Günter Spur (* 1928)

Günter Spur was born in Braunschweig on 28 October 1928. His years at school were overshadowed by the events of World War II and its aftermath. In 1948 he started to study engineering at the TH Braunschweig, where he took his degree in 1954. He then took up a post as a design engineer at the Gildemeister Tool-making Factory in Bielefeld. In 1956 he became an assistant, later chief engineer and then director of research at the Institute of Machine Tools and Production Engineering at the TH Braunschweig, where he took a doctorate in 1960. In 1961 he returned to work at Gildemeister as director of construction.

On 1 October 1965, Spur became professor and director at the Institute of Machine Tools and Production Engineering at the TU Berlin. He applied himself energetically to extending research in machine tools and opened a new research facility in 1968. At that point Spur started research into the numerical control of machine tools, an area that had already been started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Spur made significant contributions to the development of the programming language EXAPT, he accelerated the upgrading of CAD technology and he also worked on the application of DNC and CNC systems. In 1973 he acquired one of the first industrial robots for his institute and he started to develop the field of robot control (robotics). Alongside these developments, Spur did not neglect the fields of research that gave his institute its name: he researched exhaustively the thermal and dynamic properties of machine tools, and in the field of production engineering a lot of research was conducted particularly into new materials and new processing procedures.

On Spur's motivation, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft founded its Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology in 1976. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and the TU Berlin agreed to form a double institute by combining the former's Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology with the TU's Institute of Machine Tools and Production Engineering under the directorship of Spur. A new building known as the Production Technology Centre was completed in 1986 in Pascalstraße in Charlottenburg, Berlin, where Spur was able to combine the activities of both institutes. He remained director of the Production Technology Centre until 1997, making it an internationally recognised centre in the field of production technology.

Between 1975 and 1995, Spur organised eight colloquiums in production technology, which became international forums for the exchange of scientific knowledge as well as for constructive interaction between research, business and politics. Spur was a member of numerous bodies and committees, including the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Germany's national metrology institute), where he was curator, and he was a member of the board of the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization). Spur was the founding director of the University of Cottbus between 1991 and 1996. He became a founding member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 1993 where he is secretary of the technical sciences division. Günter Spur's extraordinary achievements have been recognised with innumerable prizes and honorary memberships in many institutions. He holds honorary doctorates from many German and international universities and in 1991 the German Association of Engineers awarded him its prestigious Grashof medal.

Lit.: Frank-Lothar Krause, Eckart Uhlmann: Innovative Produktionstechnik, Munich, Vienna: Carl Hanser 1998

[J. Z.]