Great North inventor
YOU can’t have missed it, pets – the Great Exhibition of the North has started. (Givowwer man – they’ve even let us take Stephenson’s Rocket back for a bit!)
According to the hype, it’s the biggest such event in England this year, and has brought much outside focus to Newcastle and Gateshead.
While their concept of what is “northern” seems as elastic as the origins of some of the cast of TV series such as Vera or Game of Thrones, the sentiment behind it is nevertheless welcome.
Similarly, the fact it’s seemingly organised by well-spoken and wellmeaning southerners who look like they’ve never set foot outside Islington before now (judging by the ones I’ve met personally or seen on telly) doesn’t detract from the sense of excitement a lot of folk are feeling.
It aims to celebrate the great innovators and inventors of the North (from Lancashire upwards) but, with me being a Gateshead lad, however much I might want to, I can’t really include John Lennon’s piano or Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank as examples of locals made good. Yet, when you look into it, the North East has really been at the forefront of inventing some pretty world-changing gizmos.
My favourite from among this fine bunch include the grandly named Gladstone Adams, who first invented an everyday item we all take for granted on our travels.
He was a successful professional photographer based in Whitley Bay and was also the official photographer for Newcastle United.
In April 1908, he had been on duty for the Toon’s FA Cup Final but, after seeing them lose 3-1 to Wolves, he began the long drive north, presumably feeling many of the frustrations familiar to many black and whites over the ensuing century and a bit.
To make matters worse, it began to snow heavily and our poor Gladstone’s windscreen began to fill up with white powder faster than Al Pacino in the the final scenes of Scarface. It was at this time Gladstone had his eureka moment and the history of motoring would never be the same.
So what did this uber-Geordie invent ?
Emerging from his despair, maybe he could have conceptualised the first motorway services decades before the first motorway: a place where he could pull in out of the blizzard, pop to a nettie with no paper, get grief off a charabanc full of Wolves fans (I imagine them as a more Barry off Auf Wiedersehen, Pet than Peaky Blinders) and blow a month’s wages on reheated sausage and chips.
Alternatively, he might have innovated the world’s earliest automobile induced sickie “implore you see reason good sir, a dilatory arrival is unavoidable as my automobile simply can’t facilitate adequate traction due to the inclement precipitation.”!
In fact, our northern genius was inspired to invent the windscreen wiper and, although he patented it, the idea was always credited to an American who merely improved on his original idea.
So every time you clear dead flies or horizontal sleet off your screen, say “thanks, Geordie Gladstone”.
Unbelievably, our main man wasn’t content to leave it at that as far as adventures went. In WW1, he became a photographic officer in the Royal Flying Corps and was the gadgie who discovered the shotdown Red Baron’s body and subsequently arranged his funeral (some cans of Federation Ex, tuna stotties and a wake at local CIU cluurb?).
One wonders what would have happened if he’d had such an original idea while working under the current St James’ Park regime – immediately airbrushed from history and a mysterious stadium name change to “Wipers Direct”?
Mike is performing at the Graham Wylie Charity Dinner at Close House on July 21.