John Fothergill Crosfield CBE DSc MA (22 October 1915 in Hampstead, London – 25 March 2012 in Hampstead, London) was an English inventor and entrepreneur. He was a pioneer in the application of electronics to all aspects of colour printing and the inventor of the acoustic and subsonic mines during the World War II.
Graduating with a degree in mechanical sciences from Cambridge University in 1936, Crosfield was working on electrical lifts for ASEA in Sweden when war was declared. He joined the Admiralty, where with a team of mathematicians and engineers he was charged with developing sonar, to detect midget submarines and new types of mines.
In 1947, Crosfield founded J F Crosfield Ltd. (later Crosfield Electronics Ltd.) to develop press control equipment The first product was the Autotron, that enabled magazines to print economically in colour. Following this, the company played a leading role in the introduction of colour scanning in 1958, phototypesetting and later the automated composition of pages incorporating pictures and text, a 1970s precursor to Photoshop. He founded Crosfield Business Machines Ltd. in 1966 to develop and produce banknote inspection, counting and sorting machines. The companies won 4 Queens Awards for Technology and Exports. De La Rue acquired the Crosfield businesses in 1974.
In 1971, Crosfield was appointed a CBE for Services to Industry. He was a board member of De La Rue, Baker Perkins and the Scientific Instruments Research Association until 1985. Crosfield researched and wrote The Crosfield Family, The Cadbury Family and, in 1991, Recollections of Crosfield Electronics 1947 to 1975. He installed an electron-microscope in his studio, using it to scan and image microscopic insect and plant life from his garden. He used these images as the inspiration for surreal but fascinating paintings.
Crosfield was noted for his generosity, giving away most of the fruits of his success in his lifetime. He was widely read, a good conversationalist and always interested in the exploits of his large, extended family and his many friends and their offspring. After a short illness, he died at his home at the age of 96.
Early life, family and education
Crosfield was the third child and second son of a family of prominent Quakers. His father, Bertram Fothergill Crosfield (1882–1951), was managing director and co-proprietor of the liberal dailies The News Chronicle and The Star, president of the Mid-Bucks Liberal Association and Clerk of the Meeting at Jordans Meeting House. John Crosfield's mother, Eleanor Cadbury (1885–1959), was a daughter of the chocolate manufacturer and Quaker George Cadbury. She was well known locally as a magistrate, elected as a Liberal to Bucks County Council, and for her work in local charities and political associations.
John Crosfield was born at Grove Lodge in Hampstead, London in 1915, the third of six children. As the house was too small for his growing family, his father sold Grove Lodge to the novelist John Galsworthy in 1918 and they moved to Buckinghamshire, on the outskirts of Beaconsfield. From a very young age, he had a passion for making things. In the family workshop he made boats, steam engines, jigsaw puzzles and a cannon that he tested on the garage door. The shot went straight through the door and through his father's beloved Daimler. At prep school he and his friends built a model railway through the school grounds. At public school he built an O gauge model railway with a friend and with another friend linked two of the houses with a telephone line and exchanges for their respective studies. He played second violin for the school orchestra, but dropped music in favour of painting and model making.
While his early schooling was idyllic, he was bullied and hated the bad food and harsh discipline at the Downs School, where he was sent as a border at the age of nine. The boys slept in three-sided huts with the fourth side open to the elements and here he contracted pneumonia followed by pleural empyema. He was ten years old and spent nearly a year recuperating at the Cadbury holiday home, Winds Point, high in the Malvern Hills. At thirteen, Crosfield went to Leighton Park School, a Quaker school in Reading, where his father had been head boy. He liked physics and maths and Crosfield chose to study engineering. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his father had also read mechanical sciences. Crosfield was a founder member of the university's Gliding Club, where the flyers developed what they believed to be the first successful winch launch, using an old Buick they adapted for that purpose. Although Crosfield enjoyed Cambridge to the full, with parties, sports (rowing, squash, golf and gliding) and high jinks, he worked hard, noting he had 27 hours of lectures and workshops a week compared to 6 hours for some of his friends. He graduated in 1936 and spent six weeks in Munich to improve his German. Here he was shocked by the virulence of anti-Semitic propaganda, the thin and haggard political prisoners he passed building new autobahns and by Hitler's hate-filled yet strangely mesmerising radio speeches. On his return to England, he found that his reports of what was going on in Germany were met with disbelief.
After Cambridge, Crosfield joined the British Thomson-Houston Company (BTH) at Rugby as a student apprentice, where he worked in departments testing electric motors, turbines and generators, and in the drafting, design and estimating departments. Adjoining the turbine department, where the monotony of the production line exasperated him, was Frank Whittle's laboratory. Crosfield sneaked in to see the first prototype of a jet engine. Frustrated at being stuck for six months in the drafting department, Crosfield left BTH in February 1938 to continue his apprenticeship at ASEA, based in their headquarters in Västeräs, Sweden. The summer of 1939 found him in Stockholm at one of ASEA's companies making electric lifts. He was on a painting holiday in the Skärgäden when he heard that the Luftwaffe had bombed Warsaw. After a false start he reached Newcastle by boat from Bergen and, as he had sailed in the Baltic, he volunteered for the Navy. He had to wait for his papers and ASEA gave him a job to install a newspaper drive at Manchester for Allied Newspapers, his first work on a printing press. Crosfield was impatient to get into the Navy, where he wanted to join a fighting ship. He explained his frustration to an acquaintance at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, who referred him to a friend in the Admiralty.
In February 1940, the Admiralty assigned Crosfield to the Mine Design Department HMS Vernon at Portsmouth. The first assignment he completed was to design equipment for detecting midget submarines at Britain's harbour entrances. He was then charged with designing a magnetometer to measure a ship's magnetic field, but he realised that magnetic mines were useless against German E-Boats (motor torpedo boats) that were built with wooden hulls. So he started work on an acoustic mine that worked on the sound emitted by a ship's propeller. He had made a prototype and started testing it when Commander Brown called him in and told him to get back to the magnetometer. He ignored the order and, "with improved security", continued the development of the acoustic mine. This became an official priority after a British destroyer, which had been 'degaussed' and was therefore impervious to magnetic mines, set off a mine in the Thames Estuary. With the help of a mathematician and much testing he overcame the technical obstacles. In its first use in the Baltic Sea, 200 of the new acoustic mines sank 47 enemy vessels and the Baltic was closed to shipping for two weeks. One of his colleagues at HMS Vernon was his friend and future Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, who built up a little organization which modified mines to meet new tactical requirements.
Crosfield's superior, the mathematical physicist Professor Harrie Massey, asked him to do a special job for the Normandy landings. Crosfield and his team developed a new acoustic and subsonic mine. He was put in charge of producing enough of them for the RAF by 15 May 1944. He found that the four depots assembling mines were chaotically run. By commandeering a lorry to move parts to where they were needed, sending in his engineers to control stock and quality and convincing the manager of the Milford Haven depot to deploy eight of his secretarial staff together with six of the Admiralty's mathematicians on the production line, they met their target. The new mines were dropped by the RAF in the Kiel Canal, the Straits of Dover and the Western Approaches (Operation Maple and Operation Bravado), with the result that very few German vessels were able to reach and attack the invasion fleet. The Admiralty awarded Crosfield 500 pounds for his invention, and with this he bought his first house at Emsworth.