Professor Meredith W. Thring (Mechanical Engineering 1939)

Provided by Sue Kalaugher

Meredith Wooldridge Thring, generally know as "Med", was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1915. He returned to England when he was four and after school at Malvern went to Trinity College Cambridge. Here he attained a double first in Maths and Physics in 1937. He was offered a PhD course in the Rutherford lab but he was keen to "get out into the world to help people". This decision probably helped him, to his later great relief; to avoid being involved in early work developing nuclear weapons. On graduation he joined the British Coal Utilisation and Research Association (BCURA), becoming head of the combustion laboratory, where one of his projects included converting vehicles to run on producer gas made from wood, to save petrol in wartime. In 1946 he became Head of the Department of Physics at the British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA), London. In 1953 he was appointed Head of the Department of Fuel Technology and Chemical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. His interests there included magneto hydrodynamics, robot fire fighters and the domestic robot, a topic which caught the interest of the popular media! In 1964 he moved to Queen Mary College at the University of London to become Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Here he worked on subjects as varied as aids for thalidomide children to novel methods of low drag ship propulsion as well as running the department and teaching. He also pioneered an Inventive Design Course, which at least two of his ex students report "changed their lives"

Med Thring was a visionary who greatly enjoyed a heated debate (at any time of day) about his predictions of the future. A physicist by training he changed to engineering because he wanted to make the world a better place for people to live in. In his later years he worried greatly about the future state of the world for his great grandsons. He started to think about this many years before it was a generally known topic. In this, as in so many other things, he was ahead of his time. He was highly intellectual yet firm in his view that engineers must have a conscience to help make sustainable development possible. He looked to today's engineers for renewable energy technology that can be shared throughout the world. He maintained a positive disposition, in spite of his knowledge of the dangers of the consumption by western countries of so much more than their share of the world's resources. Past students from around the world remember him with great affection and gratitude.

He was a founder of the International Flame Research Foundation and a founder fellow of the Fellowship of Engineering, which became the Royal Academy of Engineering, London. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Energy, serving as its President 1962-3. He published numerous books including "The Science of Flames and Furnaces", "Man, machines and tomorrow", "The Engineer's Conscience" and "How to Invent", the last of these with Eric Laithwaite. He was consultant to a number of companies including Shell Oil Co, ICI and Montecatini Edison in Italy.

In retirement he worked as hard as ever, getting up at 6am and going to bed at 11:30pm. He greatly missed having a secretary so learned to word process so that he could go on writing books. He also communicated regularly with friends around the world by e-mail. However he found his computer a bit recalcitrant and his children were used to getting SOS 'phone calls for advice and help.

At this time he became very concerned in helping the people of Africa feed themselves. He founded a charity, Poweraid, sponsored a village in Tanzania and was also very active in Nigeria, making a number of visits to Lagos. One of his favourite technologies was that used to extract edible protein from leaves. He worked out ways to harvest water hyacinth from Lake Victoria and turn it into food, acting as a personal consultant to President Musoveni of Uganda on this subject. His passion remained: he wanted science and engineering to make a positive difference to the lives of people all over the world.

His wife, Margaret, gave him tremendous support, with activities ranging from entertaining students at their home in Sheffield on a weekly basis to accompanying him on numerous trips abroad. They married in 1940 and were married for 46 years. They had one daughter and two sons, seven granddaughters and five great-grandsons.