SAY GOODBYE TO THE OVERFLOWING BATH

Ross Clark is bemused by

the amateurish ingenuity of a gathering of 400 British inventors

I ARRIVED late at last weekend's Great British Innovations and Inventions Fair at the National Exhibition Centre in Birm- ingham because my train broke down. One of its two diesel engines began to whine as we crossed the black fens, and by Peterborough it had choked and splut- tered to a halt. Surely, I thought, an open- ing there for an ingenious British inventor: a diesel engine which can cope with a gen- tle journey over flat country on a benign May morning. There was nobody trying to sell a mira- cle diesel engine at the fair. Indeed, it was difficult to find anyone visibly selling any- thing; except for a man who was getting terribly excited about a bolt, shouting its virtues in the manner of a Cockney market trader, his crudely written notice declaring that it 'dose [sic] the work of a press that would cost £10,000'. The others — 400 or so of them — were living up to the notori- ously diffident reputation of the British inventor, cowering behind their creations, looking embarrassed and nervously answering questions when spoken to. There were no greetings, no welcoming pats on the back, no second-hand car sales- man charm. It was possible to walk up and down the aisles unaccosted. Considering that this was a trade fair — an opportunity for inventors to sell to manufacturers there was clearly something wrong.

One inventor was facing entirely the wrong way. He was sitting staring into the white pin-board cubicle that the exhibi- tion's organisers had built for him, while the public buzzed past behind him. I had to tap him on the shoulder to ask him what he was showing off.

`It turns the pages when you play,' he said cheerfully, pointing to his 'automatic page-turner' mounted atop a small piano in front of him. He — I later got out of him that his name was Richard Graves, he lived in Beckenham and had once been a univer- sity administrator in Guyana — then demonstrated the contraption, launching into a jaunty rendition of the theme tune from the Eurovision Song Contest as the pages of one of Bach's preludes flicked by before him.

The idea was beautifully simple: all he had to do was to squeeze a small, plastic ball beneath his foot and, by pneumatic action, the pages of the music book flipped over one by one. They were attached to spring-loaded, piano wire arms, which were released one at a time by each squeeze of the ball.

`I made this for £10,' Graves went on, `and look' — he reached for a catalogue 'here is an automatic page-turner already on the market for £1,400!'

He returned to the theme from the Eurovision Song Contest; I wished him well and wandered on. It was a shame he had not been more persistent: he had only needed to ask and I would gladly have parted with f10 and placed an order.

I came next to a Welshman named John Lewis, who was peddling a solution to the age-old problem of the overflowing bath. `Normal bath overflows don't work,' he said, 'but look at this . . '

He filled his demonstration bathtub with water; when the water reached a certain level, the plug shot several feet into the air and the bath was drained. 'It works by suc- tion,' he explained: 'as soon as water flows down the overflow pipe it activates a plunger.'

It might save your bathroom carpet, but, like the splitting of the atom, it turned out to have some pretty disingenuous uses too: `If the owner of a boarding house wants his tenants to have only three inches of water for their baths he just sets the pipe lower.'

I looked round to see what appeared to be a briefcase on fire. I need not have wor- ried: it turned out merely to be Mr George Friend's gas-fired barbecue set.

`Why did you put it in a briefcase?' I asked.

`Why not?' he said.

`No reason at all. But that calor gas cylinder won't really fit into the briefcase as well, will it?'

`No. But you can connect it up to the mains gas supply. The great advantage over an ordinary barbecue is that it's instant.'

Imagining horrible explosions, I moved quickly on, to an even more dodgy-looking device billed as a 'pressurised water butt'. Any resemblance to the infamous Sizewell B pressurised water nuclear reactor is purely coincidental', I was assured. Never- theless, the appearance of one of Shaun Johnson's water butts in your garden is not necessarily the best way of promoting good relations with your neighbours. It consists of a normal water butt connected to your house's gutters, but with a large rubber doughnut stuck on top. After a rain show- er you simply take a foot pump and pump up your water butt to the same kind of pressure as your car tyres. Meanwhile, the rubber doughnut expands to gigantic pro- portions. Then simply turn on a tap and you can spray your flowers just as you would with a hosepipe attached to the mains. Say goodbye to hosepipe-ban misery.

I watched it all happen behind a flimsy perspex screen.

`This is for safety,' he said, flexing it, 'but you don't really need it.'

The doughnut ballooned, until you could almost hear the rubber creaking.

`What happens if it perishes?' I asked impertinently.

`I haven't thought about that,' said John- son, scratching his head. 'I suppose you could have a cover over the top, because sunshine and rubber just don't mix.'

`What gave you the idea?'

`Well, a friend of mine's really into grass . . . he used to be a landscape gardener and he always likes his grass shiny.'

Not all inventions consist of elaborate contraptions, of course, but some consist of so little that one wonders how the inventor approached the Patent Office with a straight face. One man had come up with what he called 'the universal enve- lope' — a solution to one of the lesser problems afflicting the international com- munity: namely that in-Britain the windows of our envelopes are on the left whereas in France and in other countries they are on the right. What Mr Chi-King Chang, an excitable architect of Lyon, has done is to design an envelope with a window which goes the whole way across.

`Anyone shown any interest?' I asked.

`Oh, yes,' said Chang, showing me a Pooterish letter from a bank extolling the new envelope's virtues.

I was still thinking of envelopes when I was astounded to see an invention described as 'the safe letter-box'. Having never suffered a mishap with a letter-box I went over to enquire.

The invention consisted of a flap which covers the inside of your letter-box so that nothing can be put through.

`There's no way anybody can put an incendiary device through your letter-box when it's up,' explained Mr Stanley Clarke of Olney, Buckinghamshire, not bothering to lift himself from his armchair.

`I'm not sure we have much of a prob- lem with incendiary devices through letter- boxes round my way,' I said.

`You want to come to Milton Keynes then,' said Clarke. 'It's two a week there.'

Clarke is not alone in trying to break into the anti-incendiary device market. Across the hall he had a rival who had come up with an even craftier variation on the letter-box theme: in this one, petrol poured through the letter-box was chan- nelled down a pipe so that it would re- emerge to soak the arsonist's feet. `Someone tried to burn me office down,' he told me in his South London accent.

I paused briefly to speak to a man who had disguised a lawnmower to look like a Formula One racing car, perhaps unwisely considering recent events in San Marino, until I came to a stallholder who really was trying to push his goods, At last I had found a true salesman.

`I'll be right with you,' he said, as I casu- it's a typical story of family life: a nagging wife, her boozing husband, a daughter who's a school drop-out living with her boyfriend, and a son out on bail.' ally inspected his invention. Meanwhile, he made a call on his mobile phone.

It was clear to see, just from its presenta- tion, that this was going to be the most commercially successful venture. The cen- trepiece was an enormous Harley Davidson motorcycle, normal in every respect except that the monstrous expanses of chrome had been replaced by even more monstrous expanses of gold. The invention was a King Midas-like gold-plating machine which will coat anything you like in a few hours.

`We've had people do all sorts of things,' said Jane, a tanned blonde with a helium voice. 'Badges, taps, watches, spanners `Spanners?'

`Oh yeah, all sorts, Golf clubs, guitar parts . . '

`You've really had someone gold-plate their spanners?'

`It's not very usual to have a gold-plated spanner, I agree, but you know how it is: when one person's got one everyone wants one.'

I picked up a real gold-plated spanner and tried to scratch it. 'How much gold is on it?'

`It's half a micron thick,' I was told. 'As for the value, look, here's a chart.'

The chart compared the price a customer would pay with the cost of the material.

`For example, to cover a badge for a car uses eight pounds' worth of gold but you can charge the customer £200. If you're a garage owner and you buy one of the machines you can get your money back within weeks. Can I give you a brochure and a press pack? As you can see, we've just won a silver medal in Geneva.'

`Only silver? That's a bit rotten of them.' `I had to stop the lads plating it.'

It gradually dawned on me that neither the man with the mobile phone nor the blonde was the inventor of the gold-plating machine. Indeed, the inventor was proba- bly a technocrat in Switzerland, where the company was based. I came away feeling that what was predominantly a fair for unassuming British boffins who work in garden sheds and speak with decent, indus- trial northern accents had been vulgarised by this intrusion of slick mass-marketing. But the exhibition's organisers would not thank me for saying that. The point of the event, they said, was to prove that Britain is a country which can sell its ideas and turn its great innovative skills into profits. As I wandered along the aisles I did not feel so confident.

I mulled, this over as my train waited two hours outside Peterborough station on my way back home. The reason for the delay this time, apparently, was a bomb scare. The bomb disposal team spent the time investigating a holdall containing, no doubt, somebody's gym shoes and dirty laundry. Anyone with the capital required to develop a mobile X-ray machine which will allow such packages to be examined within minutes is invited to contact me.