As a child, ​​Artist and engineer Bill Martin knew he wanted to be an artist, but was encouraged to study something that would guarantee him a good living, so he studied chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology. After Pearl Harbor, Martin enlisted in the Navy where he was trained to be an electronic technician. After the war he earned a degree in industrial engineering at Ohio State University.

Bored with his first job as an engineer, he finally committed to being an artist and enrolled at the Boston Museum School. In order to support his art and his growing family, he took a job in Cambridge where he was recruited to be a member of their “Invention/Design Team” — a select group of seven creative people with diverse backgrounds. During this time he collaborated with architects and interior designers and designed and made unique fountains and lighting for churches and temples, private residences and commercial spaces.

Martin ingeniously created the lighting for five interior stairways of the new National Arts Center in Ottawa where he cleverly invented a way to attach blocks of dalle glass to lines and branches of suspended steel cable. The installation, titled Crystal DNA, includes five hanging glass and steel sculptures ranging in size from 5 feet in diameter by 25 feet long to 6 feet in diameter by 85 feet long. Collectively the five sculptures have over 6,000 hunks of glass each attached to the helical structures by hand. All this was done not only while keeping his day job as an industrial designer, but also while teaching part-time at the Boston Museum School and working as an adjunct professor at Boston.

The Ottawa commission led to many additional major sculptural installations in such public places as lobbies, performance centers, airports and schools in Dallas, Maine, Colorado and Toronto. In his final years, Martin began to write as well and had recently begun a novel based on some of his life experiences. He passed away on June 29, 2012, in Brunswick.