of explaining and predicting, which had – and indeed still have - considerable implications for the training and accreditation of engineers. As the IET Archives show, a particular tension was between those who wanted to maintain a distinction between chartered engineers who had good university degrees and technician engineers whose accreditation criteria were less stringent but whose skills set was broader. William saw these distinctions as failing to reflect the emergent needs of the profession as it developed new theoretical perspectives and innovative practices and applications and his strong views on the education of engineers reflected this.

The issue of the merger of the IERE and IEE was tangled up in the Finniston Report and in the general perceived crisis in the engineering profession and its organisation at that time. The proposal to merge the two had a long history going back to letters from Earl Mountbatten of Burma written in the late 1960s. Mountbatten had been a member of both for decades and thought they should merge as he made clear in his letters. A liaison committee was set up, but the whole scheme had fizzled out by around 1971. William picked up on these themes and by February 1980 he was pushing the merger idea very strongly. A joint working party was eventually formed of which he was a founder member. A huge amount of work undertaken by others eventually secured the merger in October 1988, but it seems clear that William was the initiator and important force for its progress.

William was born on the Essex coast where his parents were shop-keepers.  His grandfather, a publican, was a rather exotic local luminary whom William vividly remembered as having a rescued circus elephant as a pet.  William was evacuated early in the War, an unsettling experience: he recalled that his hosts were kind, but spoke an impenetrable local dialect.  His parents later moved to Nottingham, where William attended the Mundella Grammar School, where he excelled. William’s university education was at Imperial College, where he was strongly influenced by the Nobel laureate G.P. Thomson, after which he worked at De Havilland. He joined the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Swansea in 1958, where he became chair of the Department and professor in 1967. There he developed innovative and internationally applied work in radio engineering. He introduced students to a curriculum for the digital age of software – which was not always welcomed by his colleagues.

He moved to the University of Bath in 1974 to chair the School of Electrical Engineering where in addition to his ground-breaking research he established a novel programme which incorporated a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree with extensive industrial experience. This involved the social science, natural sciences and engineering faculties because he believed that engineers should be educated to address the interface of society with science and technology. As someone who taught on that programme, one of us (Helen Haste) can attest to the very positive experience of multidisciplinary cross-fertilization and how it enabled to students to see beyond the traditional image of engineering as being purely in the service of industry. Another innovation was to bring in industrial and governmental collaboration to attract funding for his research. This is now commonplace, but it was new then. It also strengthened his commitment to giving students industrial experience and the perspective of how their work might impact its consumers.

William used the new contacts with industry, government and the military to raise his profile and force open doors. As well as chairing a number of august national bodies, he found himself on a terrorist hit list. He became a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers in the City and joined the Athenaeum. He became establishment. This progression into the nation’s status quo eventually led to an approach from a leading global engineering company, Plessey, in 1980. As Technical Director, he had responsibility for fifteen hundred engineers at the cutting edge of research, globally. His son Ceri remembers some of the more flamboyant accoutrements of such status: “The job came with trappings. Big cars with chauffeurs. Offices as ostentatious as cathedrals. Flights on Concorde. The posh lady from military intelligence who watched his back. He rubbed shoulders with world leaders, was with Thatcher on the morning of the Falklands invasion, and was on first name terms with both the US Defence Secretary and the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

In this phase of his life he was often responsible for defining standards and regulations. A family friend, Tom McEwan, who as an engineer and project manager had a role in the rollout of 3G, 4G and digital TV in the UK, comments on the challenge of establishing GSM standards, dealing with national, commercial and personal interests to arrive as an agreed set of standards; “I have immense admiration for those who have the fortitude, determination and sheer grit to stay engaged and deliver”. William had a fund of entertaining stories about some of the international struggles to find a common position.

William was a visionary regarding technical – and therefore cultural – change. He foresaw clearly many of the radical consequences of the digital and microchip revolution, often against resistance from some colleagues, and he continually pressed students and junior colleagues to challenge and rethink their assumptions. He referred to the kind of change happening in the microchip revolution as a ‘knight’s move’ – as in chess – where the normal expected trajectory does not apply and therefore is not predictable from the common (and dangerously misleading) assumption that the future will be ‘more of the same’. His analyses of change very much reflected the application of post-quantum concepts like chaos theory, fuzzy logic and the key difference between open and closed loop solutions.

He cared passionately about the importance of intersecting technology and society, and of recognising how technology, over thousands of years, has always shaped culture. He considered it vitally important to distinguish science and technology. He constantly challenged the common perspective that technology is (merely) the application of pre-existing science. He pointed out, in The Guardian in 2000, that ‘today science and technology look like twins and people find it hard to distinguish between them. Yet they are not the same. Engineering is about making, science about knowing.’ Engineering is ‘the oldest profession’; science came along (much) later and explains it.

Throughout his life, but especially after he left Plessey when it was taken over by Siemens in 1990, William encouraged the public awareness of science and engineering through accessible books and media pieces. Helmsmen and Heroes (Weidenfeld, 1994) explained control theory to the layperson, not just in technical systems but in human behaviour. Most recently, Culture’s Engine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explored in very accessible language the ways in which culture and social interactions have been shaped by technological developments. William was Treasurer for many years in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a media-friendly forum for exploring many of the ideas that engaged him. He was Treasurer of the Council, and also in 1998 President of the History of Science Section.

William had wide interests beyond technology. He loved poetry and he had a strong interest in theology. At different times he was a Quaker, an agnostic, a Buddhist and an Anglo-Catholic – the latter being his eventual space, though in rather idiosyncratic form. He engaged frequently in public media explorations of the relationship between science and religion, and in 2001 published a witty, wide-ranging and provocative book that lived up to its subtitle: The Definite Maybe; All you need to know about God, life and science. (Xlibris, 2001). At the time of his death he was working on a book that he hoped would further clarify and consolidate his beliefs.

William very much enjoyed being on the margins, where innovation happens. He delighted in being both lefthanded and dyslexic, which he described as making him ‘non-modal’. He is remembered widely, as well as for his polymathic intelligence, for his integrity, generosity and warmth, and his capacity for encouraging young and less confident people to achieve their potential. He was married for nearly seventy years to Patricia née Best, who was a poet and psychotherapist. They had three children, Melanie, Dicken and Ceri. He is survived by Ceri, Ceri’s daughters Poppy and Nancy, and Melanie’s daughter Rebecca, who value his supportive love and encouragement of their endeavours. The wider world, of which the IET is one part, recognises his brilliance and creative energy.