My father-in-law, Raymond Hardman, who has died aged 96, was a modest man from a working-class family who overcame his relative poverty to rise to academic excellence in his chosen field of electrical engineering.

Raymond was born in Oldham to Joseph Hardman, a carder in a cotton mill, and his wife, Jessie (nee Oliver), a cotton mill worker. As a result of injuries sustained during the first world war Joseph died when Raymond was only two, and he and his younger sister, Mabel, were brought up by their mother and her sister, their Auntie Bina.

His formal education at Hathershaw school ended at 14 when, to support the family, he started work in the electrical engineering firm Ferranti, in Hollinwood, putting capacitors together on a production line.

While there, Raymond developed an interest in engineering and enrolled in evening courses at Oldham Municipal Technical College. His studies were duly rewarded when he was elevated from the shop floor to work in the research and development laboratories at Ferranti. He continued his night classes and by 1939 was awarded national certificates in electrical engineering.

At the outbreak of the second world war Raymond was kept out of the army as he was deemed to be more useful working on the improvement of gun sights and the trajectory of missiles for the Royal Navy.

Raymond continued to study and gained higher national certificates in electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at Manchester Municipal College of Technology (which became Umist). In 1952 he was admitted as a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineering (later the Institution of Engineering and Technology).

Raymond’s cycling forays were famous. After work on Friday afternoons he would often cycle towards Settle, Hawes, Castleton and other parts of the Yorkshire Dales and the Peak District. In 1946 he cycled from Oldham to the Swiss Alps. Raymond also had a love of hiking, particularly in the Lake District.

In 1952 he married Peggy Kenworthy, a draughtswoman, and they settled in Garden Suburb, Oldham. Leaving Ferranti in 1954, Raymond taught at the Oldham College of Technology, becoming a senior lecturer in electronics and electrical engineering. In the 1970s he took a degree in mathematics at the Open University, graduating in 1978 with first-class honours.

Raymond was a keen amateur radio enthusiast and an avid Guardian reader. He had a daily subscription to the paper from 1952 until last year, when he developed macular degeneration and so found reading difficult, but his mind was always capable of solving tricky Sudoku problems.

Peggy died in 2010. Raymond is survived by their son, Alastair, their daughters, Judith and Gillian, and their grandchildren, Jonathan, Alex, Christopher, Isobel and Dominic.