READY CASH: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CROWDFUNDING

Crowdfunding is a way of getting a large number of people to pay a small amount to make anything from a gadget to a film. Although the word is only 16 years old, the idea goes back over 300 years. Mozart and Alexander Pope used it to fund some of their work. Even the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal was crowdfunded by 160,000 donors.

Donors take a risk but, in the case of products rather than, say, films, if the makers are successful, backers can get things at a big discount. Online crowdfunding has had a patchy history, though in time it has become a major way to finance innovation.

One of the most successful campaigns was for Pebble, a smartwatch much like the ubiquitous Apple Watch

– but years earlier. Pebble raised millions and delivered, but went out of business shortly after the Apple Watch came out in 2015. Glowforge, a 3D laser printer, beat Pebble’s record for a single campaign, raising $28 million in a month; it also delivered.

Crowdfunding campaigns give inventors an indication of how popular their products will be. After a teenage Palmer Luckey (below) built a virtual-reality headset he named Oculus Rift, he tried to raise $250,000. He got that in hours and went on to raise $2.4 million. In 2014, he sold his fledgling company to Facebook for $2 billion.

But it’s often for near misses, flops and scams that crowdfunding hits headlines. Smartwatches as thin as paper, ‘gills’ to help humans breathe underwater… Such ideas have tried, raised

substantial sums, but not quite succeeded.

One of the most notorious, meanwhile, was a Welsh-designed drone, Zano, not unlike Vernon Kerswell’s Micro Drone 4.0. However Zano, which raised an extraordinary £2.3 million, failed an important test – it didn’t fully work.