DIMMING THE LIGHTS

During the early days of Cats at the New London I recognised one of the UK’s most celebrated scientists queuing up at the Box Office. Eric Laithwaite, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, had found TV fame through the BBC’s hugely successful ‘Young Scientist of the Year’ programme ...but that was not where I knew him from:

“You probably don’t remember me,” I approached him nervously, “but you presented me with the Haldane Literary Prize at my school prize-giving when I was twelve.”

“I’m sorry,” he made a comical show of trying to place me, twenty years on. Fair play!

“I saw this full page ad in New Scientist last week”, I continued good-naturedly. “A Japanese company was bragging about building a railway using a linear induction motor, which I sort of thought was your invention?”

“It’s not easy getting funding in this country,” Professor Laithwaite replied with a frown. “When we leave here I’m going to meet an Arab prince.  He’s been given a million pounds for his eighteenth birthday and I’m hoping he will invest some of it in developing my new project.”

Flash forward a couple of decades and I’m in the company of a former underwater escapologist who had turned inventor in order to build devices for his badly injured stunt colleagues. By this point, Trevor Bayliss had acquired much deserved celebrity for the patent clockwork radio that he’d invented in response to the AIDS crisis in Africa, but that afternoon it seemed that all he really wanted to talk about was his frustrations while trying to raise interest and investment for the ground-breaking (and life-saving) project from the UK government.

“Finally, after all the forms and letters, weeks and months, and to-ing and fro-ing (I paraphrase from memory) they told me that they were not interested in the clockwork radio project because they were looking into ways of powering devices with energy converted from the heat generating parts of the body such as armpits and inner thighs.” To which Bayliss replied:  “So you’re telling me to stick it up my arse!” (and here I do not paraphrase!)

None of the above would come as any surprise to one of the all-time heavyweight champs of The Business Of Pleasure. About a century-and-a-half before my brief encounters with Eric Laithwaite and Trevor Bayliss, Mr Charles Dickens wrote the following in his novel Little Dorrit:

“This Doyce,” said Mr Meagles, “is a smith and engineer… A dozen years ago, he perfects an invention (involving a very curios secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow creatures… The moment he addresses himself to the Government, he becomes a public offender!  …He ceases to be an innocent citizen, and becomes a culprit. He is treated from that instant as a man who has done some infernal action. He is a man to be shirked, put-off, brow-beaten, sneered at, handed over by this highly-connected young or old gentleman, to that highly connected young or old gentleman, and dodged back again; he is a man with no rights in his own time, or his own property; a mere outlaw, whom it is justifiable to get rid of  anyhow; a man to be worn out by all means possible.”

…“You must have great patience,” said Arthur Clenham, looking at Doyce with some wonder. “Great forbearance.”

“No,” he returned, ‘I don’t know that I have more than another man… You see, my experience of these things does not begin with myself. It has been in my way to know a little about them from time to time. Mine is not a particular case. I am not worse than a hundred others who have put themselves in the same position -than all the others I was going to say.

…Disappointed?  Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s only natural. But what I mean when I say that people who put themselves in the same position are mostly used in the same way…”

“In England,” said Mr Meagles.

“Oh!  Of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions to foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason that so many go there.”

Mr Meagles very hot indeed again.

“What I mean is, that however this comes to be the regular way of our government, it is the regular way. Have you ever heard of any projector or inventor who failed to find it all but inaccessible, and whom it did not discourage and ill-treat?”

“I cannot say that I ever have.”

“Have you ever known it to be beforehand in the adoption of any useful thing?  Ever known it to set an example of any useful kind?”

“I am a good deal older than my friend here,” said Mr Meagles, “And I’ll answer that. Never!”

DT 16 May 2025