50 Great British Inventions - BBC

MICHAEL MOSLEY
A nation founded
on invention
Sir James Dyson once
told me that he believed
part of the reason the
British are so good at
inventing things is
because we are an island race. I’m not so
sure I can point to any one particular British
characteristic that has encouraged such a
great inventing tradition, but our geography
certainly has helped. It created its own
pressures, separated us intellectually as well
as physically from the rest of Europe. It made
our relatively affluent, well-educated nation
turn to science at a time when the rest of the
world did not. It gave us a head start.
The result is that we have an enormous
amount of history that we can draw on for
inspiration. We led the Industrial Revolution,
and I can look back with huge respect at all
those steps in our engineering and inventive
past that make my life today so easy.
That past — which BBC2 is celebrating this
year with a season of programmes called
Genius of Invention — can also fuel the next
generation of scientists and inventors. Our
universities are world class, with a great
history of technology behind them. We turn
out a phenomenal number of Nobel Prize
winners, and our heritage has made us a very
open place, ready to embrace talent from
around the world.
But there is a downside. Perhaps because
we are used to getting there first, we constantly
fail to commercialise British invention. Tim
Berners-Lee, the father of the worldwide web,
is rightly applauded for giving his invention to
the world — yet on another level it would have
been nice if he could have benefited from his
Have your say
which of the following
50 inventions, compiled
for RT by a group of BBC
science experts, is your
favourite? and are there
any from the randomly
displayed list that they’ve
missed out? vote now at
radiotimes.com/inventions
work in the way Google’s founders have done.
Richard Trevithick — the inventor of my choice
in this supplement (see page 7) — is a great
example of a man who doesn’t get the
recognition he deserves because he failed
to commercialise his invention.
Attitudes are changing, and I have
absolutely no doubt that our economic
future lies in tapping into British
inventiveness. Programmes such
as Dragons’ Den and figures like Steve Jobs
and James Dyson have certainly inspired
my children. They want to make things, but
they also want to sell things. They want to
be entrepreneurs.
We need invention now to help pull us out
of our current morass, and I’m very hopeful
our next generation of inventors is going
to do it. To achieve this, we must reconnect
with a culture of innovation that served these
islands so well in the past: where scientists
and inventors are appreciated, and where
people see things that inspire them and
want to make them even better.
Michael Mosley presents
a new series, The Genius
of Invention, which starts
on BBC2 next week
1 Thermos
flask
INvENTED 1892 INvENTOR
SIr JAMES dEwAr
This humble invention was the
brainchild of Sir James Dewar, an
eminent professor of chemistry at
Cambridge and leading light of the
Royal Institution. Dewar didn’t
invent it to keep tea hot on picnics,
but to help his experiments on
cooling gases, like air and oxygen,
to such low temperatures that
they would liquefy.
The flask was actually two flasks,
one inside the other, touching only
where they joined at the top, and
with a vacuum in between. Its
purpose was to keep its contents
either warmer or cooler than the
ambient temperature outside.
Sadly for Dewar he never
patented his invention. When the
German Thermos Company did,
he sued them – and lost.
2 Worldwide web
INvENTED 1989 INvENTOR TIM BErnErS-LEE
DID YOU KNOW?
Berners-lee’s
parents were
Both involved
in the
developMent
of one of the
earliest
CoMputers, the
ferranti Mark 1,
unveiled in 1951.
Not to be confused with the internet, which is a system of
linked computer networks, the worldwide web was invented
by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. It was while
working at Cern, the European particle physics lab, that he
wrote a proposal showing how “hypertext” – a way of sharing
information via links – could be married with the internet to
create a system for fellow scientists to share data.
He created the first server in late 1990 and, on 6 August,
1991, the web went live, with the first page explaining how
to search and how to set up a site. One critical innovation
was that web users could link their page to another without
the need for the other user’s approval. And Berners-Lee
gave his invention to the world for free.
3 Lawnmower
INvENTED 1827
INvENTOR EdwIn BEArd BuddIng
What could be more quintessentially British than
a perfectly mown lawn in summer? Until inventor
Edwin Beard Budding came up with the lawnmower
in 1827, this was the preserve only of the very rich,
who could afford an army of people to cut their
lawns with scythes. Budding already had a
reputation for inventiveness: he devised a repeating
pistol that predated Samuel Colt’s, a cotton carding
machine of a design that is still used today, and
the first screw-adjusted spanner.
His first mower was 19in wide, had a box that
collected the clippings as they were thrown
forward by the blades and allowed the user
to adjust the height of the cut. It was, at
first, still a fairly exclusive item: Oxford
colleges and the Royal Zoological Society
were among his first customers. But its
popularity spread as more British homes
came to have gardens. And because
it made lawns more affordable,
it gave an important boost
to sports that were
played on grass, such
as cricket, rugby
and football.
4 Float glass
InvEnTEd 1959 InvEnTOr AlAstAir Pilkington
When we think of inventions, it’s machines and gadgets that
usually come to mind. But what about all the processes needed
to create and manufacture the materials the modern world is
made of? Take glass: almost all the glass we use today is made
using the “float” process, devised by Alastair Pilkington in 1959.
Molten glass is poured from a furnace onto a shallow bath of
molten tin: the glass floats on the tin, and under its own weight
it spreads out to form a level surface. As it gradually cools on
the tin, the glass is drawn off in a continuous ribbon. This
process made it far easier and cheaper to make high-quality
glass, without the need for grinding and polishing.
2 RadioTimes 50 Great British Inventions
RadioTimes 50 Great British Inventions
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