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 knowledge in technology
and tickles the parts of particle physics.
Did you know 70% of accidents happen in the home?
So just imagine how dangerous a TV studio could be.
Oh!
See what I mean?
And that's why our topic today is Better Safe Than Sorry.
Today, our inventions are all designed to keep us safe...
wherever we are.
We'll be looking at spacesuits
to see how they keep astronauts all safe and cosy.
This is your miniature spaceship. This lets you do a spacewalk.
It's your home away from home when you're in outer space.
My science correspondent Mr Jem
will be seeing how a 1940s Hollywood star
turned inventor for the ultimate safety project -
protecting the free world...
It's important, isn't it? I mean, really.
...and my archive librarian Goronwy will be giving us a rundown
of some inventions that failed the health and safety test.
But let's jump straight in with a look at the history of ejector seats.
BEEP
CLEARS THROAT: Take it away, Ashley!
Ahh! I've always wondered what that button was for, Wallace.
Now, the ejector seat is standard issue in all modern military aircraft,
if not TV Studios.
But it's the one invention you never want to have to use
because it really is the last resort, as one lucky ejectee remembers only too well.
Flying around about 27,500ft
and 500-odd miles an hour when things started to go wrong.
The control column drove itself hard over to the left
and I couldn't move it. The steering locked up.
There was no real thought process in it. At that point, I knew I had to eject.
It's like the biggest bang, the biggest kick up the bottom that you can imagine,
as the explosion rockets you clear of the aeroplane.
But, thankfully, I'm here to tell you the story today.
ASHLEY: The ejector seat is truly a life-saving invention.
It was invented in the 1940s because aircraft started flying so fast
it was no longer possible for a pilot
to simply throw himself out of a stricken plane.
Although others had developed prototypes during the Second World War,
the British were the first to build a commercially available ejector seat.
And by 1946, it was ready to be put to the test.
All they needed was a chap with a stiff upper lip to try it out.
One volunteer, Captain Bernard Lynch, stood out,
and I think I know why.
The footage is from the first ever recorded ejection test,
and even though Lynch had tested the seat extensively on the ground,
testing the seat in the heavens was a big step up in sheer guts.
Lynch - and his moustache - survived intact
and the ejector seat was born.
Although the principle is pretty straightforward,
there are, in fact, a staggering 15 separate steps
involved in an ejector seat's operation.
Pull firing handle, initiate rear seat, restrain air crew,
sequence inter-seat operation, jettison canopy, unlock rear seat and rise,
restrain legs, initiate seat system, fire rocket motors...
I haven't finished yet.
...deploy drogue parachute, activate emergency oxygen,
monitor height and speed, deploy parachute, separate seat...
ejection complete! Phew!
And all that happens in less than two-and-a-half seconds.
Unsurprisingly, a reliable, fully tested and equipped ejector seat
doesn't come cheap.
Older models start at £75,000,
while the most modern versions cost a hefty £2 million.
For that you get a rocket-powered seat, a survival pack
which equips you for every eventuality and, most importantly, a parachute,
carefully packed to ensure that getting out of the aircraft alive
isn't the last thing you do.
Packing the parachute isn't just a sort of "stuffing a rag in a bag",
as they used to call it. It's a bit more technical than that.
We probably only do two parachutes per day.
When they pull that handle , they want that parachute to work,
so it's a great responsibility and we don't take it lightly.
ASHLEY: Ejector seats have been in use for over 60 years
and have saved around 10,000 lives.
The survivors form a pretty exclusive club,
but within their ranks is an even more select group -
people who've been ejected not once but twice.
I couldn't believe my luck when it happened for a second time.
I've got crystal-clear, vivid memories of everything,
from pulling the handle, watching the cockpit disappear,
specks of dust and chipped paint,
then looking down, seeing the aeroplane fly away from under me,
things then go very quiet.
To eject twice and survive has made me the luckiest person in the world.
Although I was injured, I'm here today,
walking, talking, living, breathing, thanks only to the ejection seat.
ASHLEY: And let's hope Craig doesn't have the need to make it a hat trick!
Yes, accidents can happen anywhere.
To illustrate...
CLATTERING
Ah-ha! Well spotted, lad!
Oh, dear!
Gromit was so busy with that banana skin,
he didn't notice I'd coated the second step in chip fat.
And now let's have a look at some inventions
that are strictly for the birds.
ASHLEY: "Look before you leap" is a good rule of thumb
for anyone trying to avoid accidents. Isn't that right, Gromit?
It's a principle the military has taken to heart.
That's why unmanned aircraft, or drones,
have been used to spy on enemy activities for years.
The information gained can be vital for safeguarding troops,
and it doesn't even expose a pilot to risk.
But to allow even closer surveillance,
the latest drones are being disguised as birds.
These images are from a classified US Air Force research project.
They show a mechanical pigeon that's being developed
to carry a range of sophisticated spying equipment
whilst blending in with its surroundings.
But it might surprise you to know that this is not a new idea.
This picture, dating from the First World War,
apparently shows a German surveillance pigeon
equipped with a camera for photographing Allied targets.
But can it be true?
Did the Germans really use homing pigeons to spy behind enemy lines?
Or was this just an elaborate propaganda hoax?
Well, it turns out that pigeons have been used in times of war.
And, believe it or not, the humble pigeon
has a pretty distinguished record.
In both World Wars, troops made use of the pigeons' homing capability
to carry important messages back from the Front.
NEWSREADER: Mrs Alexander, wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty,
hears the exploits of Gustav and Paddy, two D-Day carrier pigeons
decorated with the Dickin Medal for Gallantry.
During the Second World War, 32 pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal,
the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross,
and were even given a peck on the cheek.
NEWSREADER: Well, well, what do you know!
How appropriate. Pigeon post is one thing,
but could these birds really be used to photograph enemy positions?
Here at the World Of Invention,
we decided to solve the mystery once and for all.
In the archives of the German patent office, we discovered these plans,
dating back to 1908, for a pigeon-mounted camera system.
Using them, we built our own pigeon camera.
And here's our nest of spies,
at an undisclosed location in Milton Keynes.
Meet our pigeon spy, code-named James, who's licensed to eat Trill.
Pigeon Master Q, better known as Colin Hill,
is on hand to help out.
Come on, boy.
ASHLEY: Like his namesake, Commander Bond,
James the pigeon is neither shaken nor stirred
as the camera is strapped to his chest...
unlike Colin.
I think this is pretty impossible.
ASHLEY: It's up to James now - only he can get this idea off the ground.
As you can see...no way. Steady about.
ASHLEY: Even our lightweight camera is too much for James to cope with
and the mission is aborted.
COLIN: I'd love to have seen the people do it,
cos I think that was propaganda,
and really make-believe.
Colin is clearly unimpressed.
But how's James?
His feathers are perfect, he's A-OK.
As you can see.
ASHLEY: So it seems that this was just a German propaganda stunt,
designed to ruffle feathers in Allied High Command.
However, given the latest developments in the US,
spy birds may be due a comeback.
Probably a good idea - you'd never get a human to balance on a telephone wire.
Well, fancy that.
Safety in the workplace is paramount. For example...
one nut, one sledgehammer.
Hold her steady, lad!
Now, viewers, what am I doing wrong?
That's right - safety goggles!
There we are.
But first, here's Mr Jem
with this week's item that never got off the drawing board.
Geronimo! CRUNCH!
JEM: Not your most cracking idea, Wallace.
What would you think if I told you
Angelina Jolie had developed a new missile guidance system?
Or Lady Gaga had invented a new technology
for secure electronic data communication?
You might think someone had put something funny in my popcorn.
However, 70 years ago, something just like that actually happened.
JEM: Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood A-lister in the 1940s,
but she wasn't just a pretty face.
MAN: She's as pretty as a picture and as stubborn as a mule.
The secret to looking glamorous, she once said,
was to stand still, looking stupid. But Hedy Lamarr was far from stupid.
She was so sharp that in between films
she invented something to keep Allied sailors safe
and give them the upper hand in the war at sea -
an incredibly sophisticated system for guiding torpedoes.
A few years earlier, Hedy had been married to an Austrian arms dealer,
and had been present at many of his work discussions
on military technology, including torpedoes.
She left Austria and her husband in 1937 and made her way to Hollywood.
But when the Second World War started, she wanted to use her military know-how
to help the fight against Hitler.
Torpedoes were deadly, but they had a problem.
You could only fire them in straight lines, like a cannonball.
If you could radio control them, however,
you could steer them wherever you wanted.
But that had another problem -
if the enemy could tune in to the radio signal you were using,
they could jam it, or worse still,
take control and steer it right back at you.
Hedy set out to invent a system using radio signals to guide
torpedoes in a way that no enemy could intercept -
at the time a huge technical challenge.
Help came from a surprising source -
the dashingly handsome, daring young composer George Antheil,
who created mad, experimental music.
Sounds fascinating.
George created music using mechanised instruments,
and his favourite was the pianola.
Together, crazy as it sounds,
Hedy and George adapted the controlling mechanism for a pianola
into a way of guiding torpedoes using radio signals.
The pianola was controlled by paper rolls, like this.
Each of these holes corresponds to a particular note.
GLISSANDO
George and Hedy's idea was to put identical rolls, one on the ship and
one on the torpedo, and start them turning at exactly the same time.
But instead of changing notes on a piano,
they would be changing frequencies on the ship's controller
and the torpedo's receiver,
and by quickly hopping from one channel to another,
it made it impossible for anybody else to get a fix on the signal they were using.
Their idea of frequency hopping was brilliant,
and they were granted a patent for their Secret Communication System.
But the US Navy wasn't interested.
They weren't used to getting weapons designs from actresses and composers.
Hedy's hopes for making her name as an inventor were dashed.
FILM: Hollywood's most famous movie stars...
JEM: Disappointed, she went back to the day job
of being one of the most glamorous women in the world.
She helped raise over 7 million to help the war effort.
NEWSREEL: ...Screen celebrities giving their time and talents
to aid the national war effort...
JEM: Hedy and George's invention was never used in World War II.
But that's not the end of the story.
This is a typical modern mobile phone mast, and masts like this
relay all those important phone signals
to ensure messages like, "I'm on the train," get through clearly.
Crucially, each call constantly switches between different channels
to keep our conversations private.
Sound familiar? It's a modern version of frequency hopping.
The version that makes this work is called spread-spectrum technology,
but it's a direct descendant of Hedy's idea.
The US Navy might not have taken her seriously,
but the modern telecommunications industry
and anyone who uses a mobile phone
owes Hedy Lamarr a big thank-you.
# Bom bom-bom bom-bom Curiosity Corner... #
Oh! Welcome to Curiosity Corner, viewers.
And today's subject is very curious indeed.
Let's meet the highly prolific and rather eccentric Arthur Pedrick.
ASHLEY: The late Arthur Pedrick's name might not mean much to most people,
but ask around at the UK Patent Office
and pretty much everyone will have heard of him.
Arthur Pedrick filed about 160 patent applications over 15 years,
and I was one of the examiners who was given the job of
examining some of his patent applications.
The massive number of patents meant Pedrick was churning out
a new invention every five weeks,
many of them aimed at improving health and safety.
However, the questionable quality of his designs
meant the end results often made things more dangerous.
Take GB1453920,
a patent for fire blankets big enough to cover entire skyscrapers.
Quite apart from being wildly impractical, such a large blanket
may have also prevented escape from the building
and actually increased the risk of people suffocating.
Equally, his plan for constructing bomb shelters, GB1339414,
relied on using a nuclear explosion to create an underground cavern,
an innovation that would have made the whole shelter radioactive!
And GB1396439,
a patent for automobiles driven from the back seat,
would have created vehicles with their own inherent problems.
CRASH!
Pedrick's ideas may not have been successful or particularly sensible,
but that doesn't mean the Patent Office examiners
viewed his applications as a waste of time. Far from it, in fact.
Pedrick was a bit of light relief.
When a new Pedrick application came in, we thought, "What's he done now?"
It wasn't just Pedrick's sense of humour that appealed to the Patent Office staff.
BRIAN: The Patent Act said that you had to describe your invention,
but it didn't specifically forbid him from describing anything else
that took his fancy, like his eccentric views on nuclear physics
or his cat's views of the world.
ASHLEY: Pedrick's cat Ginger was a regular theme in his applications,
but his crowning appearance came in patent GB1426698 -
a photo-sensitive cat flap
with added cat-astrophic features for any feline intruders.
His cat Ginger had a problem because the black cat next door
used to go through the cat flap and steal his food, so Pedrick invented
a photo-electrically controlled cat flap
which kept out black cats but let ginger cats through.
But he also combined this with a 1,000 megaton nuclear weapon
circling the Earth in orbit, which is a novel idea, to put it mildly.
ASHLEY: Thankfully, the black cat was never actually nuked,
and its owners, perhaps unsurprisingly, remember Pedrick well.
I think he was a typical professor type
in that he wasn't at all worldly.
He didn't live in the world that we live in,
he lived in the world of ideas and in his own mind, didn't he?
Yes. Arthur would come in with the odd patent and say,
"This one should make us all famous," and tell us that he was being serious.
ASHLEY: Not all of Pedrick's ideas were accidents waiting to happen.
He patented schemes for irrigating areas of desert,
building wind turbines and generating energy from waste -
ideas that might have seemed outlandish 40 years ago.
but are now commonplace.
So if Pedrick was sensible enough to patent such clever and far-sighted ideas,
why did he bother with the ridiculous ones?
I think he thought some funny patents would attract attention
and publicity, perhaps, and draw people in to the more serious ones.
ASHLEY: So, lots of wacky ideas published
in the hope that they'd attract attention to the sensible ones.
Sounds like another off-beat Pedrick idea to me!
What do you think, Wallace?
Mad as a bag of cats, eh, Gromit?
Yes, everywhere you look there are accidents waiting to happen.
Ooh! Watch out, Gromit!
Sorry, chuck, I meant to tell you about that.
You should pay attention to this, lad.
It's all about the importance of suitable protection.
ASHLEY: And protection doesn't get any more important
than when you're here, Wallace - space.
Although radical new suit designs are in the pipeline,
the modern Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU suit,
is currently all that protects a space-walking astronaut
from the extremes of temperature,
the bursts of cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space.
RADIO CHATTER
This is one of the spacesuits you'd wear
if you went outside of the space station or the space shuttle.
It's like a little miniature spaceship.
This gives you your environment, this protects you
and gives you that environment that you would have on Earth.
ASHLEY: All the spacesuits used by NASA come from here - ILC Dover in Delaware.
But these ladies didn't always make spacesuits.
Before life support, it was bosom support.
Wait till you see this!
The first cross-your-heart bra with soft tricot sides.
Perforated latex, or Playtex,
was developed by the same company back in the 1930s.
Latex's elasticity wasn't just good for holding in waistlines,
it was good for holding in pressure.
Here on Earth we're surrounded by air, pressing in on our bodies.
But out in space there's no atmosphere, so no pressure.
What does that mean?
Well, check this out.
Imagine the liquid in that beaker is your blood.
When the air is sucked out of
the surrounding bell jar, the reduction in pressure
causes the liquid to boil.
That's what would happen to your blood
if you were out in space without a spacesuit.
But a latex suit can be filled like a balloon, with enough air
to exert sufficient pressure to prevent that happening.
And latex is just one of the layers woven into the modern spacesuit.
It's got this outer layer right here, which can absorb the impacts
of little micrometeorite particles at very high speeds
and break them up and not allow it to penetrate the surface.
It's also white in colour because it has to reflect that sunlight.
But it takes more than just a bit of whiter-than-white fabric
to deflect the full power of solar radiation.
We have five layers of aluminised mylar and I think of those as...
like mirrors, if you will. When that sunlight penetrates through,
the radiation from the sun, it actually reflects it away.
There's five layers because four isn't enough and six is too much,
that's the easy way to explain it.
With all these layers and associated life-support systems,
the suit weighs in at a whopping 127 kgs.
That's probably more than the astronaut does!
Fortunately, floating around in zero gravity
does make it a little easier to put on.
Here on Earth, it's not an easy suit to get into, but I'd be glad to demonstrate that here in this room.
Despite its bulk, the suit is so well-designed
the astronaut can carry out virtually any kind of movement,
short of the tango.
Some of the gauges might be difficult to see,
but a handy mirror and some back-to-front letters solve that.
There is, however, one thing the designers do seem to have forgotten.
If you have an itchy nose, you have a lot of problems scratching it
so you have to hope you can get over to the edge somewhere
and find a little spot to scratch it.
So if you have itchy noses, you might not want to be an astronaut.
And don't even think of sneezing!
But if that's the worst of your problems, those suits must be pretty good.
Very impressive, but not a patch on
my Total-Protection Hazard-Free Safety Suit.
Hee-hee!
It renders me instantly impervious to harm.
Come on, pooch, do your worst!
See? Not a scratch!
Now, finally,
let's take a look at my top six health-and-safety nightmares.
It's over to Goronwy, our archive librarian.
Right-oh, Mr Wallace.
Yes, in this week's countdown we've got six inventions
that are seriously bad for your health and safety.
At number six, let's think this invention through.
You're at a cocktail party and somebody says,
"Ooh, look up there at that chandelier,"
and before you can say Bryn Terfel,
you've got an eyeful of creme de menthe.
Where's the health and safety in that?
And he's smoking! Daft!
At number five, the zeppelin is a great invention,
but here's a health-and-safety tip -
never under any circumstances stand under a zeppelin
when somebody is flushing the lavatory.
CROWD SCREAMS
It's quite important to remember that.
In fourth place, quite apart from that fact that this device is a gun,
so there's a health-and-safety issue straightaway,
he's going to put his back out bending over like that!
And bad backs don't win wars.
And talking of bad backs, number three
of our rundown of health-and-safety nightmares is the hover stretcher,
designed so the stretcher-bearers don't have to bear the stretcher.
Mind you, it is a pity that protecting their health and safety
will leave the patients suffocated by fumes and dust.
At number two, what do you do with your old razor blades?
Why not put them in a garden rake to mow down all those weeds?
I'll tell you why not - because, like me,
you don't want to cut your foot off.
And our number one health-and-safety nightmare
is this invention, which is totally against building regulations.
Whoever plumbed that in is just giving the trade a bad name.
Well, viewers, I hope that I've succeeded in driving home
some very useful safety points.
SUIT POPS
CRASHING Whoooaaaahhh!
Gromit! CRASH!
Run the credits, lad.
I'm feeling a bit deflated.
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details of our road show,
as well as lots of ways to get you inventing.
Pull your finger out and get clicking!