The marine engineer, was born in Edinburgh and rose to be a director of the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company. He was responsible for the engining of a number of Cunard liners, as well as warships, Castle liners, and Norddeutscher Lloyd vessels. Under him the engine and boiler works were redeveloped, and the company he served remained at the forefront of technical innovation.

It was therefore something of a surprise when Laing moved to Tyneside as the manager of the engine works of the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company in 1896. The move was apparently prompted by a dispute with his fellow directors over remuneration. Laing’s first important design at Wallsend was the machinery for the Russian icebreaker Ermak, and in 1900 the company secured its first Admiralty contract. As the company history puts it:

Andrew Laing was a man of outstanding energy and imagination, and his talents were exactly what the company needed at this period of rich possibilities in ship-propulsion technology. To his already considerable reputation, he was soon to add the title of the man who ‘sold’ the turbine engine to the sponsors of the Mauretania. (Launching Ways, 34)

The contract for the Mauretania was of such a scale that it precipitated a reorganization of the industry on Tyneside. The merged company of Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson Ltd took a controlling interest in the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company, who built the quadruple-screw turbine propelling machinery for the giant liner. During the First World War the company engined sixty-eight vessels of all types, including the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Malaya. The need to improve engine performance led Laing to develop the Wallsend-Howden system of oil firing, which began manufacture in 1909.

Laing eventually became a director of Swan, Hunter as well as of the Newcastle and Gateshead Gas Company. He was appointed CBE in 1917 for his war work, and in 1930 the North-East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders bestowed its highest distinction on him, an honorary fellowship. Although he was deeply interested in research, Laing's only publication was ‘Fifty years of steamship machinery installations’, which appeared in the Marine Engineer in June 1929.

At his death Laing and his close contemporary Sir Charles Parsons (q.v.) were considered to be on a par, ‘as being the two greatest marine engineers in the world’ (Transactions of the North-East Coast Institution, 432), since when he has been comparatively overlooked. He died at his home, 15 Osborne Road, Newcastle upon Tyne.