Michael Humphreys, a man of dual vocations as a Baptist preacher and a pioneering expert in building temperature control, has died at the age of 89.
Early Career and Research
In the mid-1960s, Humphreys joined the scientific civil service and began working at the government's Building Research Station in Garston, Hertfordshire, focusing on thermal comfort. His colleague Charles Webb's field data from Singapore, India, Iraq, and the UK revealed that people felt comfortable in widely varying room temperatures, from the high teens in the UK to the mid-30s in Baghdad. Together with Fergus Nicol, who joined the team in 1966, Humphreys developed adaptive thermal comfort research, emphasizing the importance of different customs, behaviours, and attitudes in different climates.
Their findings starkly contrasted with the narrow temperature bands mandated by the air-conditioning industry in building standards, which were based on limited laboratory research. In 1972, Humphreys and Nicol presented their pioneering adaptive comfort theory at an international conference, and it now underpins global standards.
Ministry and Return to Research
In 1978, Humphreys' calling to the Baptist ministry took him from Garston to Regent's Park College, Oxford. He was ordained as a minister in 1981 and moved with his wife, Mary, to Tring in Hertfordshire, serving first as pastor at the Baptist church there and later as pastor-secretary for the Hertfordshire Baptist Association in Dunstable.
In 1992, he returned to research with the Oxford Thermal Comfort Unit, attached to Oxford Brookes University, and found little progress had been made in adaptive comfort during his absence. National and international comfort standards were still dominated by narrow engineering comfort zones, leading to excessive energy use and emissions from buildings. Released by the church for two days a week, over the next 30 years he contributed to numerous field studies, research papers, books, and the Windsor series of conferences on thermal comfort from 1994 onwards.
Legacy and Personal Life
Humphreys' kindness, empathy, and intelligence helped build a worldwide network of like-minded researchers, architects, and engineers, enabling the development of safe, comfortable, lower-energy buildings, vital in our heating climate.
Born in London, he was the youngest of three children of Helen (nee Paterson), a secretary, and Raymond, a chemist, and spent much of his childhood in Kent and Lancashire. Studying physics at Hatfield College, Durham, he met and married Mary Wood in 1959. After completing his diploma in education at Durham, he spent seven years teaching physics at Hartlebury Grammar School.
In 1996, the couple moved to Knighton in Powys, Wales, where he continued his research until 2020, while preaching in Welsh chapels. He wrote that he hoped his example would lead others to follow their deepest insights and have the determination to 'swim against the current,' for which, he maintained, perseverance is definitely needed.
Mary died in 2023. Michael is survived by their four daughters, Grace, Catherine, Ruth, and Hilary, 12 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren, and his brother, Jonathan.
