Inventor who was on a roll
QUESTION Who invented roller skates?
JOHN JOSEPH MERLIN was born on September 17, 1735, in huys, Belgium. he studied at the Academie des Sciences in Paris and went on to make clocks, watches, musical instruments and other delicate mathematical instruments.
he was brought to England by the Spanish ambassador in May 1760 and became head mechanic at Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens, London.
he achieved fame for contriving a string of gadgets, including a manoeuvrable sedan-type wheelchair for people with gout, a perpetual motion machine that ran on atmospheric pressure changes, a harpsichord with pianoforte action and mechanical mobiles and musical boxes.
he also created the very first set of roller skates, inline skates with metal wheels running along the centre of the boot.
Merlin was regarded as somewhat eccentric, and his roller skates were involved in a memorable stunt. In about 1771, Mrs Teresa Cornelys, an opera singer and impresario who hosted fashionable gatherings at Carlisle house in Soho Square, asked him to assist at a masquerade.
he put on his skates and began skating while playing his violin. Unfortunately, he ‘had the misfortune to skate so violently against a large looking-glass … as to break it to pieces’.
Merlin eventually opened his own museum, Merlin’s Mechanical Museum in hanover Square, London, in 1783. he died on May 4, 1803.
It was another 60 years before quad-style roller skates were invented and skating became popular. Their inventor was James Leonard Plimpton (1828-1911) of New York City. In January 1863, he also patented a four-wheeled roller skate capable of turning. The mechanism had a pivoting action dampened by a rubber cushion.
he built a roller skating floor in the office of his New York City furniture business and leased out his skates. he founded the New York Roller Skating Association (NYRSA) to promote the sport.
James Squires, Nottingham.
QUESTION Apart from making individuals rich, do hedge funds perform any useful function in the economy of a country?
THE expression hedge fund is derived from the gambling practice of ‘hedging one’s bets’ by which gamblers protect themselves against large losses by placing bets which are guaranteed to pay out if the primary bet is a losing one.
For example, if a gambler places a £1 bet that a particular horse will win a race, at odds of 10/1, he may also place a £9 bet that the same horse won’t win.
Because this is more likely (under most circumstances) the gambler might get odds of only 1/10 on that bet. If the horse wins, he collects £10, plus the return of his stake, leaving him £1 in profit.
But if the horse loses, he wins 90p, plus the return of his £9 stake, leaving him with a loss of only 10p, rather than the £1 loss he would have incurred he had only placed a losing bet on the horse to win.
over the long term, the gambler is sure to break even, providing he places one winning bet for every ten losing ones. This wouldn’t be the case if he only bet on each horse to win. In practice, an experienced gambler is more likely to win four or five times in ten and generally make a handsome profit.
hedge fund managers place their ‘bets’ on the financial markets based on considerable research and knowledge of companies and financial markets, so the likelihood of a bet not being a winning one is already reduced.
But because they hedge their bets, they never lose in the long term. The only issue is how much the fund makes.
The most successful hedge fund managers are able to charge the highest fees, so funds limit themselves to the most lucrative clients — those who can afford to pay the fees even if a bet loses.
The profits of hedge funds are taxable so, providing no aggressive tax avoidance is involved, the most direct benefit to the economy is through taxation, both of the fund manager’s income and the investors’ profits.
hedge funds generally make only shortterm bets, so there’s usually no benefit to any company in which an ‘investment’ is made. Conversely, if a successful hedge fund manager is known to have placed certain bets it can actually influence the markets.
If, for example, a hedge fund manager is known to have placed heavy bets on the value of the pound falling, it might influence the foreign exchange markets in the belief the hedge fund manager knows something that the foreign exchange dealers don’t, thereby causing the value of the pound to fall for no reason, or to fall further than it would under normal circumstances.
In principle, investing in hedge funds is morally no different from gambling or any other form of investment. Where the real question of morality comes in is the fact that it makes already rich people even richer, while poor people are effectively excluded from participation.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Was the nose art on some World War II planes commissioned from well-known artists or did the aircrew paint it?
FURTHER to earlier answers, on March 30, 1944, I was a member of a Pathfinder Lancaster crew of 156 Squadron preparing to take off on what was our second trip from Upwood and our 13th operation, heading for Nuremburg. The code letter on the aircraft was GT M (the 13th letter of the alphabet).
The nose art showed the Devil holding seven airmen as puppets and the caption underneath read The Devil’s Disciples. he looked after his own that night as the losses were 96 aircraft, but we had no trouble. Sadly, the aircraft was lost a few nights later on a raid to Nantes. With most of the same crew, we went on to complete 77 operations. J. R. Watson, DFM, ex-Flight Engineer 12 &
156 Pathfinder Squadron, London.
NOSE art was also common in the Luftwaffe. The greatest fighter pilot of all time, Erich hartman, with more than 350 victories to his credit, had a black tulip painted on the nose of his aircraft. he was named, by the Russians, ‘The Black Devil’.
It is said that the Russians would avoid combat with him to such an extent that new pilots to the squadron were given his aircraft to use in order gradually to introduce them to combat. John Cantrell, Middlesbrough, Cleveland.