Renishaw co-founder Sir David McMurtry dies
December 17, 2024
Renishaw has announced the death of its co-founder and Non-executive Director Sir David McMurtry.
In 1973, Sir David founded Renishaw with fellow Rolls-Royce engineer John Deer to commercialise a 3D touch-trigger probe for coordinate measuring machines. He had invented the probe the previous year to solve measurement problems faced in the manufacture of the Olympus engines that powered the Concorde supersonic aircraft. Prior to founding Renishaw, Sir David worked for Rolls-Royce for seventeen years. There, he rose to become Deputy Chief Designer and the company’s youngest-ever Assistant Chief of Engine Design. He was responsible for forty-seven patents at Rolls-Royce and went on to be named on over 200 patents for Renishaw innovations.
Under McMurtry’s leadership, Renishaw focused its development on coordinate measuring machines, shopfloor metrology and process control. Sir David also led the company’s diversification into other areas of metrology, manufacturing and automation, including Additive Manufacturing, encoders and calibration systems, and neurosurgery.
Today, Renishaw is a globally known business, employing over 5,000 people in thirty-six countries. Sir David said that from the start he and co-founder John Deer set out to create a company that was different to most others – different in how it applied technology to real-world problems, in how it invested for the long term, in how it manufactured rather than outsourced, and in how it treated customers and local communities as partners.
McMurtry received recognition from around the world for his achievements, including Japan and the USA, where he received awards that had historically only been presented to citizens of those countries. His Knighthood was awarded ‘for services to Design and Innovation’ and he was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) in 1989. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, a Fellow of the American Society of Manufacturing Engineers, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The awards noted by Renishaw in its tribute also included the 7th ND Marketing Award in 1990, where Sir David was the first non-Japanese winner of this prestigious award given to outstanding executives in the metal forming industry. In 2008, the official magazine of the US Society of Manufacturing Engineers also honoured him as a ‘Master of Manufacturing’, the first time that this recognition had been given to a non-US citizen.
In 2013, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the economy of the Bristol city region and at the National Business Awards he was honoured with The Telegraph award for a Decade of Business Achievement – the first head of an engineering business to be granted this award. The Institute of Physics jointly awarded its 2012 Swan Medal to Sir David and John Deer for their roles in founding and leading Renishaw.
In April 2014, during the MACH exhibition, Sir David was also awarded the inaugural MWP Lifetime Achievement Award which honours an individual who has made a significant contribution to the UK’s manufacturing industry. In 2019, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) awarded McMurtry the James Watt International Gold Medal for his outstanding contribution to mechanical engineering, the highest award that the industry can bestow and that a mechanical engineer can receive.
“Sir David will be greatly missed by so many, including the generations of Renishaw engineers who he inspired and mentored,” Renishaw stated in its tribute. “The manufacturing industry has lost a great innovator and many at Renishaw have lost a father figure and a friend.”
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