Weird and wonderful inventions were spawned in our county
GLOUCESTERSHIRE has spawned its fair share of inventors. Around 1900 a Cheltenham chap named Dale Marshall patented his design for a car with one, two, three, or four-wheel drive.
Nobody took any notice at the time, but astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission trundled about the Moon’s surface in a buggy based on the same idea.
Another Cheltenham inventor was Benfield Huckes.
Before the First World War he patented the Huckes’ aero engine starter, which was basically a Model T Ford modified so that a drive shaft protruded from the front.
This engaged with a plane’s propeller and fired its motor into life.
Alfred Bird, the inventor of custard powder, was born in Nympsfield near Stroud in 1811 and his son Alfred Frederick Bird came up with the recipes for blancmange and jelly.
In 1908 Edward Ripley of Charlton Kings patented an improved petrol engine, of which no more was heard.
But the vacuum cleaner, invented by Gloucester-born Hubert Cecil Booth found a home in households up and down the land.
Equally successful was Edwin Budding of Thrupp, who in 1830 invented the cylinder lawn mower, a development of cloth shears he saw in daily use at his textile mill in Stroud.
This clever engineer was also responsible for the adjustable spanner.
Isaac Pitman was a school master at
Wotton-under-edge when he published his “Stenographic sound hand” in 1837.
The book was a great success despite its unpromising title and students have been learning his system of shorthand ever since.
John Canton was a teacher too. He was born in Stroud and was responsible for the electroscope, electrometer and the world’s first successful artificial magnet.
More homely was the invention by Sir James Horlick, who was born in Ruardean in the Forest of Dean.
Many of us sip his malted milk drink in our pyjamas and dressing gowns to this day.
If you were at school in the pre-pocket calculator era, you may have used a slide rule.
This was invented by Jonathan Hulls who lived in Broad Campden, near Chipping Campden.
Robert Forester Mushet, born in Coleford in 1811, perfected the Bessemer process for making steel in the 1850s.
Some years later he invented highspeed, self-hardening steel, though due to a lack of funding, ill health and jiggery-pokery he lost his patents.
Chief engineer at the Dursley firm of Lister’s in the 1890s was Mikael Pedersen.
Cyclists have much to thank this Dane for as he invented the Dursleypedersen bike, the grand-daddy of the modern cycle.
Barnwood born Charles Wheatstone invented the electro-telegraph, electric clock, code transmitter and the Wheatstone bridge, used to measure electrical resistance to this day by physicists.
But Wheatstone’s other invention, and his lifelong passion, was the concertina.
Largely forgotten now, but a figure of great controversy in the 1920s, was Harry Grindell Matthews who was born in 1880 at Winterbourne.
In 1911 Matthews claimed to have invented a device he called the Aerophone, which allowed the pilot of a plane to talk to people on the ground.
He won the £25,000 prize offered by the British Government in 1914 to anyone who could invent a device that could be used against Zeppelins.
Matthews’ answer was a remote control system that interfered with an airship’s engine.
Although his system was demonstrated to work, it was never used.
A development of this device, however, was his dramatically named Death Ray in 1921.
This ray, he announced, could stop an engine at distance, bring down aircraft, ignite explosives and incapacitate infantry from a distance of four miles.
The War Office demanded a demonstration of the Death Ray, which it then denounced as a fraud.
Curiously though, a High Court injunction was granted forbidding Matthews from selling the rights.
The message from the War Office seemed to be: “Your Death Ray doesn’t work, but we don’t want our enemies to get their hands on it”.
Disillusioned with the way his home country had treated him, Matthews
moved first to France, then the USA.
He came up with a few more inventions.
There was a projector that cast images onto clouds, a submarine detector, a design for aerial mines and a craft called the Strato-plane that could fly in space.
In 1938 he married an American woman who was an occasional opera singer, but had amassed a fortune by marrying rich husbands of riper years who should have known better.
She didn’t profit much from Harry though. He died of a heart attack in 1941 on the brink of bankruptcy.