THE CHINA MAIL,
SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1961.
→ Page 5
PETER CHAMBERS
EFFERVESCENT AND AS FRESH AS THE WEEK-END
Dreamers with
perpetual
DON'T think we Bri.
tish are slipping while the Russians and Americans
are staking
out the cosmos for their
#brainwaves...
Our Inventive genius flourishes.
Why, a Scotsman
vented a flat-edged
has just in-
Heraping porridge off the bottom
Office
Wan Invented
notions. and old Patent 1 happened Upon this hands tell of two classies:- cuitrary brainwave ut the
A DEVICE Institute of Patenters at In-
Some ventors, A dim second-floor 3
"raisitut office near Westminster Abbey.
This is a somewhat Dickensian outt which looks after 1,000 British Inventors for C4 4s year each.
Very old brown filling cabinets held unimagined secrets.
The flood
Mrs A. B. Davies, I discover from the fles, has invented an hygienic wiper for telephone mouthpieces.
Mr P. Koronka Corne up trerently with
"soft cooker" and Mr W. T. Wilmot
another male slaving over the hot stove, evidently — has rugis- tered an "automatic jelly pan."
The kitchen-godgel theme is
for
Jane dreamer the int to ladies without taking the hands out of the pockels." You squeezed a rubber bull in your pocket, and air-pressure flowed through s concealed tube to activate the hat-raising device.
NOT DEATH but the fear nf being buried Blive Wos behind Graveyard Alarm Bell. A six-foot string connected the hand of the corpse to a bell above ground, and the instruc- tlons read, In brief: "If you wake up
down there, pull briskly."
I wrote this straight down in iny notebook, then went to see a patent agents and an inventor.
Expensive
The patent agent said: "Chap
not entirely dominant. 1 come I once had Invented across Mr R. H. Fuller's
*
self-
"apparatus for obtaining rotary heating hair-curl sachet. It self- su well it caught movement from falling weights, heated itself
and there is also an "anti-snatch are in a legal office and nearly spindle moulder, on the books, burned an eminent Q.C."
me
Luk Ie All this is just a drop in the
anything I bucket, a side-eddy in the and fancied patenting would cost me Inventive Awiri that floods from £20 up to £150 in fees for patent (Britain through the Patent Ofice every a provinsi year.
only). The putent lasts 10 years. Here, Britain's 400 potent
If I wanted production abroad agents collide with 400 patent it would cost between £00 und examiners, employees o the 100 por country,
expensive business,
fiction.
His
Hiz
All
Valiant and Victor bombers, as well as Britannias nd other civil aircraft, are Atted with what Ruffle calls
"my babies."
0
is His current project carburettor attachment now being examined by one of the big car manufacturers,
This baby is an easy onc," said Rume, it simply cuts down the petrol Intake when the car is moving downhill."
What makes an Inventor tick? Money as much as anything. Ruffle sold be had been resting between Ideas for seven months, but he had to begin work again u bring In the "washers, drachmas, kopecks, or pesetas."
Sharpener
He plays ar dice in his locul
Brighton, mil near
and he owned o lathe Once. "But got rid of it because I found was only using it to sharpen pencils," he said. Inventions come out of the head, and the do-it-yourself power-tools in the garden shed are just good for Lorpentry, chaps, if you don't have the ideas.
I am haunted by the idea of that Scotsman who invented the flat-edged porridge spoon.
"Squire," he said, "I've done
Was he driven mod every nothing but invent things for a
iving since I came back from morning, at breakfast in some because a bowl- installing automatic telephones lonely gien,
shaped spoon couldn't
get the In Shanghat in 1934."
nast sticky remnant of the Aged 57. father of five, Mr Board of Trade, whose job is to It is an
tume is like the inventor out of porridge out of the pot? Did he brood for hours, like James check inventions for originality.
puckets sprout Watt staring at the kettle, OR When it comes to a rest legal but anybody who invents a new pencils and bits of wire. fight over a patent, there is a spinning-jenny crazy round schoolboy glasses adhere the hob and suddenly thinking.
the does not patent it in Japan. very close over the bridge "Steam-engine!"
of equrtroom on the premises
Lays have registers foreign the nose..
further develop- settle it.
ments from Scotland. Like a "We're working at top peak," patents.
Mr Rullie derives more than simply styled instrument - I soid puten! exainer Mr C. Me W. H. "Ruft" Rußte, pro- half his current surtax income, dont care if it is bowl-shaped Vincent Smith. "In 1959, our pessional inventor looked ex- from two master patents; a or flat with which an un- biggest year, we registered
and actly the H. G. Wells and spoke fre detector device
tulored Englishmen can lear 40,000 inventions and we expect with the same cockney-Infected pressure switch, both used in to cat hnggis.
-London Express Service).
to do the same this year."
Expertise
might
You
Visualise Mr Vincent-Smith as a man who is) dally pursued down corridors by some dippy genlus carrying a perpetual-motion machine and crying "Eureka! Eureka!"
The work is, in fact, fairly humdrum, Involving chiefly engineering expertise and o hideous amount of eroas-check- ing through some 450 tons of Patent Onice Mes.
"Most Inventions nowadays come out of company aburi-
Even Russia
voice.
aircraft.
ENTER TWO DANCING
GIRLS
THE
GETTING INTO
ACT TOO LATE.....
AST month, the Na-
Ltional Gallery an- One good early work would
tories and workshops," he said. nounced the purchase of
"The individual Inventor a-two large decorative
counts for probably less than
a tenth of our turnover.
Still, the Individunt Inventor
paintings by Renoir for
#1 Sum not less than
dreams up HOME remarkable £162,000.
Missionary society needs 150
'saints'
THE Church Missionary THE
Society wants 150 more
The total paid was not dis- closed, but a spokesman for the National Gallery stated, humor- ously perhaps, that it did not execed six figures.
have bettered these
by DAVID
CARRITT
Renoir is probably more po- The National Gallery has done Mr Selwyn. Lloyd, in a speech to the House of Com- pular today than any artist who what i can at enormous cost, But it looks as if it has entered mons, explained that the Trea- has ever lived.
the field too inte. sury had granted £182,000 to-
Colour reproductions of his If this is all it can achieve for warde the purchase of these work sell by the million, Renoir, a prolife artist who pictures because, with the re- museums and millionaires lived to be seventy-eight, what turn of Renoir's masterpiece, Les everywhere compete recklessly can it hope to buy in the way Paraplules, to Dublin. the No for his best pletures, the moder- of Manet, tonul Gallery no longer owned ately rich pay what they can to Lautrec?
Degas, Toulouse- a single major work by the secure the trides of his aff-days. There are sill plenty of gaps great French painter, and thut
Until the purchase of these in the gallery's marvellous col- In view of the Increasing value
two
the pictures,
National Iection and rarity of his paintings the Gallery possessed only
century of pre-10th two painting-real gaps tint show acquisition of these two decora- examples of his work, a rather distinctly because the collection tions seemed imperative, and
stodgy portrait of Madame as a whole is so complete. the price reasonable.
Seri, and a reclining nude, The early Stenese School, for remarkable for her lack of example has splendid examples
charm.
of every great Slenese painter
"saints" in the next five Mock Oriental
years,
And general secretary Canon Max Warren told the society's
verance.
да
Straining
4.5
If the Trustees wish to build except Simone Martini, who up a representative collection of historically as important and 10th Century French painters, artistically rewarding Painted around 1910 for the then they obviously had to Renoir. 102nd annual meeting in Lon-dining-room of Monsleur Gang- acquire something considerably
one of Renoir's most ce- better than either of these. dun the type of men and women nat,
One great Renoir would have that are needed.
voted patrons, they depict two They must possess the quali. dancing girls in vaguely Turkish been cuough. But where to find
sort of mock- 117 tica of humility And self-costume-the
After fifty years of carer Gaps of this sort will bo effacement; patience and perser-oriental fantasies popular in rich
But homes everywhere from the appreciation by every Western hard and costly to fill. middle of the 19th Century until country except England, the there is every argument for the great pure compositions which National Gallery straining to do Only In artistic quality do were his supreme contribution so before it is too late. they differ from the fancy dress to art have all passed frretrley- If Londoner want to see the absurdities of Albert Moore and ably out of the market.
Impressionisis and post-Impres- Alma-Tadema.
The Renoirs that do occasion- sionists at their best, they can the Courtauld ally change hands are either always go to slight or were painted when he Galleries in Woburn Square.
All the was past
omens indicate that, the height of his
however generous the Treasury powers.
becomes, they will never And better examples at the National Gallery.
LITTLE POWER
They must expect to contrl- bute ideas while only rarely being power to put them
into effect.
Soclety missionaries, he raid,
were always guests with no
sécurity. After years of learn-
the 1914-18 war.
Breathtaking
Naturally enough, the new
ing all about a country's people acquisitions have attracted much they could suddenly find their attention and admiration. They visas cancelled without ex-have breathtaking /. fluency. planation.
Crippled
It is pathelle and humiliating that many provincini murcums In America con boast finer 10th- century French pictures than the
sweet, rather sugary, dolour har- For at least fifteen years, "That," he paktī, "is part of monies, gracefully languid do- unili his death in 1919, he was National Gallery, what is means to be a saint, sigo and a good dash" of sex increasingly crippled by rheu Is there really aný point in and a missionary today."
appent.
matiem of the hands, and our attempting to rival them -The meeting called for a big- fly virtue of scale alone (the although many of his late works, when the opportunities gest-ever recruiting campaign figures are life-size) they are like the two Dancing Girls, have virtually ceased to exist and the greni voluptuqur power, no one price even for the second-rate, to meat commitments in Africa certainly imposing, and the East.
But did the National Gallery could claim that they show him has become cxtrditant?_ -Jondon Expresa Zervice), really have to buy them? at him best.
-London Express Service).
have
213
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