William Gosling BSc DSc FIET. 25 September 1932 – 2 August 2024.
Professor William Gosling was a pioneering systems and radio engineer working at the cutting edge of digital technology in its early years. He was educated at Imperial College. He joined the School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Swansea in 1958, where he began his innovative and internationally applied work in radio and mobile telecommunications.
He moved to the University of Bath in 1974 to chair the School of Electrical Engineering where he established a novel M Eng programme, combining a bachelors and masters degree with extensive industrial experience and involving social science and engineering; he believed strongly that engineers should be educated to address the interface of society with technology. Later in his career he also contributed to the Psychology Department’s Masters in Science, Culture and Communication.
In 1980 he joined the multinational technology company Plessey as Technical Director where he managed over fifteen hundred scientists and engineers globally. He was President of EUREL, the Convention of National Societies of Electrical Engineers in Western Europe, in 1978, and President of the Institution of Electronic and Radio Engineers in 1979.
William was an inspiring teacher and brilliant communicator. He often lectured without notes for an hour, with spellbinding wit and extraordinary breadth. High tech industrialist Sir Terry Mathews, one of his former Swansea students, remembers: ”William had an amazing ability to communicate and interact with all the people around him in a way that inspired and motivated them to do better and to have fun in their lives”.
His skill in cutting edge communication is reflected in his many technical and accessible books and writings. He cared passionately about recognising how technology, over thousands of years, has always shaped culture, which he provocatively addressed especially in Helmsmen and Heroes (Weidenfeld, 1994) and most recently, Culture’s Engine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He constantly challenged the common perspective that technology is (merely) the application of pre-existing science.
He was a visionary regarding technical – and therefore cultural – change. He foresaw clearly many of the radical consequences of the digital and microchip revolution, often against resistance. He referred to the kind of change happening in the microchip revolution as a ‘knight’s move’ – as in chess – where the normal expected trajectory does not apply and therefore is not predictable from the common (and dangerously misleading) assumption that the future will be ‘more of the same’.
William was dyslexic and lefthanded, two attributes of which he was very proud and that he thought contributed to his enjoyment of being on the margins and boundaries of ideas. He had wide interests beyond technology. He loved poetry and he had a strong interest in theology. At different times he was a Quaker, an agnostic, a Buddhist and an Anglo-Catholic – the latter being his eventual space, though in rather idiosyncratic form. He engaged frequently in public media explorations of the relationship between science and religion, and in 2001 published a witty, wide-ranging and provocative book that lived up to its subtitle: The Definite Maybe; All you need to know about God, life and science. (Xlibris, 2001).
William was married to Patricia, née Best, who was a psychotherapist and poet, for nearly seventy years until her passing in 2021. They had three children, Melanie, Dickon and Ceri. William is survived by his son Ceri, and his granddaughters Becca, Poppy and Nancy. His granddaughters especially value the deep support he gave them as they found their routes into careers and adult life.