Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, dies aged 80

Trevor Baylis, the creator of the wind-up radio that helped millions in the developing world to access life-saving information, has died aged 80.

The inventor, who was awarded a CBE in 2014 for services to intellectual property, died of natural causes on Monday morning, having been ill for some time.

Baylis, from Twickenham in south-west London, was regarded as one of Britain’s greatest living inventors. He was best known for his BayGen clockwork radio, which he began work on in 1991 while watching a documentary about Aids in Africa that highlighted the value of educational radio programmes in tackling the spread of HIV.

“Before the show was over I was into my studio and I managed to get a bark of sound out of an instrument and that was, if you like, my eureka moment,” he recalled.

A first working prototype of the radio ran for 14 minutes and, after Baylis appeared with it in 1994 on Tomorrow’s World on BBC One, it was put into mass production in Cape Town, South Africa, by a company that employed disabled workers to manufacture it.

In recent years Baylis complained of financial difficulties after revealing he had received little of the profits from sales of the device, and he urged the government to introduce stronger legal protection for inventors.

However, his instinct to innovate did not leave him and in 2003 he told the Guardian that ideas still came to him out of the blue. “If you can solve a problem then you are well on your way to being an inventor,” he said.

Other inventions included his electric shoes, which he demonstrated in 2001 while completing a 100-mile (160km) walk across the Namib desert in southern Africa to raise money for the Mines Advisory Group charity.

Source: theguardian