Ooh!
Ha-ha!
Ooh!
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Mmm-mmm...
ALARM CLOCK RINGS
Ah...ah...!
Ooh!
Ooh-ooh-ooh!
Hello, viewers, and welcome to my World Of Invention,
the show that puts the merriment in experiment
and gives science a good kick up the astrophysics.
Ho-ho, had you there!
Thanks, lad.
Me biggest fan!
Today, we'll be proving
that when it comes to inventing, the sky's the limit.
Yes, today's show is all about flight.
We'll be shooting off
into the wild blue yonder with a jet pack on our back.
It's just truly amazing - there's nothing like it.
Taking a look at what the well-dressed astronaut will be wearing
when they visit Mars.
While my science correspondent,
Mr Jem, meets a man who can turn simple spinning...
It looks fantastic. There's so much more energy.
..into lifting power with some amazing machines.
But let's get things off to a flying start with a visit to the home
of the home-made rocket.
You're cleared for liftoff, Ashley!
Thank you, Wallace! Here we go...
Now, when it comes to space rockets, you think of Houston, Texas,
or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida....
not Manchester, in England.
But this is mission control
for toothpaste-technician-turned- rocket scientist Steve Bennett.
I got into rockets when I was quite young. I was about five or six
when the first men were walking on the Moon,
and that really inspired me -
I wanted to do that when I grew up, you know, I wanted to go into space.
Everything on Earth has been sort of discovered, so I wanted to go off-planet.
To become a professional astronaut is very difficult, so I thought I'd build a rocket and do it myself.
Of course! Much easier(!)
But first, young Steve had to learn rule one of rocket science -
don't set fire to your mum's laundry.
By 1994, things started to take off...
Hmm. But Steve didn't give up.
And by 1997, he thought he was ready to show the world how far he'd come -
with a rocket that had the potential to reach 20,000 feet.
If this is a success today, all we have to do is scale it up,
put a bit more propellant in there, a bit more fuel, and we could actually get a satellite into orbit.
MAN: There she goes!
Well, you can see, obviously not a success -
ploughed into a hillside in front of us...
obviously a major catastrophe,
and Steve Bennett, very much back to the drawing board...
Unfortunately for Steve, the sky was not yet the limit,
and back to the drawing board he went.
When we get knock-backs, when something doesn't happen,
when a rocket crashes or whatever, well, I'm even more determined
to rebuild that rocket and go again to prove that was right first time around.
Steve got a real boost when, with financial backing, he was able to open
a research and development facility to make bigger and better rockets.
But big rockets mean big fuel bills,
so Steve makes his own solid rocket fuel...
from old car tyres.
It really isn't rocket science - it's not that difficult.
So all you budding rocket builders, pens at the ready.
To turn rubber tyres into rocket fuel,
mix chopped-up tyres in some pure liquid rubber.
Add an initiator to help it to set, then mix thoroughly in a paint mixer...
before placing in a dry oven on a low heat.
Simple, really.
The solid rubber fuel, when mixed with pure oxygen,
produces easily enough thrust to send a rocket into space.
It was a recipe for success, and in 2001, Steve's rocket soared
into the record books, with NOVA 1,
the largest rocket to ever lift off from the UK.
It was an astounding and well-deserved triumph.
NOVA 1, carrying an unmanned capsule high into the atmosphere,
was brought safely back to Earth by parachute.
And one day, Steve hopes that he'll be inside that capsule.
And now his skill, determination and hard work have led to this -
the 27 metre-long Starchaser 5.
In four years' time,
Steve plans to be strapped inside, waiting for blastoff.
MAN: Three, two, one...
ASHLEY: He's even made a computer simulation of his future trip into space.
We're looking at about 6Gs of acceleration. That's enough force
to push several buses up there, so, all in all, it'd be very dramatic,
but that's for just about 70 seconds. Then the engines cut off.
It will reach an altitude of about 100 kilometres or about 62 miles up.
From that altitude, you'll get to see the curvature of the Earth,
the blackness of space, and you'll feel weightless.
People aboard the capsule truly will become astronauts for a few minutes.
The childhood rocket maker has, against the odds,
become an internationally respected rocket scientist.
Ever since I was a kid, I had this dream about building a rocket that could carry me into space.
Well, I'm making it happen, I'm living the dream. Now, there's a lot of people said it couldn't be done.
But we're just a few years away from opening the space frontier for everyone. It's going to happen.
I'm going to get there.
He's certainly come along way from setting fire to his mum's laundry.
Ha-ha-ha! A chap can get so attached to his rocket.
That's why I keep mine spaceship-shape and Bristol fashion. Hmm.
But what good is a fabulous spaceship
without a rather fetching spacesuit to go with it?
WALLACE HUMS
Our next inventor, Wallace,
is Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics
in the United States of America.
She's created the Bio-Suit,
a slimline new design that might make
the big bulky suits the boys took to the Moon a thing of the past.
The Apollo suit was fantastic for its time -
it kept the astronauts alive on the Moon -
but they had limited mobility, that bunny hop, Apollo bunny hop...
real limited mobility in the suit.
And 40 years on, spacesuits have hardly changed.
They still weigh 80 kilos
and are stuffed full of pressurised gas,
so that even in the weightlessness of space,
they're really hard to move around in.
Professor Newman's suit is more than just one giant leap in space fashion -
it could open the way for a new era of space exploration.
The Bio-Suit is an alternative spacesuit design concept.
I can move my arms, scratch my back. I can really bend down. I can be on my knees.
I could even run like an Olympic athlete, so I really have full freedom of mobility.
But how can such a lightweight outfit possibly keep an astronaut alive
in the hostile environment of space?
There's only two ways to keep an astronaut alive - one is to put him in a balloon, gas-pressurised suit -
the other one is to shrink-wrap him.
I'm going to put the pressure directly on my skin,
so this suit is pressurising me - it's a second skin.
Dava's suit creates this tight-fitting second skin
with an in-built pattern of wires that squeezes the suit to the body
so tightly that it'll keep astronauts under an Earth-like pressure.
So the real genius of this design is that it doesn't restrict movement,
as the wires map the way the astronaut's body naturally moves and stretches.
And this amazingly flexible pressure suit will be just the thing
for exploring where we want to go next...
Planet Mars.
By the mid 2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth.
It'll be a two-year round trip to Mars, and when we're there,
we're going to want to do more than just hop around planting flags.
Just look at the landscape we'll be exploring...
the huge Olympus Mons, three times taller than Mount Everest,
and the vast Valles Marineris -
in places, four times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
And with gravity on Mars twice as strong as the moon,
you can see why those old spacesuits just won't cut it.
The Bio-Suit is to enable exploration,
so that you can do what you do best, and that's explore
and search for evidence of life, if we go to the surface of Mars.
Dava's design is a real breakthrough.
The skintight pressure system will make future exploration
of alien planets much easier, but, surprisingly,
the slim-fit spacesuit is not a new idea.
Look at this, Gromit! It's one of the first tight-fitting spacesuits,
which the Russians used for the dogs they sent to space in 1959.
The dogs were strapped up tight
to keep their bodies intact before they were blasted off into space.
We've come a long way in 40 years of spacesuit design.
We still have challenges to overcome,
But we don't have to send dogs into space any more.
Did you see that, Gromit?
They were plucky little pooches, those space dogs.
The sad thing is, most of them never made it back.
But on a lighter note, Mr Jem is going to show us
another way of getting airborne that never got off the drawing board.
WALLACE SNIFFS
'Ey-up, lad, have you burnt the teacakes?
What do the following have in common?
David Beckham...
a ship with no sails...
a very weird airship...
and a new type of generator?
The answer is they all rely on something called the Magnus effect,
and I've come to California to meet a man
who thinks it might just change the world.
'Fred Ferguson has been filling the Californian skies
'with some very odd spinning shapes for the last 30 years.'
OK, let's start going!
'He now thinks one of his designs can tap into a limitless supply
'of high-altitude wind energy,
'by exploiting a natural phenomenon called the Magnus effect.'
To see the effect in action...
get a little motor, you stuff a plastic lemon on it
and stick it to the front of a car.
Now, if I were to spin that lemon up...
like that, it starts dragging air round with it.
If I were to blow at the side of that lemon,
the air at the front gets whipped out the way,
the air at the back gets stacked up with the air dragged by the lemon,
and the vehicle should go that way...
Magnus effect car.
'Still confused? You can see how the Magnus effect
'makes something go in not quite the direction you'd expect
'when you watch one of David Beckham's free kicks.
'Hmm...not one of your best, David.
'But watch this and you might do better next time.'
A spinning ball drags some air around with it.
Where this air meets the air it's flying through,
you sort of get an air pile-up on one side of the ball.
This increases the air pressure on that side, giving the ball a push.
That's the Magnus effect. And it's this effect
that's intrigued many inventors, such as Anton Flettner in the 1920s.
He designed a sailing ship - without sails!
It used an engine to turn giant spinning cylinders.
He hoped that, just like with my lemon, the spin of the cylinders
would, in a sideways wind, push the ship forward...
And it worked. The only problem was the ship would have gone
a whole load faster if they'd use the engine to turn a propeller instead.
So that's... Drawing board 1 - Inventors 0.
'But Fred Ferguson wants to improve on that score.
'He's a Magnus effect fanatic.
'We met up for a spot of kite-flying in the Californian hills.'
Oh-h-h-h! Look at that!
'I just had your normal type of kite,
'while Fred's, of course, was a Magnus effect kite.
'It uses its spin to create lift and stay up in the air.'
It looks fantastic! Mine's like a constant battle for...control,
whereas yours just sits there quite happily.
It just loves it. There's so much more energy.
Yup, that's it. Good old Magnus effect doing what it's supposed to do.
But like many before him,
Fred's attempts to use the Magnus effect have barely got off the drawing board.
Although some of his prototypes, like his airship from the '80s,
have looked totally out of this world.
The Magnus sphere airship was very UFO kind of looking,
but that design had a reason.
It was a rotating sphere that generated a lift
as the sphere moved forward.
It looks brilliant. As the Magnus effect helped give the airship lift,
it was cheap to run but sadly not cheap to build.
It would have been 100 million to make a full-scale model.
His UFO was grounded.
But 30 years later,
Fred realised that with a bit of adapting, he could turn his airship
into a way of getting electricity out of really high, fast-blowing winds.
The Magnus rotating-sphere airship would freewheel in the wind.
I thought, "What if we put bigger blades on it, like a paddle wheel,
"would it generate energy?"
He turned his airship into a mobile wind-powered electricity turbine.
The Magnus effect helps provide the lift to carry his turbine
1,000 metres high
and hold it steady in the fast winds
that are such a great source of power.
Finally, we're going to see the Magnus effect
doing something to help energy out.
The energy is there, and we have the ability to collect a bit of that energy
and convert it to electricity and maybe help improve things.
At the moment, Fred's designs are just prototypes. But,
if he can perfect it, he could succeed where countless inventors have failed
and fully harness the power of the Magnus effect.
Hmm!
Quite revolutionary, really.
You know, people often ask me... PHONE RINGS
Sorry, I can't talk now -
I'm alive on the air.
Yes, people often ask me, what are my top six planes that couldn't fly?
Well, let's join Goronwy,
our archive librarian, for this week's Contraption Countdown.
GORONWY: Thanks, Mr Wallace. And in this week's countdown,
we've got six flying machines that failed to take off.
And at number six, here's a French gentleman
who's going to launch his home-made glider off the side of a mountain.
He's got his mum's hat on and he's ready to go...
Zut alors!
Oh, my word! Well, he's survived the impact, but he's still in trouble -
he's lost his mum's hat!
Non-flying flying machine number five is one of my favourites.
The wings go up and down, and the propeller goes round and round.
Oh, no. It's happened again.
At number four, it's the rocket pack.
Oh. Bang goes the rocket pack.
And number three of flying failures calls himself "The bird man".
But he's not really flying, is he?
I know he's not touching the ground,
but I think we can see how he's doing it. "Bird man"?
"Roof-rack man", more like.
In second place, we've got another French gentleman
who really believes he's mastered the art of flying like a bird.
Off you go, then!
Well, I don't know about you, but I'd call that jumping while wearing roller skates.
Nice try, boyo, but you're not fooling anyone.
And now for my number one non-flying flying machine,
which was built by this Chinese gentleman.
It's powered by a tractor engine
and it's loosely based on a military aircraft.
Very loosely based. I don't think he followed the instructions at all!
But never mind, because he's ready to go,
and everybody's waiting for the moment they've all come to see.
And...there it is!
Of course he knew it was never going to fly,
but that didn't stop him building it!
Well done, Boyo! You reached for the sky
and missed.
# Bom-bom-bom
# Curiosity Corner... #
Oh, welcome to Curiosity Corner, viewers.
And they don't come much curiouser
than the man we're going to meet today,
the utterly amazing Gustav Mesmer.
ASHLEY: Welcome to Buttenhausen in Germany,
Wallace, and this extraordinary festival of very unusual bicycles.
All inspired by one extraordinary man -
Gustav Mesmer.
The first time I met Gustav Mesmer, I was a child
and was also with my bicycle in the fields,
and he was with his bicycle... flying bicycle.
Gustav's beautifully quirky inventions
made him a popular local character.
So why was it, then, that this inventive dreamer was unable
to tell anyone
about his thousands of strangely original designs
until he was 61 years old?
Well, it's quite a sad story.
The village he grew up in was very religious, and one Sunday morning,
the 26-year-old Gustav unwisely burst into the church and denounced God.
People in the church, in this village, thought he was mad.
And he was taken to the Bad Schussenried psychiatric hospital.
It was very grim, but Gustav found consolation
in creating fantastical designs for flying machines.
He made hundreds, thousands of sketches - on every paper
he could find, he made a sketch.
He had the idea for flying with his bicycle and his wings,
and nothing could stop him.
Gustav was finally released in 1964.
He'd been locked away for more than 35 years.
And to everyone's surprise,
he started building the incredible flying machines
he'd been imagining for all those years.
He made about 10 of these and about 100 wings.
These are the wings for the bicycle, to make a flying bicycle.
For the wings, he used normally wood and plastic.
There's one final twist in the extraordinary story of Gustav Mesmer.
Not one of his flying bicycles could actually fly.
He always said "It's just a model, it's not really fit for flying,"
but that was not the problem for him,
because it was just the idea he wanted to live for.
Gustav's flights of fancy were just that.
But for him, it was enough that his inventions raised a smile.
And now his incredible spirit is living on
in this festival of wheels and wings, inspired by his imagination.
If Mesmer could see the festival, I'm sure he would be proud.
I think he inspired a lot of people, with his work, with his flying bicycles,
with his sketches - but also being not frustrated after,
or bitter, after this long time in the institute.
He was still a humorous, impressive man.
Mesmerising!
And finally, here's an invention
guaranteed to get you out of sticky situations...
PHONE RINGS
I thought I told you...
Oh! A bit uncalled for!
Moving swiftly on, it's the trusty jet pack.
Come and look at this, lad. It'll blow you away!
ASHLEY: If there's one invention that sums up our sheer determination
to master gravity, it has to be the jet pack.
They have a great superhero look about them, and, believe it or not,
that's where they came from.
Jet packs were born in the comic books of the 1950s.
Then, in 1961, American scientist Wendell Moore at Bell Aerospace
brought sci-fi imagination into reality.
Well, we foresee many applications of the Jet Belt system
in both the police department work and in individual family life.
It would certainly have revolutionised cleaning windows!
But 50 years on, we're still using ladders.
In fact, only one man in the whole of the UK
has got a working jet pack - in his garage.
He's commercial pilot Stuart Ross.
This is the garage, and this is Stuart's latest jet pack.
'It's not until you get up really close and see a jet pack flying
'that it becomes a memory that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
'The noise, the debris... To see a guy fly through the air,
'with one of these strapped to himself,'
it's just truly amazing. There's nothing like it on Earth.
So how does it work?
Three tanks on the back -
two contain a fuel, which is hydrogen peroxide,
and one contains nitrogen gas.
The hydrogen peroxide reacts with a catalyst in the engine
to create super-high-pressurised steam, which then jets out
with such force you can blast straight up.
And the direction and speed of your flight is all controlled
by his hand-operated throttles.
Sounds simple - actually, it's anything but.
Even Stuart, with all his experience, is going to need 75 practice liftoffs
with this new jet pack to get the hang of it.
It's not even that easy to get to your launch pad.
Hang on, Stuart, what does every pilot have to do before takeoff?
That's right - a safety check.
A lot of people ask me just how dangerous it is to fly a jet pack.
Where do you start?! You've got the pressure involved - 5,000 psi.
That's enough to blow you to smithereens.
You've got the exhaust temperature, 600 centigrade -
six inches from your elbows.
Six times hotter than a boiling kettle.
You've got the speed of the exhaust, 2,500 miles an hour.
That's over three times the speed of sound!
You've got the fuel - 90% hydrogen peroxide.
That's 30 times the strength of household bleach.
On top of that, you're actually flying this thing
with it attached to you. So, the whole thing, yeah, is dangerous,
but, to me, it's the most exciting machine in the world,
and nothing will ever touch it.
Now, I've got to be honest with you. Stuart's not quite
at the exciting stage yet, and with the help of his friend, Lindsay,
he's having an early practice session with his new pack.
With such power to control, Stuart's feet stay firmly
on the practice wheel. Just left to right training today. Sadly...
no up and down.
But when you do get up, you can fly anywhere you like.
Well, until you run out of fuel,
which unfortunately only takes about 30 seconds.
So it's not surprising that more men have walked on the moon
than have flown free in a jet pack.
Oh, and flying free is very, very expensive.
It's a six-figure sum before you can actually get hold of one,
and on top of that, you've got the running costs.
It's about £600 per minute to run just on the fuel alone.
And if you equate it with a fully loaded 747 jumbo,
they burn three times as much fuel per second,
and that's just carrying me around, as opposed to 400 passengers.
It might be cheaper to burn £20 notes as fuel!
But for Stuart, it's worth it, because he knows that the jet pack,
although way hotter than a boiling kettle,
is really incredibly cool.
This is the furthest anyone's ever flown by jet pack -
a 500 metre-wide canyon in the USA.
Touchdown... with only nine seconds of fuel left.
Ooh! That was a close shave!
Still, those jet packs are just the thing when you need to make a hasty exit.
I think you'll agree,
we've seen some truly uplifting inventions today.
Mind you, all these new-fangled flying doodahs
and supersonic thingamajigs are all very well,
but sometimes you're better off with both feet firmly on the ground.
Don't you agree, lad?
Hey! What have you done with me rocket?
If you've enjoyed our show,
grab your mouse and log on to our World Of Invention website.
You'll find a fantastic competition, details of our roadshow,
as well as lots of ways to get you inventing.
Pull your finger out and get clicking.