Brian John Smith

From schoolboy to engineer

Brian John Smith was born on 5 June 1947 and grew up in South Ockendon, Essex, where he attended the Lennard Secondary School from 1958 to 1962. His leaving reference describes a pupil “above average in ability” who showed “aptitude in Pottery and interest in many outdoor activities,” represented the school at rugby, and — tellingly for what would follow — worked as a laboratory assistant who “has shown initiative and the ability to work well without supervision.” His headmaster recommended him “to any employer as a trustworthy, conscientious and intelligent employee.”

On leaving school he began a Fitter and Turner apprenticeship with Murex Limited in Rainham, Essex, formalised in a Deed of Apprenticeship. Over several years he rotated through fitting shops, tool rooms, drawing offices, welders, motor mechanics and research departments — the full sweep of practical mechanical engineering. After finishing, he worked in a tool room and was considering becoming a tool fitter when he was made redundant. He retrained as a capstan lathe setter. Then he saw a job advertised at a place called the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, on the Harwell campus in Oxfordshire. He applied and got it. He was in his mid-twenties, living with his wife in a prefab bungalow, and he had no idea what he was walking into.

His first role was hands-on maintenance engineering. Because he was small, he could crawl inside the laboratory's synchrotron to fix the target stations where particle beams hit their targets. He wore radiation badges. One day his badge fell off while he was working. He went for a cup of tea, came back, found the badge, and clipped it back on — not realising it had been sitting in a high-radiation area the whole time, soaking up a dose that looked like it had gone through Brian. He was barred from high-radiation areas for three months while they checked his levels.

He never told them the badge had fallen off.

It was in these early years, working on the Nimrod accelerator, that Brian had his first documented taste of recognition — for a simple idea. In 1974 he won a £75 Suggestion Award for a “flip-top scintillator,” a device for locating the proton beam that could be flipped out of the beam's path when it wasn't needed, prolonging its life, cutting the radiation dose to staff and saving an estimated £300 in its first year. The Science Research Council's journal reported it under the headline “A rewarding suggestion” — and signed off with a line that could be Brian's motto: “Like all the best ideas, it is simple.”

Later he transferred to the drawing office and began learning mechanical design. He noticed something that stayed with him: there were draughtsmen who could produce immaculate drawings but froze when asked to start from nothing.

“Putting the pen on the paper and getting going is the hardest thing. You need to figure out the idea. And then try to distil that into a drawing.”

Brian could do both — think up the idea and draw it. That combination would define the rest of his career.

From the archive: Lennard School attendance certificate (1958–59) · school report book · the Rutherford job advert · handwritten “potted history” · RAL training record · City & Guilds result (1968) · City & Guilds Part 3 (1975) · Reading College report

Measuring the sea and the sky

The door mechanism wasn't Brian's first encounter with instruments that left the ground. Earlier in his Rutherford career he designed detectors fitted under the nose cones of RAF Hercules C-130 aircraft, measuring sea-surface temperature from the air on set routes — “long before anybody was worried about it,” he says, meaning long before climate change became a public concern.

He also knew the people behind Rutherford's atmospheric balloon programme. A newspaper clipping in his archive records one flight where the crash basket — designed to collapse on impact and absorb the landing — turned out to have been built a little too strong. It didn't collapse. The crew were unhurt, but it made for a harder landing than planned.

No photograph of this work survives in Brian's archive. To see the aircraft itself, the RAF's Air Historical Branch has a gallery of the Hercules in RAF service →

That atmospheric-science work reached space, too. Brian worked on ISAMS — the Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder — one of the instruments aboard NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), deployed from the Space Shuttle Discovery on 15 September 1991 to study the ozone layer and the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. For his part, NASA sent Brian a certificate of recognition signed by its Administrator, Richard Truly — together with a mission decal that had actually flown aboard the shuttle.

Cooling things down

Cryogenic pumps

Brian designed liquid-nitrogen pumps for a cryogenic cooling system serving a particle-physics experiment in Germany. He designed the pumps, had them pressure-tested at Rutherford, and shipped them out. Some of the physicists there were sceptical.

“They said, ‘That'll never work.’ But it did. And there it goes. It doesn't always have to be really complicated.”

Cryogenics is the engineering of the very cold. The superconducting magnets at the heart of a modern detector only work when chilled to hundreds of degrees below zero and held there by liquefied gases like nitrogen and helium. The German experiment was most likely H1, on the HERA electron–proton collider at DESY in Hamburg, where Rutherford built the experiment's huge superconducting magnet and the cryogenic system that kept it cold — the kind of unglamorous but essential plumbing Brian's pumps fed into.

His archive also documents a related piece of cryogenic work in his own hand: liquid-helium pumps assembled and tested at CERN's Prévessin site in the autumn of 1988 — some of the few photographs that survive of Brian actually at work on a project.

From the archive: the liquid-helium pump album page (CERN, 1988)

How Brian thought about physics

Brian was not a physicist. He was a mechanical designer who happened to work on physics experiments, and his view of the science was practical, curious and gently irreverent. He once put a question to one of the physicists at Rutherford:

“If you've got an ice cube, and it's got 12 volts in that ice cube, and I get a big hammer and I smash the ice cube, you get lots of little bits — but each one's got a little voltage in it. How do I know if that's a new particle and not just part of the original ice cube?”

The physicist replied: “That's what we're doing it for.” Brian took this in his stride.

“Basically, they don't know exactly what they're finding — which is perfectly fine. But they get funding for it, and we get other developments. The web and all that. So we get spin-off technology come out of it.”

The discoveries may be abstract, he reasoned, but the engineering and technology they drive are real.

The way he worked

What runs through all of Brian's stories is a consistent design philosophy: keep it simple, keep it light, keep it cheap, build in a safety margin, and make it work. He knew that on a satellite, or deep underground at CERN, you cannot send someone to fix a broken mechanism. The thing has to work the first time and keep working.

He kept his drawings in A4 folders on a bookshelf in his office — a personal archive eventually taken by management when Rutherford was pursuing British Standards accreditation. They needed example drawings, and Brian's were good enough to use as templates. He didn't get them back. He used the Medusa CAD system as computing arrived in the drawing office, but his instinct was always to start with the idea first and the drawing second.

“Doing meetings, writing reports — that's my worst part. And it appears that I was better at it than all the other clever sorts.”

He chose family over extended overseas postings. He could have spent months at CERN, but he kept his trips to about a week at a time. “I could have actually stayed out there for months,” he says, “which would not have been that good for the family, because you kids were growing up pretty quick.” He came home at five o'clock. He enjoyed the work. He didn't think of it as historic at the time.

From the archive: “Brief General Experience” sheet

About this archive

This whole site began with a cardboard box on a shelf. Inside were Brian's certificates, a handful of official photographs, a few letters and newspaper clippings, and the SOHO and CMS materials he'd kept over a thirty-six-year career — quietly, without ever thinking of it as historic.

His son Leroy sorted the box, scanned the documents into an Obsidian archive, and recorded a long conversation with Brian on 13 May 2026 to capture the stories the papers couldn't. That recording is the backbone of everything here. You can read the full conversation, browse the source documents, or see more of Brian himself.

Where Brian couldn't recall an exact date or detail, it's marked as approximate rather than invented — preserving the real record matters more than tidiness. If you're family and you know the story behind a photo, or have more to add, those gaps are meant to be filled.

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