wind-up merchant (Clock This - Trevor Baylis)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Clock This - Trevor Baylis
Date:	01/07/01 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An amusing, endearing success story.

Disadvantages: He doesn't give much away about all those women in his life!

In case the name is not familiar to you, Trevor Baylis is the bloke that invented the clockwork radio. He was vegging out in front of the goggle box in September 1991 when he saw a documentary about the spread of AIDS in Africa. Spreading vital information was proving difficult because there are large areas without an electricity supply and where batteries are horribly expensive.

The clockwork radio is such a blindingly simple idea that you have to wonder why it hadn't been thought of before. In fact, it had.
A patent search revealed that a similar idea had been logged decades earlier, but that was before the transistor had been invented, and powering a valve radio by clockwork is completely impractical. I guess that by the time the transistor was invented, clockwork had been rendered 'obsolete' by the ubiquitous battery

Trevor Baylis was born on May 13th 1937 in Hendon, an only chld to loving parents, he spent his formative years roaming wild - the way kids could do back then (especially as the adults were all preoccupied with the war.) Whereas kids today collect Pokemon, he collected shrapnel! He later swapped it all for a rabbit hutch.

One day, while helping the war effort, by salvaging old junk
and scrap metal, he came across a rusty box among a mound
of rubbish at the end of his street. It contained a Meccano set...
Barely literate, he was now on his way to becoming an inventor.

"I was the type of child my parents warned me not to play with"
he says. His mother wouldn't allow his father to tell little Trevor the formula for gunpowder, but with the help of a pal from school and a little experimentation (!!!) he managed to concoct some... Then, with the aid of a length of pipe and a ball-bearing,
they managed to successfully KO a neighbour's chimney-pot!

In the forty years between knocking off that chimney pot
and inventing the clockwork radio, he had quit
e a colourful life...

He swam for Great Britain, narrowly missing out on a place in the Melbourne Olympic team. He formed a lifelong friendship with the son of a circus performer and became a fairly good tumbler.

After a brief apprenticeship in a soil engineering firm, and a spell of National Service (jocularly described) he became a swimming pool salesman. He also combined his swimming and circus skills and performed an underwater escapology act in a Berlin circus!

He also became an underwater stunt arranger. It was he who arranged the famous demonstration of how to escape from
a submerged car on the Dave Allen show in the 60's, and also
the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore spoof of it the following week.


During a discussion on disability in 1982 he was challenged to try and invent something useful for a one-handed person in less than half-an-hour. It took him thirty-five minutes. This was the first of a clutch of gadgets for the disabled he called Orange Aids, and from then on he was inventing full-time. His experience with those Orange Aids was not good - he was taken to the cleaners by the men-in-suits. A salutory lesson, and a pitfall he is keen to help others avoid by setting up an academy of invention.

You might think that those men-in-suits would have been quick
to recognise the merits of his prototype for a clockwork radio,
but no. He couldn't get anyone to take him seriously for nearly two years. Eventually, he received enthusiastic support from
BBC World Service personnel, and this led to an appearance on Tomorrow's World where he was interviewed by Carmen Pryce. The phone started ringing, and, the rest, as they say, is history.
(Would it be a sad attempt at namedropping for me to mention that I went to school with Carmen's young brother Lance Pryce? Yes I thought so.)


Unusually for an autobiography this book is never boring.
Let's be honest m
ost biographies are stultifyingly dull - especially those of luvvies and sports personalities (and I use that word wrongly). But in this book Baylis condenses his life into succinct chapters buoyed along with jolly wit.

The only dark spot is when he tells of how, at the age of six,
he suffered repeated sexual abuse by a "clergyman" after Sunday School. Not surprisingly this soured his view of religion, and he now describes himself as a "Seventh Day Absentist".


Trevor Baylis lives in a house he built himself thirty years ago
on Eel Pie Island, Twickenham. Clock This was published in 1999 - a truly memorable year for him - he was awarded the OBE,
got ambushed outside Buckingham Palace by Michael Aspel
for This Is Your Life, and was voted Pipe Smoker of the Year.

Oh, and by the way, it's not clockwork, it's "people power"!



For more information see:

http://windupradio.com/baylis.htm

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