Inspect a gadget
We’re always looking for ways to make life easier – and here are just a few of the quirky ideas inventors have come up with
THERE’S a cardboard box in the garden shed chez nous full of wires, plugs, leads and AC adapters long since parted from the PC towers, screens, keyboards and wi-fi gizmos and gadgets that lie redundant in another (larger) box in a cupboard here in the office.
I have no idea what belongs to which and probably never will again.
After the scavengers have had their pickings at our local “recycling centre”, what’s left will surely end up as landfill. Which is a pity, but that’s one of the costs of new technology… and my fixation with wanting the latest digital “toys”.
That’s how I empathise with Maurice Collins.
He told me about his severely learning-disabled daughter, Kim. “When my son, Paul, was about nine, I realised I had been spending all of my time with Kim, who by then was 12 or 13.
“I wanted to spend more time with Paul, so I asked him what he wanted to do, anything at all. He said he wanted to go bottle-digging in Victorian rubbish dumps, and that’s when I started collecting.”
Me too, except Maurice concentrated on antique curiosities and contraptions from a period when technological advancement didn’t rely on batteries or electricity.
Now, 40 years later, he has amassed a mind-boggling, museum-quality array of objects far removed from computers and smartphones and worthy of featuring in their own books and exhibitions.
Hundreds of them are catalogued in Maurice’s latest and most ambitious volume Bizarre & Outlandish Gadgets & Doohickeys, and all profits from book sales will go to charities working for children with learning-related difficulties.
Packed with more than 1,000 images, each with an amusing description, the book’s 320 pages cover objects ranging from quack devices like asthma-curing necklaces and ill-shaped nose straighteners to a car horn powered by the vehicle’s exhaust pipe.
A selection of around 150 of his most fascinating acquisitions will be on show at the Antiques for Everyone fair at the NEC, Birmingham, later this month (see panel, right).
They cover the period from the first Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 to the post-Second World War Festival of Britain in 1951, a time of rapid technological advancement when countless products, from the ingenious to the idiotic, benefited – and bamboozled – customers on both sides of the Atlantic.
My favourite? I’m embarrassed to say I remember some of them from my childhood. Who else had a “savings clock”? Given free to customers by insurance companies, the Fifties mantle clock had a coin slot in the top into which the user made his weekly payment for his life or household cover.
From time to time, a collector would call, remove the wired lead seal from the back of the clock and take the cash. Anything left over after the cost of the cover had been deducted was returned to the customer as savings.
Or the “Owzthat” cricket game I carried to school on rainy games lesson days.
I still have the little blue tin with its two hexagon-shaped steel roller dice inside. One is marked with numbers one to six, five being replaced by “Owzthat”, the other with “Bowled”, “Caught”, “Stumped”, “L.B.W.”, “No Ball”, and “Not Out”.
Or the cobalt blue glass “Fire Grenade” we picked up at a fleamarket years ago.
Maurice’s book explains: “Take aim! If a fire started you could lob this glass ball to put out the flames.
“Early examples … from 1850 onwards contained a strong solution of bicarbonate of soda, but later ones used carbon tetrachloride, which would put out a fire but was also highly poisonous.”
Apart from our own, and another in clear glass which sprang a leak at some stage and is only half full, we have seen others in situ either side of doors in stately homes, notably Erddig, near Wrexham in North Wales.