Inventing the Clockwork Radio w/ Trevor Baylis | Tomorrow's World | Earth Science

[@CrazyChiv]

Good ol' Trevor. The wind-up radio was a fantastic idea - it's a shame so many people were too short sighted to realize it.

[@Kneedragon1962]

Thanks Britlab, and thank you Trevor. Not trying to steal thunder or anything, but I can very clearly remember an episode of the TV show The Inventors, here in Australia, in about 1975, where they had a wind up power source, so they asked the inventor how he got the idea and he explained all he was doing was taking away the pedals and adding a spring. Huh? The Australian Outback School of the Air had been operating school services to kids on remote properties since the 1930s, over shortwave two way radios, and while they could be powered by a battery, or mains power if you had it, the base setup was a set of pedals under the table and a generator. They ran that system for over 30 years. The modern equivalent is a 2 way internet connection and a virtual classroom, but I don't think there's a pedal version of that...

[@thordwolf]

I love Travor Balis, and its a shame what happened to him and his idea in the end, the people that wanted to work with him in the end cut him out by replacing the windup tech with a wind up battery that worked but not were near as well as his original idea would have. Then he lost his lake home due to having lost a lot to the business. Its a real shame he couldn't get it off the ground. Maybe if there was a kickstarter effort to get the guy to make a newer version that would work for modern devices he could finally get the dream running again, like clockwork. Btw his original mp3 player is a damn good machine, I have one with me and although its not completely wind-up its so useful I keep it around for emergencies.

[@2157AF]

I assume hes dead now?

[@thordwolf]

Optimax71 Nope he's still ticking along, here's a article by the Telegraph on what he's up to now. www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/fameandfortune/10961486/Trevor-Baylis-I-should-have-made-a-lot-more-from-my-wind-up-radio-invention.html

[@RitsuTainakaFin]

@@thordwolf He is now dead.

[@bangerbangerbro]

I didn't know that is what happened. I knew they made a battery version but I didn't know that was a technique to get around a patent. I just finished reading his autobiography but it was written before that happened I guess. That is a shame. I think for a while I never thought much of this concept, being used to the modern dynamo torches that never seem able to charge their batteries, so when I found out that these actually use a spring I realised that that is the distinctive characteristic. The spring can probably take more cycles, is probably cheaper to produce, and it is obvious when you have charged it - you don't keep cranking and then try to use it and all the energy has disappeared into the void somehow. Forgetting about discharging, the charging must be more efficient as well as you can just compress a string rather than having to have battery management regulated current and voltage. A spring won't have much discharge either. There are these Nippon solar and dynamo radios floating around on the internet that look like they are older but I can't figure out if they actually are. I think they work with a battery though. I didn't know there was an mp3 player.

[@thordwolf]

Yup it was basically "how can we out price the original so that we are the only ones in town that can sell so called clockwork radios to poor people)", it was the workaround that killed a potential system that could still be used today. If there was a way to get the patent design remade easier it could make for a cool emergency battery charger or even a sudo battery replacement in difficult times.@@bangerbangerbro

[@Jim54_]

I wonder if you could use the clockwork radio principle to power a probe that won’t be needed to be activated for decades, or possibly even longer. Like a probe sent to Alpha Centauri perhaps, with Solar Radiometers on the probe to both activate the probe as it nears the Solar system its aimed towards, and recharge the clockwork mechanism like a giant self rewinding watch that never stops running. The electronics would have to be powered like a clockwork radio, negating the need for batteries or Nuclear power, which will degrade over extremely long periods. This is the issue with the voyager probes as they age, despite the fact that the electronics and computers within the probe are functioning perfectly after nearly half a century of constant use. The probe would have to be large and capable of making independent decisions, which may require a large amount of older hardier computer chips. You could even go a step further, and have small landers on the larger probe that could be fired and directed towards other planets. They could be hardy probes, with a self contained non rechargeable clockwork power source of their own. Preferably a hardy probe to gather planetary data quickly, similar to the Venetian and Titan probes of the past. The only issue would be having a secondary rechargeable clockwork mechanism to power the transmitter, which would have to be very powerful for the extremely long distances to earth. Storage of information until broadcast would be vital. If Spacex can reduce the cost of launches further, perhaps we could have a mother ship probe that could launch smaller satellites like a Clockwork Cassinis, to examine planetary systems and their moons, as well as launch the aforementioned smaller probes. This is a bit long winded and hypothetical, but its worth thinking about

[@n9brb]

We have three wind up radios at our house in the middle of nowhere in upper Wisconsin (middle of the Chequamegon National Forest).

[@mcfcguvnors]

Also worth pointing out that bayliss WUR`s - will work after an EMP strike :) as they arent switched on ...genius

[@walnut5]

Trevor Bayliss is one of the great Brits of our time. Legend!

[@BBC600]

I just heard about this man today and found this clip about him. RIP

[@totallyfrozen]

Sounds great! Unfortunately, the Baygen FreePlay radio that used his design was junk. The springs and/or cranks on them were notorious. They’d break after light to moderate use. I, personally, had one that broke the first time I used it outdoors in an environment where I NEEDED it to work. I don’t know if it was Freeplay’s materials or workmanship, or if it was Baylis’s design-but those Baygen radios were junk.

[@yousorooo]

About time to make a clockwork phone!

[@naweyeeminn3326]

Is the energy diagram correct? \Kinetic energy ----Strain energy----Electrical energy---Sound energy.

[@DP-hy4vh]

I got two of his BayGen Radios (Model A & Model B) and a BayGen Freeplay Torch (Lantern in the US). I originally found about the radios via Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM radio program and the C. Crane Company, a radio supplier. They're probably collectors items now that they're no longer made.

[@bangerbangerbro]

The second model seems to be quite common but the original one with short wave seems to be more of a collector's item.

[@ASilentS]

I like the british gas-powered radios the gas companies gave away to dissuade people from hooking up to the electric grid.

[@chrishenniker5944]

Were they powered by a thermoelectric set up, or a generator powered by a piston engine?

[@bangerbangerbro]

@@chrishenniker5944 Thermoelectric set up. There is one at the national gas museum in Leicester. Nice museum, free entry, but only open on tuesdays and wednesdays for some reason.

[@HeylonNHP]

I have a dynamo FM / AM (MW) / LW / SW radio I use on my bedside table. Similar concept and very useful.

[@xSkitZx]

The large electronic companies won't take it on because they have masses of shares in battery companies. These will only be used, like the video says, in places where batteries don't sell very well.

[@TheOriginalEviltech]

like in the savanna, the jungle and some northern isolated areas... No thank you, i will use my phone for that. I have a universal charger (solar, mechanical and plug in car, wall socket or whatever). And it's waterproof.

[@TimpBizkit]

What I'm most curious about in the clockwork radio is how Trevor got the spring to wind down more slowly with reduced volume settings. If you have a bit of electrical knowledge, you'll know that you can use a motor as a generator. You'll also find that higher power loads increase the torque required to turn the generator at a set speed, whereas low power/current loads make the generator easy to turn. Higher generator speeds give higher voltages. So when you turn the volume down on a radio, any generator running it gets easier to turn. This would mean a spring powering it would have less resistance and so tend to unwind faster, which is the opposite of what you want. You want the spring to turn more slowly when you turn the volume down, but the easy to turn low power demand generator is giving you the opposite! Worse it might cause a voltage spike that could damage the radio. When you turn up the volume on the radio, the opposite problem. The generator sees a lower impedance load that is demanding lots of current and so it becomes harder to turn. And the spring which you want lots of power from has now slowed right down due to the difficult to turn generator! Whilst you could install some kind of automatic transmission that shifts the spring into a taller gear at low volumes and a shorter gear at high volumes, it seems quite mechanically complicated to do so. You could instead install a variable DC-DC converter which steps up the voltage, so the motor sees a high current low voltage (and the radio sees a lower current medium voltage) which will make it harder to turn saving spring energy at low volumes. And you could have it step down the voltage at high levels so the motor can spin really fast making high voltage medium current which is then converted to medium voltage high current to run the radio loud. This is the electrical equivalent of changing the gear ratio. So anybody the wiser to how it's done? How do I make the motor harder to turn at low power instead of high power so the spring winds down more slowly?

[@TimpBizkit]

I think I've worked out what it is. The generator is connected to a capacitor in parallel with the radio. When the capacitor is fully charged, it is swapped out of the circuit for a shorting wire on the generator. The shorting wire is to put resistance on the generator and make it turn at minimal speed when it is not in use. The radio runs down the capacitor until a circuit detects that the voltage in it is low. The shorting wire is switched out of the circuit and the capacitor is swapped back in to recharge. This cycle repeats multiple times a minute. A loud radio will discharge the capacitor more quickly and it is automatically switched back into the circuit more times a minute than a quiet radio does. This also works out why the unwinding radio oscillates in speed instead of unwinding at a constant rate. There are transistor circuits that will switch based on a changing voltage at the base. One such device is called a Schmitt trigger that can provide an output when the capacitor charges to Vmax and keep signal till it discharges to Vmin. And also the opposite switching the capacitor back in.

[@bangerbangerbro]

@@TimpBizkit That is pretty smart, thanks for that. I just finished reading his autobiography and I'm sure at some point it mentions some kind of automatic gearbox though may have just been for a prototype. I think it also mentions that only the "2nd generation" version has a feature to adjust the speed of spring discharge, so maybe they used the method you describe, and the earlier ones used a gearbox or some more crude method to just regulate the voltage?

[@johnnybg_1936]

In a commercial on Discovery he explained "The idea came to me, when I was on a trip abroad.". It was. In a train carriage. In a conversation. Because of a headline in the newspaper he carried with him ( the Independent), the topic was Aids, and the problem of informing the people most struck, because the people in Africa were too poor to buy batteries. (This explanation was given in Panorama, the BBC program the week prior.). I suggested to couple a handheld Dynamo that was used in WW2 in The Netherlands as a torch (we call it "Knijpkat", because you squeeze a handle), to the mechanism of a WW1 grammophone, as transistors don't require that much current (A). "I still got one in the shed" was his reply. Whe he left the train, to get the boat to Harwich, I added neither do LED's need that much current; it being a second apparatus to power this way. When I saw him in Tomorrow's World, I recognised him as that fellow-traveller. Good on him, he tinkered it. I didn't have the means to do so. Mind you, the mechanism in that kind of grammophone ís a clockwork.

[@bangerbangerbro]

That's interesting. In his book that story is adjusted to say he thought of it after watching panorama, falling asleep, and then waking up to a program with a gramophone in it.

[@johnnybg_1936]

@@bangerbangerbro lol Well, that was not what happened. As I already mentioned, he appeared in a clip on Discovery, walking along a beach, and said "The idea came to me when I was on a trip abroad.". In another peace of video, speaking to students (that is how I interpreted that), he told them "I always ... this lateral thinking.". So, nothing about "It appeared to me in a dream.".

[@bangerbangerbro]

@@johnnybg_1936 Yes that's why it said it is interesting that there are two conflicting stories. Also he didn't say in the book it came to him in a dream, but after a dream, anyway that's how I interpreted it, it wasn't clear.

[@theirisheditor]

I wonder if the current wind-up radios (and torches) were based on this idea, even if dynamo based instead using a clockwork spring... I remember getting a combination solar and dynamo radio a year or two after this aired, which was brilliant at the time for a number of reasons. It worked during power cuts and could be stored away without any risk of batteries leaking inside. With its solar panel, it operated at a moderate volume without winding in a well-lit window. I use to leave it on a talk-radio station while on holidays as it gave the impression a TV is on during the day, followed by a timer-operated lamp in the evening. It lasted a few years before its dynamo failed.

[@johnnybg_1936]

They must have been. See my other comment. But he also wasinterviewed in commercials on Discovery. In those he explained "The idea came to me when I was on a trip abroad.", and that the company was worth a 3.000.000 English Pounds.

[@Pottery4Life]

I very much like the subject matter, however, just "stumbling in" mid-sentence to start the video is rather clumsy and a bit amateurish. This is BBC, right?

[@zenzylok]

Amusing device, hopefully developing countries have benefited from it by this point in time.

[@Ed.E]

RIP 5 March 2018

[@simonhawker9277]

cannot find one for sale anywere

[@DP-hy4vh]

They quit making them. You might find a good used one on eBay.

[@neilvanhorne7410]

Kick Starter. I want one.

[@TheXxkornmunkyx666]

So at Brit Lab we have decided not to make any original videos and have instead gone with showing you film clips from 80's BBC documentaries...

[@wyvernlord23]

Or for the sake of having multiple records. Decided to upload this stuff to the internet so new audiences who didn't have the privilege of being born in the 80's can see it, and so prevent it from becoming lost to the aether. Hopefully the'll upload other documentaries such as The World At War, so at least some things aren't forgotten.

[@FRMmega]

But they do make original content...

[@BrightSpark]

***** Maybe they said "slope" within a 500km radius of an asian or something.

[@Kaslai]

I love it though. While I do miss James May, I'm glad I didn't drop the channel during their relatively long dead phase. I really do enjoy these nuggets of video from the 80's.

[@chaquator]

Felipe Ritter last one they made was inaccurate

[@MrRockstar1968]

Did they ever eventually manufacture these radios?

[@lukasgayer5393]

No

[@MrRockstar1968]

@@lukasgayer5393 Shame. Maybe it's something they should do.

[@MrRockstar1968]

@@lukasgayer5393 Looks like they do manufacture them after all. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aHnEhJ-kfpatrM0

[@bangerbangerbro]

Yes they did. Company is still around I think.

[@Osamabahudila]

ما كان حلم اصبح حقيقة واقعة. المخترع د-اسامه باهديلة

[@MrRockstar1968]

We shouldn't need a snotty nosed self proclaiming hierarchy council to tell us what we can or can not manufacture.

[@Curi0u50ne]

RIP

[@thespykernaf]

Where did James May go? #BringBackJames

[@joemaples6243]

The problem was his ethnicity. Be honest.