Tustin started working in 1914 at the age of 16 as an apprentice to the C. A. Parsons and Company, of Newcastle upon Tyne. He entered Armstrong College, later part of Newcastle University, in 1916, served in the Royal Engineers in World War I, and eventually received his master's degree in science in 1922.[2]
In 1922 he joined Metropolitan-Vickers (Metro-Vick) as a graduate trainee. In the early 1930s he worked for Metro-Vick in Russia for two years, advising and selling equipment to the government companies. Here, he wrote his first book on the design of electric motors, which was also translated into Russian.[2] In the late 1930s and during World War II Tustin was working on the Metadyne constant-current DC generator for gun control.[3] He also developed new methods for gyroscopic stabilisation and further applied servo-mechanisms to tanks and naval guns.[2]
After the war, in 1947, he was appointed Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, a post in which he remained until 1955. In 1953-54 he had been Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from 1955 to 1964 he was Professor of Engineering at Imperial College London.[3] Tustin was married to Frances Tustin, a pioneering psychotherapist and authority on autism.
