Otto Mayr (2 November 1930 – 10 February 2025) was a German mechanical engineer, historian of technology, curator, author and director of the National Museum of History and Technology in Washington D.C. and the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
He was particularly known for his work on "The origins of feedback control"[1] and "Authority, liberty, & automatic machinery in early modern Europe.
[4] After his graduation in 1956, he had started his career as research assistant at the MIT Heat Power Laboratory for a year.
From 1962 to 1965 he was lecturer and later assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
In 1988, Mayr was awarded the first-class merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1992 he received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT).