Arthur Porter (engineer)

Arthur Porter (1910–2010) was a British-Canadian engineer and pioneer in computing and biomedical engineering.

Porter was born in Ulverston, England, on 8 December 1910,[1] the son of John William Porter and Mary Anne Harris.[2]

He studied at the University of Manchester where he gained undergraduate (BSc) honours in physics followed by an MSc.[3] He went on to obtain his doctorate (PhD) at Manchester under the supervision of Douglas Hartree).[1] His graduate work and doctoral thesis was on a differential analyser (early analog computer) constructed from Meccano parts.[3]

He spent the period from 1937 to 1939 on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] This was followed by wartime research with the Admiralty Research Laboratory and the National Physical Laboratory.[1] After the war, he was Professor of Instrument Technology at Royal Military College (1946–1949).[1]

Porter then moved to Canada where he was Head of Research at Ferranti Ltd in Toronto from 1949 to 1955.[1] He then returned to London to take up the post of Professor of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London from 1955 to 1958.[1] Following this, he was Dean at the University of Saskatchewan (1958–1961),[1] followed by two periods as Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto (1961–1968 and 1973–1975).[1] During his career, his colleagues included Douglas Hartree and Marshall McLuhan.[3]

Porter was a member of Project Lamplight in the 1950s.[3] Other posts he held included Chair of the Royal Commission on Government Organization (The Glassco Commission, 1960–1962),[3] Academic Commissioner at the University of Western Ontario (1970–1972),[1] Chair of the Science Committee of the Ontario Science Centre,[4] Chair of the Canadian Environmental Council,[4] and Chair of the Ontario Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning.[4] He also chaired the science advisory committee for Expo 67, the World's Fair held in 1967 in Montreal.[3]

Honours conferred on Porter include the Canadian Centennial Medal (1967)[4] and the Order of Canada (1988).[4] He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1970.[1] Porter became a US citizen in 1995.[2] He was hospitalised following a stroke and died at Forsyth Memorial Hospital, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on 26 February 2010.[1] Porter was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 2013.[5]