John Crawshaw Taylor[1] OBE FREng (born 25 November 1936) is an English inventor, entrepreneur, horologist and philanthropist best known for his extensive research into electric kettles.

[4] Two years later, Castletown Thermostats changed its name to Strix Ltd, and in 1984, Eddie Davies was appointed as Chief Executive, with Taylor remaining Chairman.

[4] In 2001 Taylor received an Honorary Doctorate at UMIST and was made Visiting Professor of Innovation in recognition of over 150 patents in his own name.

[1] In 2000, in a bid to expand into the new growth market of coffee makers, Strix raised £50m of capital from HSBC Private Equity by selling 40% of its shares, valuing the company at £125m.

Strix controls are incorporated into electric kettles from many leading manufacturers, and it is estimated that they are used over one billion times per day worldwide, by over 20% of the world's population.

[11][12][13] In 2017, the Royal Academy of Engineering named their newly refurbished Enterprise Hub after Taylor, in recognition of his donation that enabled the project.

[14] He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to business and horology.

They are all designed to show the grasshopper escapement, part of a conventional clock mechanism that was invented by John Harrison.

When building the Corpus Chronophage, Taylor found that the inertia issues presented by such a large grasshopper escapement made the mechanism unworkable.