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David Potter, who died on 28 June, was the UK’s pioneering engineer and entrepreneur of the computer age. In 1980, he founded Psion, a technology company that went on to create the world’s first hand-held organiser four years later. He then oversaw the creation of Symbian, the standard operating system for mobiles. Later, he served two terms as a non-executive director of the Bank of England, a period that included the financial crash of 2007, which confirmed his loathing of US financial influence. He used his wealth to become an intelligent, progressive philanthropist. In that role, he played a decisive part in rescuing openDemocracy from bankruptcy in 2013, anchoring a matching funds campaign.

I met David after his wife, Elaine Potter, became a member of the openDemocracy board in 2006. An experienced investigative journalist, Elaine was part of the Sunday Times Insight team in the 1970s. Under the leadership of Bruce Page and the overall editorship of Harry Evans, the team forged the standards for sustained, independent investigation that, despite all the efforts of Trumpite corporate self-interest and its corruptions, still shape our expectations of honest journalism.

Thanks to David, the Foundation he established with Elaine became a modest but invaluably regular supporter of openDemocracy’s core costs. I was an experienced fundraiser and found him enjoyable and strangely unique. It took me some time to work out why. In this short, personal salute, I’ll summarise my answer.

Four things about David Potter made him a distinctive force for good in ways unusual for the rich, certainly in Britain.

Firstly, he was a self-made industrialist. I was used to working with the trustees and directors of foundations, some of whom had inherited great wealth or had made fortunes out of the opportunities of finance and even the media. David was different. He was akin to the great nineteenth-century industrialists. He created a cutting-edge manufacturing company. He made things. Talking with him was to enter the joy of the tangible.

Soon after we met, David denounced with venom American economist Milton Friedman’s famous claim that the “one and only social responsibility of business” is to “increase its profits”. David’s business had made him wealthy, but the purpose that got him up in the morning was to create something useful that people needed. He innovated for use-value, not to extract as much as he could. To start and grow a major company is incredibly demanding work. For him, it was a work of creation, not exploitation.

He also loved talking about manufacturing, especially the qualities of Japanese factories. His own products were tremendous. When I posted a notice of his death on Bluesky, Shane McKee, a consultant in genetic medicine in Northern Ireland, responded: “I'm still using my Psion Series 5mx daily.”

Once David told me, with a delightful twinkle in his eye and contempt in his voice, how when he worked for the Bank of England he’d had lunch with a senior City banker who went on about innovative financial products. David had cut him short to tell him that if he really wanted to know about ‘innovative products’, he was talking to the right person!

Reflecting on this led me to interview David with Will Davies, who at the time was editing a series of articles for openDemocracy called Uneconomics. David rewrote the transcript, making in effect an article by him, which we called ‘Let's welcome the enmity of bankers’. Mostly, it was about his experience of the financial crash and his opposition to debt-fuelled growth and its dangers.

It opens, however, with how he started as an academic at London’s Imperial College doing a PhD in non-linear physics. He studied the laws of “complex phenomena such as fluid dynamics, the atmosphere or the structure of a galaxy… turbulence, statistics in nature” and pioneered using computers to do so, writing his first book on Computational Physics in 1973. In other words, he mastered the intangible – such as the mathematical description of the dynamics of galactic clouds – as well.

This was his second special attribute: he was a top-rate scientific intellectual. At the end of the 1970s, teaching in Los Angeles, he grasped the transformative significance of the exponential increase in the power of the microchip. Realising that it would transform the world, as indeed it has, he decided he wanted to help make the change. He resigned from his academic career to start Psion – but never lost a sweeping world view.

As well as being both a maker of things and an intellectual, David Potter was South African. One of the things about liberal South Africans is that they are not afraid of revolution, having experienced real change. Most progressive British funders, while they like the idea of radical aspiration, in their hearts fear barricades, tumbrils and losing an invitation to join the House of Lords. South Africans, by contrast, have experienced system change and know it can work. It makes them much more fearless and relaxed when you pitch to them that openDemocracy wants to hold capitalism to account.

Finally, there was a fourth factor that made David special. He was married to Elaine. They were in every best sense an item, watching out for each other, staying measured and secure in their generosity. They seemed a perfect foil for each other. In practical terms, when he was uncertain about the politics of a project, Elaine could figure it out, and if she was doubtful about an economic proposition, she respected his opinion (this is not always true of spouses).

An anecdote that shows how special he was. In a conversation at his home by the Thames in Wallingford, David gently upbraided me for failing, like almost all the English, to recognise the utterly exceptional contribution of James Clark Maxwell, the Scottish scientist who worked in London and Cambridge. He didn’t patronise me or make me feel small. But I learnt that I should know that Maxwell ranked with Newton and Einstein as one of the great physicists of all time. Indeed, when he first visited London, Einstein said that he stood on Maxwell’s shoulders, rather than Newton’s and that Maxwell’s demonstration of the unity of electromagnetism meant that “one scientific epoch ended and another began”.

David was delighted that he was able to be a prime funder of a statue to Maxwell in Edinburgh. Delighted, not out of patriotism but because he was a scientist as well as a successful manufacturer. The latter had given him the resources to ensure a monument to his scientific predecessor, in whose footsteps he himself had followed.

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How the Psion founder and tech titan combined scientific brilliance with fearless philanthropy to champion public good

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How the Psion founder and tech titan combined scientific brilliance with fearless philanthropy to champion public good