Patrick McKeown obituary

Precision engineer whose unit at Cranfield University helped develop scanners, tiny integrated circuits and the mirrors of the James Webb space telescope For the past four years, the James Webb space telescope has been returning stunning images of stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe. Parked in orbit a million miles from the Earth, the observatory is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine that shares a special engineering heritage with a swelling number of modern devices, from mobile phones to medical scanners and turbine blades. All are products of precision engineering, a discipline that blends the traditions of surveying, navigation, astronomy and time-keeping to create the technology that underpins our lives today. And one of its prime exponents was Patrick McKeown. McKeown, who has died aged 95, wrote the “11 principles of machine design” that were a distillation of everything he had learned about accuracy, stability and error correction in mechanical systems, and that have become the bedrock of precision engineering across the world. In 1968, he used these principles to help launch a world-leading unit dedicated to the field at the Cranfield College of Aeron