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Why I invented the wind up radio_ Trevor Baylis OBE (1)
Key Stage 4
Year 10
Design and technology
I'm great, your Honour, to participate in this what 21st Century Challenge. My name's Trevor Baylis, and perhaps you may not know, but I invented the windup radio. People often ask me, how did it all come about? It was pure chance. I happened to be sitting here, where I am now in fact, looking at my television and I could have been watching "Come Dancing" or "The Golden Shot", But in fact, I was watching a programme about the spread of HIV, AIDS in Africa, and this was really, really dramatic and I almost turned it over to another programme. But I listened long enough because they said the only way they could stop this dreadful disease cutting its way through all these people, was with the power of information and education. But there was a problem. The most effective way to get information to people was through radio, but less and less, because most of Africa doesn't have electricity, the only other form of electricity was in the form of batteries, which were horrendously expensive. People were bartering their maize and their rice in order to obtain batteries. And where do you get batteries? So I'm just sitting here thinking about this and then I can, well, very instantly, I can imagine myself in the old days when we used to have a wind up gramophone with a big horn on the top and I thought, look, hang on, hang on. If you can get all that noise by dragging a rusty nail around a piece of old Bakelite using a spring, surely is enough power in that spring to drive a small dynamo, which in turn would drive a radio. And then because my workshop out here, my studio, as I call it, is the graveyard of a thousand domestic appliances, I was able to find a cheap transistor radio and a small DC motor, which I realised when running reverse becomes a dynamo and I put that into the truck of a hand brace, I turned the handle having joined the two wires to the back of the cheap transistor radio, and I in fact generated the first bark of sound. And that was within top half an hour of watching that amazing programme on television. And that really is how the windup radio got started.
Why I invented the wind up radio_ Trevor Baylis OBE (1)
Key Stage 4
Year 10
Design and technology
I'm great, your Honour, to participate in this what 21st Century Challenge. My name's Trevor Baylis, and perhaps you may not know, but I invented the windup radio. People often ask me, how did it all come about? It was pure chance. I happened to be sitting here, where I am now in fact, looking at my television and I could have been watching "Come Dancing" or "The Golden Shot", But in fact, I was watching a programme about the spread of HIV, AIDS in Africa, and this was really, really dramatic and I almost turned it over to another programme. But I listened long enough because they said the only way they could stop this dreadful disease cutting its way through all these people, was with the power of information and education. But there was a problem. The most effective way to get information to people was through radio, but less and less, because most of Africa doesn't have electricity, the only other form of electricity was in the form of batteries, which were horrendously expensive. People were bartering their maize and their rice in order to obtain batteries. And where do you get batteries? So I'm just sitting here thinking about this and then I can, well, very instantly, I can imagine myself in the old days when we used to have a wind up gramophone with a big horn on the top and I thought, look, hang on, hang on. If you can get all that noise by dragging a rusty nail around a piece of old Bakelite using a spring, surely is enough power in that spring to drive a small dynamo, which in turn would drive a radio. And then because my workshop out here, my studio, as I call it, is the graveyard of a thousand domestic appliances, I was able to find a cheap transistor radio and a small DC motor, which I realised when running reverse becomes a dynamo and I put that into the truck of a hand brace, I turned the handle having joined the two wires to the back of the cheap transistor radio, and I in fact generated the first bark of sound. And that was within top half an hour of watching that amazing programme on television. And that really is how the windup radio got started.