John Alfred Powell FRSE FIEE FRSA (1923–1996) was a 20th-century British physicist and company director.
In the Second World War he joined as an apprentice in the Royal Air Force based at RAF Halton in 1939, but was invalided out in 1941.
In 1957 he moved to Texas Instruments in Bedford as senior product engineer, devising a way to create cheap germanium crystals.
This brought him rapid promotion, rising to assistant managing director for Northern Europe and in 1968 became vice president.
The company went on to create a body scanner and to dominate the world medical scanning market.