Professor Robert Macmillan

Robert Hugh Macmillan (27 June 1921 – 10 May 2015) was Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Swansea University and went on to become Director of the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) where he installed an early linear induction motor to investigate vehicle safety, as well as overseeing MIRA's successful transition to a commercial research organisation. He ended his career as a Professor at Cranfield University.

As a young lecturer at Cambridge University straight after the Second World War, Robert Macmillan wrote the standard text on control systems and a second book on automation, both published by Cambridge University Press in the 1950s. He went on to be appointed Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Swansea University at the young age of 35 and in time became Head of the Engineering Faculty, helping to steer the construction of Swansea’s new engineering building. He published another standard text, this time on non-linear control systems.

After eight years at Swansea, in 1964 he took over as Director of the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA), where he oversaw the installation of the largest industrial linear induction motor in Britain, used for indoor testing of vehicle collisions and which was opened in 1968 by the Minister of Technology, Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Macmillan also transformed MIRA from an organization supported by government funding and a block grant from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, into a successful commercial research organization.

From MIRA he moved to Cranfield Institute of Technology (now Cranfield University) where he spent five years writing another standard text on the Dynamics of Vehicle Collisions, exploiting the processing power of an early Hewlett Packard scientific desktop computer for the complex calculations.

Robert Hugh Macmillan was born in 1921 in Mussoorie, a hill station in India. His father was a civil engineer who worked on Indian Railways and who had himself been born in Cuttack in India. His mother Ethel (née Webb) was the daughter of an art teacher and a talented and prolific amateur artist in her own right (see example) with a family connection to the silversmiths Mappin & Webb.

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