IN pride of place above the lavatory in his home on Eel Pie Island in the
Thames, Trevor Baylis has framed a letter from a fellow engineer outlining
in detail why his idea of a clockwork radio would never work.
Baylis takes great satisfaction from having proved his correspondent
spectacularly wrong: his radios and other clockwork-powered devices have
sold in their millions and earned their inventor an OBE, a dozen honorary
doctorates, minor celebrity status and £1.5m from the sale of his company,
BayGen.
His inspiration for using clockwork to power radios was not born of the wish
to make a fortune, however, but from a desire to
help after he watched a television report in 1991 on the spread of Aids across
Africa.
“The programme said that the big problem was getting the health message
across. Broadcasts on safe sex were not reaching many areas. In remote
villages there was no electricity, and the cost of batteries and radios was
prohibitive.”
The idea for using clockwork came in a flash of inspiration, said Baylis. “I
imagined someone listening close to the horn of an old gramophone. It was so
obvious: if a clockwork gramophone could produce that sound, why not apply
the idea to a radio?” Baylis went straight to his shed-come-workshop and
began tinkering. Within three months he had proved to himself that the basic
principle was workable. But convincing others to invest time, money or even
show interest in his idea took much longer.
Large companies wrote frosty rejections, if they bothered to reply at all, and
even bodies such as the Design Council decided not to help Baylis.
By the end of 1993, Baylis was on the point of giving up and not renewing the
patents he had taken out on his design. But interest and encouragement from
staff at the BBC World Service kept Baylis going and led to an appearance on
the BBC technology television show Tomorrow’s World.
“The phones didn’t stop ringing after the show was broadcast. People were
calling to wish me luck well into the small hours. I got more encouragement
in those few hours than I got in two years from the big companies,” said
Baylis.
One caller was Christopher Staines, an accountant from BDO Stoy Hayward. He
provided many of the contacts and much of the knowledge needed to take the
product to market, and soon they found a few backers from business,
charities and government.
But once Baylis and his colleagues started developing the radio, setbacks with
the technology looked likely to doom the project. An analysis of the
prototype showed it would never produce enough volume, and things looked
bleak for Baylis and the backers who had invested large amounts of money in
the radio.
Fine-tuning the technology so that the radio would be loud enough and play for
long enough was an agonising process, said Baylis. But after a year of
tinkering and testing they cracked the problem.
In 1995, a factory in South Africa started churning out the first radios,
branded as the Freeplay. Eventually, Baylis and his team improved the
technology so that the radios could run for an hour with only 20 seconds’
winding.
Baylis, a former stuntman and underwater escapologist, has run his own
business building and maintaining swimming pools since the 1970s, but he
said he was more of an inventor than an entrepreneur.
His bruising run-ins with big business and potential backers have instilled a
natural wariness of banks and a sympathy for other inventors. Partly because
of such experiences, he recently launched Trevor Baylis Brands, and last
August raised £850,000 for the company.
Its aim is to help inventors to develop their ideas and take them to market,
while protecting them from theft of their ideas or from being exploited by
unscrupulous backers.
“I am doing this because of the crap I had to put up with when I was trying to
get help to develop the radio. People can be terribly cruel and
discouraging. There are also many charlatans out there who will tell you
your product is wonderful just to get your money.”
His desire to help inventors also comes from his bemusement at the way many of
Britain’s genius inventors ended their careers in disappointment or with
scant recognition. He has in mind the likes of John Kay, who transfromed
weaving with the invention of the flying shuttle in 1733, Isambard Kingdom
Brunel, and his own hero, Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine.
Baylis hopes to change all this. For a £100 processing fee, he and his
colleagues will advise inventors on how to develop their products, evaluate
them and take the viable ones to market, keeping a third of the profits from
the successes.
The company gets several submissions each day and so far has received 600.
Most are unviable or unprotectable, some have already been patented and a
few are crackpot ideas — perpetual-motion machines regularly crop up. But
there are also several genuinely innovative products with potential.
It is a service Baylis could have done with when taking his own products to
market. Looking back, he did not make as much money from his invention as he
could have, he said. “If I had 2p for every wind-up torch and radio sold I
would be extremely wealthy. The deal I agreed didn’t work out as I had
expected. If I could do it again I would hire some decent lawyers to start
with.”
But the other rewards — the gongs, the recognition, the honorary doctorates
and even an inventors’ slot on a breakfast TV show — have been worthwhile in
their own right, he said.
Simply creating useful products is perhaps most satisfying of all. And it’s
something we all have a capacity to do.
“Anyone can have a good idea and turn it into something that works. It’s not
magic. If you find yourself trying to solve a problem, you are halfway to
inventing something. There is an invention in all of us.”
