Professor Heinz Wolff
Host of The Great Egg Race whose ‘nutty professor’ image belied a serious and respected scientist
PROFESSOR HEINZ WOLFF, the former Professor of Bioengineering at Brunel University, who has died aged 89, was a champion of the cause of science and was familiar to television viewers as the engagingly eccentric celebrity boffin on The Great Egg Race, an absurd but gripping technological game show that enjoyed popular success in the early 1980s.
Wolff, who had arrived in England in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, fitted the popular caricature of the nutty science professor to his fingertips. Bow-tied and balding, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose, his trousers high off his shoes, and his shiny pate framed by whippy tufts of hair, Wolff spoke with a strong mittel-european accent and conveyed an almost manic enthusiasm for gadgets of all sorts.
The Great Egg Race, (or “Ze Grrreat Ek Race”, as Wolff would have it), which ran from 1979 to 1986 on BBC Two, was an engineering competition in which three colour-coded cardiganwearing teams representing organisations like Wipac, ICI or Pilkington Glass, were challenged by Wolff to use their ingenuity to “zolfe a fiendish engineering proplem” and provided with a variety of absurdly inadequate equipment (generally including clothes pegs, bicycle pumps and hot water bottles) with which to do so.
In the first series, the task was to construct a means to race an egg over a certain distance without breaking in a vehicle powered by a rubber band. Over the years the egg racing was dropped (as was Wolff ’s co-presenter Lesley Judd); later shows devised other tests such as the creation of a hovercraft from an old Flymo lawnmower, a bicycle which would ride on water, a device to play the piano, an automatic pancake maker and the taking of photographs of an oil rig using a kite.
Apart from the pleasure to be gained from watching the contestants mess things up and make complete fools of themselves, the programme owed its success to Wolff ’s infectious enthusiasm, endearing sense of humour and distinctive Germanic enunciation: “Ze blue team haf one quite rrrigid member using ze keyhole as a bearing,” he announced alarmingly at a tense point during one programme.
Each competition was marked by him and a suitably boffinish-looking guest judge using a ludicrously back-of-the-envelope marking scheme in which points were awarded for “entertainment value” as well as for technical accomplishment.
If the more purist of Wolff ’s colleagues disapproved of the way in which he helped to sustain the Professor Brainstawm image of scientists in the public mind, they admired his dedication to demystifying science and his success in encouraging young people to consider it as a career. Moreover, in spite of his penchant for Heath Robinson gadgetry, Wolff was a serious and respected scientist in his own right.
Heinz Siegfried Wolff was born in Berlin on April 29 1928, the son of non-observant liberal Jewish parents. After his family emigrated from Germany in September 1939, he attended the City of Oxford School, then worked for four years at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford and at the Pneumoconiosis Research Unit near Cardiff, where he was concerned with the design of medical and environmental measuring equipment, before going up to University College, London, to read Physiology and Physics.
After taking a First in 1954, he was employed as a researcher in the Division of Human Physiology at the National Institute for Medical Research, where he specialised in the development of instrumentation suitable for fieldwork. In 1962 he founded and became director of the Biomedical Engineering Division of the institute.
In 1971 he founded a division of Bioengineering at the new Clinical Research Centre at Harrow, which was concerned with applications of technology to medical care, and with technology transfer to industry. In 1983 he founded the Brunel Institute for Bioengineering at Brunel University, Uxbridge, in Middlesex. Under his leadership, the institute became financially self-supporting and won contracts for work in space research, medical instrumentation and technology for the improvement of the quality of life for older people.
Wolff, who listed his recreations as “lecturing to children, dignified practical joking”, was a key proponent of the theory that science should be fun and believed wholeheartedly in the importance of communicating enthusiasm for science and engineering to the young: “If I had to dress up as a clown to teach children science, I would,” he liked to proclaim.
He made his television debut on Panorama when he persuaded Richard Dimbleby to swallow a “radio pill”, then activated the microscopic transmitter by jabbing Dimbleby repeatedly in the stomach. Later he became a contributor to the BBC’S Young Scientist of the Year competition, in which schools competed against each other to see which came up with the best invention or scientific discovery. In 1985-86 he presented the BBC Two series Great Experiments.
Although The Great Egg Race was taken off the air in the mid-1980s, Wolff continued to run Great Egg Race competitions for businesses, schools and universities. He went on numerous lecture tours and was an ubiquitous member of judging panels for popular science competitions.
During the 1980s, Wolff held several honorary appointments with the European Space Agency and from 1982 to 1991 was chairman of the ESA’S Micro-gravity Advisory Committee, responsible for making policy for scientific research in the low gravity environment present on orbiting spacecraft.
He also served as science director of the Anglo-soviet Juno project, the first ever commercially-funded space mission, but resigned in 1991 when the sponsors, the Moscow Narodny Bank, closed the door to British participation.
Wolff never entirely shrugged off the Heath Robinson tag. In 2000 he led a team of scientists working on a new “Millennium House” that would speak to its occupants in their own voices and spread the smell of coffee, toast and sizzling bacon to get them out of bed in the morning. The house, developed using a £1·2 million Government grant, was reportedly being tested as a possible alternative to sheltered housing for elderly people: “It will say things such as ‘I wonder if it is not time to get out of bed?’ or ‘Have I taken my medicine yet?’ in their own voices to remind them of what they have to do,” Wolff explained.
Last year Wolff and his Brunel colleague, Gabriella Spinelli, launched “Give and Take Care”, a £1 million government-funded programme which encourages volunteers to support an elderly person in their community so as to receive the same later in life.
For his services in improving the quality of life for elderly and disabled people, Wolff received the Harding Award in 1989, awarded alternately by Action Research and RADAR. In 1992 he won the Edinburgh Medal, awarded in recognition of an outstanding contribution by a scientist to society.
He was elected to a fellowship of University College, London, in 1987, and became a vice-president of the College of Occupational Therapists in 1989. He was elected a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1993, and of the Biological Engineering Society in 1994.
Heinz Wolff married, in 1953, Joan Stephenson, who died in 2014. Their two sons survive him.