Cecil Alfred 'Coppy' Laws

Cecil Alfred 'Coppy' Laws (also C A 'Coppy' Laws and C A Laws) (21 November 1916 – 28 May 2002) was a British electronic engineer and radar engineer during World War II, and the inventor of the domestic air ioniser or ionizer.

C A Coppy Laws was born in Great Yarmouth on 21 November 1916. In 1931 his father died, and the 14-year-old Cecil was boarded with a school friend's family, and came to terms with his loss by immersing himself in radio, his childhood hobby. He built the first TV in the street, and neighbours would crowd in to see the one hour of weekly broadcasting transmitted by the BBC. There was no money for further education, so he worked in a local shop recharging lead-acid accumulators for radios by day, and cycling 16 miles to evening classes and back, five nights a week for four years. This determination won him a first-class City and Guilds examination in radio communications.

In 1936, aged 20, Laws took a job at Philco. He had striking, copper-coloured hair, and a young secretary, Rita Hay, coined the nickname 'Coppy'. Coppy and Rita were married in 1942. The couple had five sons. He died on 28 May 2002.

In his mid-twenties he designed a range-finding system which allowed guns to home in on enemy ships beyond the horizon with accuracy and to fire a salvo the instant they were detected.

His achievements won recognition from the British Government in the form of a large cash award, similar to that given to Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine.

At the outbreak of war he was seconded to the Admiralty to work on the development of radar. He resolved the key component of a design for a radar distance-measuring oscillator, a problem which at the time was defeating the young Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, part of the mathematical team backing up the radar designers.

After the war he was invited to form a radar division for Elliotts, the electrical engineering company. He helped create the East coast radar defence for the USA; set up Elliotts' first automation division; automated the oil pipelines in Saudi Arabia for Aramco; and initiated and directed the first computer division.

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