Bill Moggridge: incredible generosity and spirit

Published: 13 September, 2012
by DAN CARRIER

IT was from above a dry cleaners in Kentish Town Road that Bill Moggridge, who has died aged 69, designed the world’s first laptop.

His Grid computer, conceived in 1979, would travel into space on NASA’s Shuttle programmes. It included such groundbreaking features as a built-in telephone modem.

Bill, whose father, Henry, was a civil servant and his mother, Helen, an artist, studied industrial design at Central School of Art and Design, where he met a Danish textiles student, Karin Hanson, who was to be his wife of 47 years.

He spent some time in America in the 1960s before heading back to London. The couple moved to Dartmouth Park Road, Kentish Town, in 1969.

The houses then were split into flats and falling down; for Bill and Karin, this was a bonus rather than a problem as they could use their eye for design to create a home that suited their needs.

The basement became a workshop for their design studio. It was here Bill’s genius was given a platform to flourish.
He could be heard banging and sawing as he constructed prototypes of, for example, new cookers out of plywood so manufacturers could see what their products would look like when completed.

He used his artistic talents to make medals for his son’s football club, Dartmouth Park United, which played on Hampstead Heath on Saturday mornings.

The couple were known for their incredible generosity and spirit. When Bill and Karin heard of the plight of a teenage mother with two children who had been taken into foster care, they  offered her a room in their house so she could be reunited with the children while waiting for Camden Council to rehouse them.

The couple’s two boys, Erik, born in 1970, and Alex, in 1973, both attended Gospel Oak primary school until the family moved to Silicon Valley in California.

Bill’s design studio soon outgrew his home and moved to rooms above a shop at the junction of Fortess Road and Kentish Town Road. It was from these small rooms that he began to create what would ultimately become the world’s first laptop.

The small rooms in Kentish Town Road were swapped for a warehouse in Jeffreys Street, Camden Town, and by 1979 Bill was wanted around the world.
This led the couple to make the hard decision to move to California, a choice made slightly easier, they joked, by the fact Margaret Thatcher had won the 1979 election.

Their link with Camden continued, however, as they kept a flat in Parliament Hill, which they renovated.

Bill had a fine bass voice and loved to sing in choirs. He was a cornerstone of the Mary Ward Madrigal Choir for many years and was a founding member of William Ellis and Parliament Hill Schools Parents’ and Friends’ Choir, now known as the North London Chorus.

In the USA, he co-founded IDEO, which designed Apple computers’ first mouse. Among the long list of his awards and achievements, he was appointed director of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Design Museum in New York and was given a lifetime achievement award by Michelle Obama in 2010.

His name is engraved in stone at the Design Museum next to jet engine inventor Frank Whittle.

He is survived by Karin and sons Erik and Alex.