Prolific inventor illustrious for his wind-up radioTrevor Baylis,who has died aged 80, is best known for being the inventor of the wind-up radio, or but he also created hundreds of other devices,including many to relieve people with disabilities. He liked to proclaim: “I don’t achieve things because I want to achieve good; I achieve things because I like to show off.” Nevertheless he did a great deal of good with the wind-up radio, which he conceived in 1991 and first produced in 1994. He held in contempt what he called “spivs, and crooks and vulture capitalists” and suggested there should be a royal academy of invention that would relieve neglected inventors gather their ideas off the ground without being ripped off.
His dislike of exploiters came from experience. A few years before his wind-up radios began to sell at the rate of 120000 a month,many of them bound for Africa, he had conceived more than 200 devices to relieve people with disabilities. He did most of this in less than three months of creative effort in which food and sleep played inconspicuous roles. The inventions included one-handed bottle and can openers, and whisks,graters, sieves, or sketching easels,embroidery frames and binoculars, as well as smoking aids for those who had difficulty in co-ordinating their limbs (he was an unreconstructed heavy pipe smoker).
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Source: guardian.co.uk