David Jones
Chemist and columnist known as ‘Daedalus’ who delighted readers with scientific jokes and spoofs
DAVID JONES, who has died aged 79, was better known by his pen-name Daedalus, the court jester in the palace of science.
Jones was an organic chemist by training and his alter ego, the fictional inventor for DREADCO (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corp), specialised in stretching the limits of science. The “Daedalus” column began in New Scientist in 1964 and transferred to Nature in the 1980s, and also the Guardian, and Jones produced almost 1,900 columns before Daedalus retired in 2002.
A typical piece would start with something everybody knew, and finish with something nobody could believe. Big cities, Daedalus would observe, are full of litter and graffiti; meanwhile scientists have developed catalytic surfaces that make oven walls self-cleaning.
Researchers at DREADCO, he would continue, are hard at work developing an oxidation catalyser that will work at room temperature on city streets: “We have already given this new material the brand name of Catwalk, and if the research goes as we hope it will, torn newspapers, discarded fast-food wrappers, cigarette butts, painted slogans or offensive stickers will slowly burn to ash, or partially oxidise to some rain-soluble mixture.”
Once perfected, the chemistry would be applied to walls – “brand name Catawall” – to gobble up graffiti. Of course there might be a few problems – tyres and shoe soles would disintegrate and dogs would have to wear protective boots – but “the universal, dusty detritus of life … will simply oxidise and disappear.”
Other ideas included health foods loaded with genes producing cannabinol (the active ingredient in marijuana) so that no matter how disgusting they taste, consumers would come back for more; a lowpressure pub for enhanced drunkenness; a late-activated testicle to counter the mid-life crisis, and nappies made of living sphagnum moss that would be self-cleaning and reusable. (After use they would regrow, using their built-in supply of fertiliser).
Possibly with half an eye on the Templeton Prize (“for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”) Daedalus proposed experiments exploring the molecular basis of religious experience. This involved carrying out brain scans on monks and nuns at prayer, identifying the brain regions associated with a sense of contact with God, then synthesising the relevant molecules into “Theological Prozac” which would bestow spiritual comfort on users, “unaccompanied by the stern orthodox convictions attached to it by the more doctrinal aspects of religion”.
“Daedalus never flagrantly posits impossibilities,” Jones explained. “Ideally his fancies are ingenious, novel and even crazy, but they mustn’t break natural laws. On the other hand somewhere along the line, they do run off the rails.”
Yet some readers took Daedalus seriously and tried to join DREADCO; the corporation was once hit with a lawyer’s letter alleging patent infringement, and more than once it was invited to send a representative to a scientific conference. And for all his efforts to be outrageous, Daedalus could be remarkably prescient.
In the 1960s he envisaged a chemically powered laser, suggesting that it could be used to shoot down ballistic missiles. The chemical laser formed the crux of the strategic defence initiative that President Reagan proposed in the 1980s.
His most dramatic prediction came in 1966 when he noted that the lattices of carbon atoms in graphite might be induced to form hollow balls if certain defects were introduced into the lattice. The molecules, now known as buck minster fullerenes, were synthesised in the late 1980s by scientists who won a Nobel Prize for their work but were apparently unaware of Daedalus’s musings many years before. “Whenever something ‘new’ hits the headlines in the scientific world,” wrote a friend, “I often go back through the Daedalus files to see if David got there first”.
“It always puzzles me,” Jones confessed. “I try to do the calculations and reason through why the argument goes off the rails, and still 20 per cent of them turn out to be true one way or the other.”
Yet Jones was also a serious published research scientist, best known for his attempts, which he recounted in Physics Today in 1970, to construct an unrideable bicycle in order to pinpoint the essential stabilising features of the normal machine. He discovered the importance of placing the steer axis so that it points ahead of where the front wheel touches the ground, and built a bicycle to demonstrate his finding. The bicycle “crashed gratifyingly to the ground when released at speed,” Jones reported.
When the article appeared he was working as a spectroscopist for ICI, but left when the company refused to apply for a patent for his bicycle on the grounds that it was unusable.
In 1982 he co-wrote a paper in Nature in which, following speculation that Napoleon’s illness and death on St Helena might have been caused by ingesting arsenic from his wallpaper, he carried out X-ray fluorescence measurements on an original sample of wallpaper from Napoleon’s residence and concluded that the paper contained enough arsenic to be capable of causing illness but probably not death. In another experiment he had a chemical garden sent into space to see how it would react in zero gravity.
In the early 1980s Jones began exhibiting a series of ingenious “perpetual motion” machines at museums and trade shows. Beautifully made out of bicycle wheels, sewing machine parts, plumbing hardware and other bits and pieces, and housed in glass cases with no obvious means for energy input, the wheels would slowly turn over periods of a year or more, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics.
In fact the Daedalus machines had a concealed driving mechanism. But their main feature was what Jones called “cunning distractions, each designed to lead the scientific mind along one or other of several false trails’’. To his amusement many fell for it. Engineers thought that he really had discovered the secret of perpetual motion, while physicists proposed methods of deception that could not possibly work. One is still going.
David Edward Hugh Jones was born on April 20 1938 in Southwark. His father, Philip, was a copywriter. He was brought up in Petts Wood, Kent and, after education at Eltham College, took a degree and a doctorate in Chemistry at Imperial College, London.
From 1974 to 1976 he was the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and he remained a guest member of the chemistry department there. He also became an independent science consultant to industry and extended his Daedalus column into television appearances and scientific demonstrations.
In the 1970s he did work for Magnus Pyke’s television science show Don’t Ask Me, and in the 1980s was a regular guest on the German science quiz show Kopf um Kopf. In 1987 he was the subject of a BBC QED documentary.
Jones published several books. The Inventions of Daedalus (1982) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999) capitalised on his column. A third book, The Aha! Moment (2012), explored creativity. Days before his death he received the first copies of his final work, Why Are We Conscious ? (2017).
Jones’s home in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond was stuffed to the rafters with scientific gadgets and his kitchen was used for experiments as often as it was for preparing food. He exploded lemonade bottles in his back yard, establishing that they would burst at 11 atmospheres, and ran over tubes of toothpaste in his car to see whether the stripes vanished as turbulent flow overcame laminar flow (they do not). Strangely, however, he saw no reason to change his aged Elonex computer, and although it finally gave out on him, a friend managed to save his Daedalus columns, and much more besides, for posterity.
In 2000 Jones suffered a stroke and although he took some time to return to work, his ingenuity and curiosity remained undiminished.
Jones was unmarried.
David Jones, born April 20 1938, died July 20 2017