{"id":888,"date":"2018-03-07T15:26:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T15:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=888"},"modified":"2018-11-04T17:34:27","modified_gmt":"2018-11-04T17:34:27","slug":"farewell-to-trevor-baylis-inventor-designer-and-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/farewell-to-trevor-baylis-inventor-designer-and-engineer\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell Trevor Baylis -Inventor, Designer and Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let us take a moment to celebrate the life of the inventor, designer and engineer -Trevor Baylis – who died this week on 5 March 2018. Trevor’s life work reflects the OU’s values of being \u2018open to people, places, methods and ideas\u2019. In 2001, the Open University awarded him the highest recognition for his work, an Honorary Doctorate of the University.<\/p>\n

His ideas for design and innovation reflected his concern for others and recognition of his ability to make a difference. Early on he developed a range of products for physically disabled people under the Orange Aids label. As a stuntman, he had witnessed the tragic impacts of accidents on fellow stunt performers, which stimulated his ideas for solutions.<\/p>\n

Trevor Baylis is most famous for his idea for the design of a wind-up radio in 1991, which came to him while watching a TV programme about AIDS in Africa. This identified the huge challenge of health communication in Africa, where many people lived without mains or battery sources of electricity. Renewable energy solutions were needed. His idea came through daydreaming and imagining being a colonial settler listening to a wind-up gramophone<\/a>. Although effective, perhaps today this would not score highly as the most politically correct source of ideas!<\/p>\n

\"Drawings<\/a>
Image credits \u00a9 Trevor Baylis \u2018Drawings for wind-up radio, 1993\u2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Within months of watching the TV programme he had proven the principle of his prototype wind-up radio. Subsequently he obtained publicity on BBC\u2019s Tomorrow\u2019s World and then won the BBC Design Award for Best Product and Best Design in 1996. The design brought benefits to people in places where electricity sources are not easily available, affordable or accessible. Later on, the design features of the wind-up radio were marketed to western customers looking for sustainable designs and greener products. Recently, there have been several revisions of the wind-up radio design, with new smaller, lighter, solar-powered models available.<\/p>\n

A big bugbear during his career was his difficulty in retaining control of his Intellectual Property (IP) during the innovation process. This led him to set up the Trevor Baylis Foundation<\/a> to encourage innovation, advise on IP protection and help people to get the value they want from their ideas.<\/p>\n

Throughout his life, Trevor Baylis worked on new ideas and persevered even when success was not forthcoming. In one case he designed a shoe<\/a> to generate electricity while the wearer walked to charge batteries, for example, mobile phones etc. But his idea for pedestrian power was not a great success, although there is much interest in piezoelectric materials today.<\/p>\n

He leaves us with the inspiration of his life, well-travelled from the time he left school aged 15 without qualifications. During his interview with Engineering Management<\/a> in 2007, he said<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone can have a good idea and turn it into something that works. It\u2019s not magic. If you find yourself trying to solve a problem, you are halfway to inventing something<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nFurther Reading:
\nBaylis, T. (1999) \u2018Clock This: My Life as an Inventor<\/a>\u2019 Headline Book Publishing, London; Numbered First Edition.
\nArchive Profile: Trevor Baylis, Inventor of The Clockwork Radio. E&T Engineering and Technology<\/a>. by Jan Bailey, Published March 5, 2018
\nBBC\u00a0Obituary: Trevor Baylis<\/a>. March 6, 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[127,128,125,123,42,124,135,126,76,129,122,130,134,133,101,121],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment","tag-africa","tag-aids","tag-design-for-disability","tag-designer","tag-energy","tag-engineer","tag-greener-products","tag-health","tag-innovation","tag-intellectual-property","tag-inventor","tag-open-university","tag-renewable-energy","tag-sustainable-design","tag-technological-innovation","tag-trevor-baylis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}