A career less usual!

We don’t normally cover personal stories in Electrical Tester but on rare occasions there’s one for which we simply have to find space. And the story of Alan Purton, who retired from Megger earlier this year, is definitely in this category.

Many electrical engineers around the world will have met Alan, and may be interested to know a little more about him.  

Alan started his career in 1965 as an apprentice at Megger. He worked on the renowned Model 8 Mk 5 AVO multimeter, and later designed the SA9083 telecommunications multimeter.

From 1974 to 1980, he worked in South Africa as head of the protection testing division of power utility ESKOM, a post that involved commissioning 400 kV transmission lines. In 1980 he moved on to work as a protection relay design engineer. Around this time, he was awarded two patents and developed an intrinsically safe mines protection scheme.

Alan returned to the UK in 1988, where he re-joined Megger as senior applications engineer. Later he worked for Schneider Electric as an authorised person lecturer in electrical engineering but he returned to Megger for the last time in 2007, working in the Technical Support Group (TSG).

If you’d like to contact Alan, contact megger and we will pass on your details. We wish him well in his retirement and hope that he has many new achievements, albeit of a more leisurely kind, ahead of him.