LESLIE LEVENS was the man who introduced the printed circuit board to Britain in the 1950s, so revolutionising the electrical industry. At one time he was the world’s biggest manufacturer of printed circuits. He later sold out and created another fortune in property. In both cases, he used his wideranging curiosity to detect opportunities for which the time was ripe, and gave generously to charity.

Levens went from Dulwich College into a chemical engineering firm, where he was trained. During the Second World War he worked on aircraft for the RAF, and after the war he set up on his own in commercial etching, with £200 capital, a secondhand engraving machine bought for £2 10s, a used camera bought for £7 10s and an acid etching bath for 5s. His first premises were a disused paint storeroom in Bow, East London.

When he read about printed circuits, an invention of the interwar years whose incremental improvements unfortunately coincided with an era of depression and cheap labour, he realised what could now be done.

Until then radio equipment had depended on painstaking point-by-point wiring, with each junction individually made up. Now a complete template could be made by the etching process. It was a mechanised approach with a more reliable result.

Levens, who always saw himself as a developer, not an inventor, plunged in. By this time he had moved to Finsbury Park in North London. The huge success of his venture meant that he needed larger premises, and in the mid-1950s he moved to Borehamwood in Hertfordshire.

He was active in the North London branch of the Engineering Industries Association, which he chaired in 1954, and exhibited regularly at radio exhibitions at venues such as Earls Court, exciting Fleet Street business reporters with his worldwide success. By 1960 he was the biggest manufacturer of printed circuits in the world. But at home his wife mended the fuses; that was not his expertise.

His wares travelled across the globe, not least to Japan, where his printed circuit boards were inserted into radios for export back to the UK, and Russia, which worried the Foreign Office and caused his office to be bugged.

In 1962 his business was taken over by Arnold Weinstock’s General Electric Company, but he stayed on for a few years until GEC became Associated Engineering Industries.

Looking for new openings in the late 1960s, Levens happened to read a news item about the Church of Wales’s difficulties in paying its clergy and the Church’s consequent thoughts about selling some of its valuable properties.

Chief among these was a London landmark, Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. Levens hastily put a consortium together and approached the Church of Wales. His boldness won the day and he became the proud owner of Bush House, though he later sold it on. A similar sense of timing informed his acquisition of Honeywell’s former headquarters in Greenford, Middlesex, in time to be sold to National Cash Register, which was desperate for extra space as Britain prepared for decimalisation in 1971.

A man who avoided the limelight and preferred a modest lifestyle, Levens remained the observant Jew he had been brought up to be by his parents, who had owned a chain of cinemas. His many charitable donations were directed towards the Jewish community, especially the blind, and in the early days of the State of Israel he gave generously to funds fighting the tuberculosis endemic among many groups of immigrants.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter. Another daughter died in 1993.

Leslie Levens, industrialist and property tycoon, was born on June 6, 1910. He died on February 1, 2004, aged 93.