Why did this brilliant wind-up merchant die in penury?
Stuntman. Magician. And, most famously, inventor of the clockwork radio. But, as Trevor Baylis dies aged 80 ...
TAKING pride of place above his lavatory, next to the CBE he was handed by the Queen, Trevor Baylis kept one of his most treasured possessions: a typed letter from a supposedly learned scientist explaining in great detail why Baylis’s idea of a clockwork radio would never — could never — work.
Visitors to the great inventor’s home, on an island in the Thames at Twickenham, would be plied with endless cups of tea as they toured the ramshackle property, which boasted a 16ft ‘swimming pool’ in its entrance hall, an outdoor hot-tub overlooking the river, and tables crammed with nuts, bolts, fuses, and circuit boards in various states of a disarray.
Eventually, after a trip to the chaotic garden shed where he’d created and refined no fewer than 250 consumer products, some of which changed the world, they would find themselves needing to visit Baylis’s smallest room.
And there, alongside some of his 21 honorary degree certificates, they would of course find the framed letter about that clockwork radio.
It was — as many interviewers (including this writer) would conclude — proof not only of this free-thinking eccentric’s genius, but also the cheeky sense of humour that was among his most endearing character traits.
It also helped sum up the contrarian streak that, in the cut-throat world of commerce, turned out to be perhaps his greatest flaw.
Baylis, who died yesterday aged 80 after a long illness, will be remembered by TV viewers as a pipe- smoking and quintessentially British boffin, with a shock of white hair and habit of shambling around in tatty cardigans, whose most famous invention, the Baygen Clockwork Radio, knocked up in his famous shed, sold by the million and helped save countless lives in SubSaharan Africa by making possible health education broadcasts.
He was also a former champion swimmer, stuntman, magician, swimming pool salesman, and Army PE instructor, who shot to fame as a guest on Tomorrow’s World and spent much of the Nineties championing fellow inventors on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast.
YEThis failure to translate either his creative talent, or his celebrity appeal, to the world of business, where his domineering nature meant that he all-too- often seemed to fall out with collaborators, left him unable to fully realise the commercial fruits of that genius.
Unable, it seems, to ever properly protect his intellectual property, he died in comparative poverty, spending his final decade bitterly railing against the ‘vulture capitalists’, lawyers, and ‘CON-sultants’ (‘they con you, insult you, and charge you a lot of money’) who he accused of depriving him of his rightful fortune.
He never married, choosing instead to fall in and out of love with a revolving cast of girlfriends — their pictures displayed around his home — well into his 70s, and he has no surviving relatives. But that isn’t to say that his wasn’t a life well lived.
Raised in Southall, West London, the son of a middle-class engineer who worked for the Britannia Rubber Company, Trevor Baylis caught the inventing bug early, thanks to his childhood Meccano set.
‘It was fantastic because I learned how to use nuts, bolts, screws, washers, chains, gears and it stayed with me all my life,’ he once recalled. ‘I was a mechanical engineer by the time I was five or six.’
As a teenager, he swam for Great Britain, narrowly failing to make it to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics after leaving school (‘I missed qualifying by a 1/10th of a second, but I try not to dwell’) before deciding, having completed National Service, to become a salesman for a company that sold free-standing swimming pools.
To demonstrate the durability of the products, Baylis, a gifted showman, began inviting potential customers to demonstrations where he’d perform comedy diving routines, including one that involved plunging into the water in a woman’s dress — while on fire.
The pools sold like hot cakes, and Baylis was soon being offered jobs as a stuntman.
During the Sixties he worked alongside Peter Cook and Dudley Moore — before enjoying a stint as a circus performer in Berlin, where he would be tied up, blindfolded, and submerged 10ft underwater, while dressed as an Egyptian pharaoh.
It was dangerous work (he had just four minutes to escape before the air ran out, and nearly died during his first performance) but also very lucrative.
After completing 32 escapes in 18 days at a show in 1970, for a then enormous salary of £350 per show, he was able to buy a plot of land on Eel Pie Island in the Thames, and build the house where he lived out his life.
Working in Berlin had a second important legacy. ‘When I was in the circus I had a very passionate affair with an aerial ballet star, a lovely girl from Vienna,’ Baylis recalled.
‘One night, she bounced off the net and hit the side and died halfway through the show and it broke my heart.’
Realising that, as he put it, ‘disability is only a banana skin away’, he decided to develop a range of products to help disabled people go about their daily lives.
Called Orange Aids, his range of 200 devices, brought to market over the ensuing two decades, included scissors you could operate with your feet, and a tin opener that worked one-handed.
Though initially a great success, the venture eventually failed because rival companies would redesign his products, then apply for their own patent. Lacking the resources to sue, Baylis was driven out of business. A broadly similar fate befell the famous clockwork radio, which Baylis dreamed up in 1991 while watching a documentary about Aids in Africa.
The TV show proposed using educational radio programmes to tackle the spread of HIV, but berated the fact that in remote communities, where mains electricity was non-existent and batteries exorbitant, working radios were few and far between.
Baylis promptly had what he called ‘ a light- bulb moment’, deciding that people could ‘harness their own hand power to push a spring to drive a dynamo, which would in turn run a radio’.
By April 1994, he had a working prototype. Then he pulled strings to have it featured on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World. Sure enough, the charismatic Baylis and his radio seized the public imagination. ‘The phone never stopped ringing,’ he recalled.
Soon a team of foreign investors were on board, and by 1996 his Freeplay radio was being sold across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The original had a clockwork mechanism with an ingenious double-spiral spring. It wound off one pulley onto another and would run for relatively short periods of time — about 15 minutes. Later versions lasted longer.
That year, Baylis was awarded the BBC Design Award for Best Product and Best Design, met the Queen and Nelson Mandela at a state banquet and travelled to Africa for a programme documenting his life.
Shortly afterwards, he got The Big Breakfast slot demonstrating new inventions.
By 2000, several million of the clockwork radios had been sold, and he was living accordingly, employing several domestic staff and telling one interviewer that he owned a huge amount of shares in the company that made it.
‘It could be 1.6million or 1.7million shares and the last time I asked them they said they were worth about $3.50 a share so, well, I suppose that’s about $6 million,’ he said.
BUTthen the commercial venture fell apart. According to what Baylis described as a quirk in patent law ( and his partners said was a more involved ‘falling out’), the business which manufactured his devices decided to make minor changes to its design — for example altering it so that the wind- up mechanism powered a battery rather than the radio itself.
That allowed them to get a new patent, and therefore take control of the product. Baylis was forced out, and ended up selling his shares at a fraction of what he’d once thought they were worth.
He went on to invent several follow-up devices employing similar technology including a torch, a mobile phone charger and an MP3 player, but none of them generated a significant financial reward.
He was forced to turn to the after- dinner speaking circuit, where he was able to command fees of up to £10,000 a night initially, albeit on an irregular basis.
In 2013 he announced that he was nearly broke and might have to sell his home, thanks to what he saw as the failure of British law to protect inventors (‘crazy when you think that the Empire was built on great inventions’).
He spent his final years in semiretirement, walking his Japanese mountain dog Blondie, drinking whisky at the Richmond Yacht Club, and campaigning for reforms to patent law.
In 2015, he was awarded the CBE for his efforts to make intellectual property theft a white-collar crime. Chatting with the Queen at the ceremony was, he said, ‘like catching up with an old mate’.
Like so much of his extraordinary life, he treated the experience as one big wind-up.