My father, Michael Westbrook, who has died aged 88, was one of the first professionally trained electronics engineers in the UK and, during a long career in the field, invented and patented a number of useful devices, including a fuel injection system for cars and a photoelectric fog detector for ships. He also became an early expert in the technology behind electric vehicles.
Born an only child into a farming family in Preston Candover, Hampshire, to George and Phyllis (George’s cousin, also born Westbrook), Mike went to Peter Symonds school in Winchester, where even then he showed ability in the emerging field of electronics. From 1945 to 1948 he served in the RAF near Cheltenham. He married Barbara (nee Maw), a secretary, in 1949, and they moved to Upham in Hampshire while Michael studied at University College, Southampton (now the University of Southampton) under the electronics pioneer Eric Zepler.
He graduated in 1952 and the following year his young family moved to Kent, where he worked initially for Powers-Samas, which made accounting machines, and then for Trinity House, a company that created navigational aids for shipping (where he invented his fog detector). After a spell at the Rank Organisation, in 1959 he moved to Leamington Spa to join Associated Engineering (where he invented his fuel injection system), working mainly on transducers and automotive electronics. He also set up his own transducer company, Sybrook Electronics.
In 1966 Mike joined the car manufacturer Ford, in Essex, and took on various research and development management roles there, including early research into electric cars for Ford Europe. In 1987 he was appointed visiting professor at the University of Southampton’s department of mechanical engineering, and four years later the department awarded him an honorary doctorate in science.
He retired in 1991 after 25 years at Ford, but remained active in engineering institutions, chairing committees at the Institute of Physics, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and what is now the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He was a fellow of all three bodies.
Mike also worked with the Open University in the late 1990s to create teaching materials for physics in schools, and he was the author of a definitive work on the electric car and its technologies, The Electric Car (2001), as well as an earlier book on automotive transducers, Automotive Sensors (1994).
He is survived by Barbara, their five children, 10 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
