"The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress."
Trevor Baylis
The evolution of the battery-free radio is a curiously British success story. The tale begins in 1991 with part- time inventor Trevor Baylis (b. 1937) watching a television documentary about the spread of AIDS in Africa. It suggested that the epidemic could only be halted through education. A major problem, however. was that poverty and a lack of basic technology made communication to remote parts of Africa difficult.
Baylis saw an immediate solution—a simple and cheap radio set that required no household current or battery power to operate. Crudely cobbling together parts from an old transistor radio, a small electric motor from a toy car, and the clockwork mechanism from a music box, he created a prototype powered by a clockwork wind-up mechanism that drove a tiny internal electrical generator. Fully wound, the spring provided fourteen minutes of uninterrupted power.
Baylis patented the idea in 1993, but failed to convince potential investors of its worth. National interest was stirred in 1994, however, with an appearance on the BBC's program Tomorrow's World, and within a year his invention—now known as the Baylis Freeplay Radio—was in mass production in South Africa.
