SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
Mcinnes
ICE skating fan Chester Greenwood was 15 years old when he came up with an ingenious way to stop his ears turning beetroot purple and catching frostbite.
He got his gran to sew little flannel pads. Pretty soon, the ear muffs were all the rage.
Then there was a canny 16-year-old, George Nissen, whose trip to a travelling circus inspired him to create the bouncing rig that he would later trademark as a trampoline.
He toiled away in his parents’ garage, using a strip of canvas and a steel frame.
But the most famous young inventor was Louis Braille, who at the age of 15 devised the system still used today to help blind people read text.
Now we can add two new names to the list of bright young sparks – Isaac Pickering and Lili Moores, inset , who have won a national prize for their engineering brainwave.
The 11-year-olds were in Year 6 at Rode Heath Primary School when they entered the ‘Great Exhibition at Home’ competition.
Over seven weeks during lockdown, they dreamt up a series of inventive ideas.
It included sketching out designs for an electricpowered plane, which had wind turbines on the edge of its wings, and a house that could be elevated off the ground during floods.
They also created a product called ‘plarn’ – strips of plastic bags turned into balls of plastic wool.
But the one that earned them a top trophy was a contraption for sucking up plastic waste from the sea, which used the principles of centrifugal force.
The duo, who have since moved on to Alsager School, are both fascinated by solving problems using practical solutions.
Isaac is already weighing up a move into either aquanautical or aeronautical engineering when he is older. “Submarines or planes,” he told me.
So what is it about young people and ingenuity? Maybe it’s their boundless enthusiasm, untainted by the knocks of adult life.
Or maybe it’s just they get things in a way that older people don’t. It’s almost like those decibels that are only audible to the younger generation.
In Lili and Isaac’s case, they also had a lot of encouragement at school.
For the last four years, Rode Heath Primary has run a project called ‘think like an engineer’. Children have thrown themselves into engineering-based challenges and have worked with university academics.
Now that investment in STEM is paying off.
It was teacher Julie Wiskow’s suggestion to enter Isaac and Lili into the Great Exhibition at Home competition, organised by the Royal Academy of Engineering. What’s fascinating about the initiative isn’t just that it got pupils to come up with their own little feats of engineering. The competition also drew inspiration from the famous world fair of 1851, which was the biggest ever celebration of industry and innovation. The Great Exhibition was the idea of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert. It was housed in the Crystal Palace – a breath-taking building designed by Joseph Paxton – and featured 100,000 objects from 48 countries.there were steam locomotives, early versions of bicycles known as velocipedes, and adding machines.
The best of British manufacturing was represented by everything from Axminster carpets to Stoke-on-trent’s very own Milton Majolica ware.
When Isaac started researching the Great Exhibition, he was amazed to discover some of the inventions. His favourite was a folding piano that could fit on a yacht. During its run, the 1851 show attracted six million visitors. And it was revolutionary in appealing to all social classes.
Rubbing shoulders with the wealthy elite were factory workers and country folk.
Schoolchildren on their first trip to London also marvelled at the exhibition.
I wonder how many of those pupils went on to become aspiring inventors.