Martin Lowson
| Martin Lowson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Martin Vincent Lowson 5 January 1938 Totteridge, Hertfordshire, UK |
| Died | 15 June 2013 (aged 75) |
| Occupation | Engineer |
Professor Martin Lowson (5 January 1938 – 14 June 2013) was an aeronautical engineer. He held a number of senior academic appointments in UK and US universities, was a co-patentee of the BERP helicopter rotor system, and also made a significant contribution to the development of personal rapid transport systems.
Martin Vincent Lowson was born in Totteridge, Hertfordshire, on 5 January 1938.
He attended The King's School in Worcester, after which he became an apprentice with Vickers-Armstrong. In 1961, while studying at the University of Southampton, he was part of a team that achieved the first authenticated case of human-powered flight, in a vehicle called the 'Southampton University Man-Powered Aircraft'. He said that ‘driving the chase car with the whole team aboard as the aircraft took off was an incredible thrill’. He earned a first-class BSc with Honours in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Lowson gained a PhD in 1963, after which he spent a year in the Institute of Sound & Vibration Research, where he worked on aero-acoustics.
In the 1960s, he published three papers on aerocoustics that are regarded 'to be of fundamental significance in the theoretical understanding of noise generation'.
In 1964, Lowson was appointed Head of Applied Physics at the Wyle Laboratories, in Huntsville, Alabama. While in this role, he worked on the Saturn V rocket in support of the Apollo programme, with a staff of over 50 people.
In 1969 he was appointed Rolls-Royce Reader in Fluid Mechanics, at Loughborough University. He held the post until 1973.
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