British clockwork radio boffin Trevor Baylis terminally winds down

Not enough of his kind - original, authentic and giving the world solutions..

RIP ..

A legend in my humble opinion and I don't hand that moniker out very often. RIP

Sad news. BBC news really positive about his life, and showing him meeting Mandela and others, but failed to mention he was ripped off.

This is very sad news. An inspirational man, whose latter years unfortunately are not an inspiration for those minded to invent things for a living.

I met him once at the NEC in Birmingham, some tech show or other, at the height of his fame for his clockwork radio. He was selling them like hot cakes. I bought one, still got it, very useful it is too.

true national treasures

It's sad that the UK (and others) give more praise and adoration to ephemeral sportsmen and pop acts than folks like Mr Baylis who only get recognition in their obituary, long after it is of any help.

BTW in Australia where I now live there is a nationwide Mens Sheds initiative - http://www.mensheds.org.au/

Ripped off by big business and lawyer scum

Fucking typical

Should be cheaper to protect your idea...

...costs an arm and a leg to be an inventor if you want to protect your inventions adequately it costs a bloody fortune every year and if you can't cover the cost or when it expires some monied bozo corporation will capitalise - I know one huge startup which has stood on the shoulders of one fantastic expired patent.

Criminalizing patent infringement?

I don't see how criminalizing patent infringement would have been anything other than a disaster for individuals and small companies.

Large companies don't go to jail. They can change any legal battle into one of endurance, not strength.

Sad to hear.

RIP.

Optional

The (maybe) sad fact is that patents are increasingly not fit for purpose. If there's one thing we've learned from spats like the Apple/Samsung one, it's that patents are impossible to truly impartially and fairly assess, both at the point of patent award and at trial when someone claims infringement.

I remember when one2one were doing adverts and he appeared in one, saying he'd love to have a "one2one" with Frank Whittle. I was a child at the time when his radio came out and thought it was brilliant. No more nagging mom and dad for batteries!

Never got my hand on one of his radios though, and what happened to him really was cruel. The BBC, as has been said, spun his life as a lovely thing but totally glossed over how he lost out to companies who had bigger/better lawyers than he did.

RIP.

Patents dont give you a monopoly on an idea, just a monopoly on your version of it.

A true patent on something does not protect your idea.

Patents protect your implementation of that idea and must be specific and well defined. You also can not patent anything that is obvious or that already exists. Nobody for example can patent the idea of switching on an electric light by using a lever to connect two conductors together completing a circuit. But you can patent a light switch that performs this action in a diferent non-obvious way.

His patent protected his method for implementing a wind up radio. Competing radios did not "circumvent" or "get around" his patent. They simply chose to not infringe his patent by implementing a wind up radio in their own way. In order for him to have combatted this he would have had to think of submitting a new patent that covered a wind up radio (again with a specific design) that included a battery recharged by that winding action. I doubt such a patent would have been granted as it is blatently obvious and may have already been created.

This is how patents are suposed to work, however, greed and lazyness has helped create a sea of more generic patents that can be applied to almost any implementation of an idea. These illegal patents slip through the system simply because there are so many of them and so few intelligent eyes to proof read them before the patent is granted. They only get thrown into the bin where they belong is if the question of ther validity is taken through the courts. usually this quickly shows the patent is false however due to the sheer expense in simply getting to the court many dont bother and simply pay a license fee which ends up cheaper.

Such patents are like a protection racket. "Pay me a small reasonable fee to save all the trouble strife and expense of trying to win in court".

Its a shame that he did not make more money from this invention. I argue that the issue was not the patent of the invention itself. His invention was not groundbreaking and although he thought of it, to myself as a kid into hobbiest electronics at the time, it seemed quite obvious. What he did do, and did not take advantage of was he discovered the market for such radios.

Batteryless radio

I don't know what the innovative step or steps were that Trevor Baylis did*. The problem he aimed to solve was providing sufficient electric power to run a radio without the use of batteries, as batteries were difficult and expensive to obtain in remote areas and polluted the environment when discarded. I think his innovative step was to take a technique used from clock- and watch- making (and possibly gramophones) and apply it in a new area. Spring powered record players (akak 'wind-up gramophones') certainly existed as a form of prior art, and presumably produced up to 5 minutes of audio after having been cranked, as that was the approximate duration of one side of a 78 record.

In order to make most efficient use of the power cranked into the radio, it was desirable for the clockwork mechanism to drive the generator at a ('substantially') constant rate. Cheap clockwork mechanisms do not do this: they start fast and slow down. Clocks and watches and gramophone players use various techniques to extract power from a wound-up mainspring at near-enough constant torque, and what Bayliss did is adapt that mechanism and connect it to a generator that provided power to the radio. In this way he avoided using rechargeable batteries. His method made more efficient use of the hand-power supplied as it didn't incur the round-trip losses suffered when charging up a battery and then discharging it,.

I believe (I could be wrong, as I'm not practised at patent search) the UK patent application is here: UK Patent Application GB 2 262 324 A

A newer similar patent application is GB 2 304 208 A

Both are worth a read.

So, as far I can make out*, what he did was take a well-known technique from one area, and apply it in a novel area. The problem he hit was that it was considerably cheaper to simply charge up a small battery (with its short life) with a cheaper to manufacture generator mechanism.

There's quite an interesting old Wired article from 2001 about Trevor Baylis which is also worth a read: The Greatest Shoe on Earth.

Note: human powered radio transmitters had been invented as early as 1928. In this case, pedal powered - Alfred Herman Traeger and his transceivers and Pedal-powered radio brings back memories for creator's daughter

*A patent lawyer might be able to give a better description of what the innovation was, and tell me I'm wrong.