Audrey Wood
Company: Oxford Instruments
Wealth estimate: £50 million
As one of the co-founders of one of British engineering’s biggest post-War success stories, Audrey Wood was a pioneer in spinning out a commercial company from a famous university. Oxford Instruments began in 1959 and produced its first superconductor magnet in 1961. Its journey from the college lab to the cutting edge of Magnetic Resonance Imaging took it through a variety of homes, including a former abattoir and a boat house.
By the 1980s, MRI machines were becoming a mainstay of medical diagnostics, thanks to the company Audrey founded with her late husband Sir Martin Wood. She remained a director of the company until 1983 when it went public, having run its administration, marketing and finances.
The couple met just before Martin moved to Oxford in 1955, leaving the coal industry to return to the lab. They invented callipers that bent at the knee to help one of the young widow Audrey’s children, caught in the aftermath of polio, to be able to ride a tricycle.
Audrey was born in 1927 in Hankow, China, to missionary parents, she went on to study botany and zoology before meeting Martin. Keen environmentalists and philanthropists, they also set up charities The Oxford Trust and Sylva Foundation.
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