If you happen to be in London on the evening of Tuesday September 2 and can spare a couple of hours, then I urge you to book a seat* at Maurice Collins’ forthcoming talk at the British Library Business & IP Centre on the subject of ‘Weird and Wonderful Gadgets’.
Mr Collins (who was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Birthday Honours for his lifelong services to the disabled) has been seeking out the labour-saving domestic paraphernalia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for more than 30 years. He has built up a huge collection, which he maintains in his North London home and a small sample (some 50 or more items) have been placed on display at the Business & IP Centre networking area for the duration of the summer.
The collection provides a wonderful snapshot of late Victorian and early twentieth century social history. At a time when consumerism was beginning to have a big impact on the prosperity of the nation and a burgeoning middle class sought gadgetry almost as avidly as we do today, there was no shortage of inventive talent to meet the demand. Indeed, many items from Mr Collins’ Collection are early versions of the technology that we take for granted today, and this exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the ingenuity of our forebears.
Among the exhibits are a clockwork burglar alarm, a mechanical page-turner, a self-pouring teapot, an automatic nose hair cutter and a 1902 clockwork ‘teasmaid’. This last item, Mr Collins confesses, is his favourite. When the alarm goes off, a mechanism is set in train, which strikes a match against a piece of emery cloth to light an oil-fuelled boiler. Boiling water is then automatically transferred into the teapot. Not very safe by today’s standards, he admits! Many of these inventions proved very successful. The self-pouring teapot, for example, sold in its thousands and made the inventor a very rich man.
Apart from its very real entertainment value, Mr Collins’ wonderful collection reminds us of the importance of intellectual property and the role of facilities like the British Library’s Business & IP Centre, which offers free access to the UK’s most comprehensive collection of business and IP information. A Reader Pass is all you need to take advantage of this resource, which contains no less than 50 million patent specifications, unique databases on trademarks and registered designs, market research reports, trade journals, legal guides and government publications.
So, if you are setting out to the invent the next must-have gadget, don’t forget that resources like the Business & IP Centre are there to help you develop your ideas well before you need to contact a patent attorney.
*You can book at www.bl.uk/bipc/gadgets.html where you can also obtain more information about the Business & IP Centre. Exhibitions of Maurice Collins’ collections are also being mounted at local museums in Keswick and Wrexham.
Les Hunt
Editor
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