Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A scientist and inventor who presented BBC's The Great Egg Race and founded the Institute for Bioengineering at Brunel University, creating devices for space, s
On the island
Eight records
because it soars, it liberates me. I feel like a bird or a gull who can who can manage to fly.
It's not really technological at all. It's Marlene Dietroy singing Lily Marlene. Now this has this app this appears to two characteristics. One of them is it is sentimental. And I there is no doubt that I have nostalgic and sentimental and so on, which scientists I suppose really really ought not to do.
because it's a sheer verve and power which he puts into the song, which I admire.
And it recalls to me a time when everything appeared to be alight with the world.
And I I really met it first as the um a theme song uh to a television film about the About Ark Oil. But it it um it happened to occur at a time of of a what we might call a naval adventure of my own.
Richard Denton and Martin Cook
Well my next record, not unreasonably, is a theme music to the Great Air Grace, which I can generally say has changed my life.
The Man I LoveFavourite
It was made by my wife for me around 1958 or 1959. Now, I relatively recently, within the last four years, was very ill. I temporarily died, had a defibrillator put into my chest, was in Hammersett Hospital for some time, and my wife visited me every day, at least twice. And I recognize there the depth of the relationship between my wife and myself.
It isn't exactly a desert island sort of situation, um but uh I went to Japan uh at a time when the Soviet Union was still in in full control and a friend of mine and I decided to do it the hard way and travel Trans-Siberian and came to a town called Nahotka.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:10What did [Richard Dimbleby] swallow?
I was one of the people who had developed a tiny radio transmitter which you could swallow. … The gastroenterologists in those day those days were much interested why had people had pain in their tummies. … And I gave one of these to a Trip Dimblebay because they had picked this up as being an interesting device. And I had brought a little receiver with me, which was tuned in such a way that when I poked him in the stomach, so as to increase the pressure inside his gut, it um produced um a squeal.
Presenter asks
3:28What was the first thing you ever invented?
I remember, for instance, for some reason which I don't now remember, inventing a device uh to stop film overheating in a in a film projector. And my father, who was really quite keen to to encourage this kind of thing with me, actually got some serious physicist to come and talk to me. … Perhaps I should add at this point here that I owe a great deal to my father in terms of being a scientist at all.
Presenter asks
22:01Why the Great Egg Race? Where does the title come from?
Certainly my motive was to have a programme where people were seen to be creative. … And we happened to to find out about an experiment which had been done or a competition which had been run in America on ener energy efficiency lines of making an egg travel on some sort of carriage for the maximum distance with all from all the power derived from a tiny rubber band. So because the BBC didn't have the courage to have an all-problem solving program, which we'd also worked out that we would the first few programmes were mixed. And then we had the courage to say, well, to hell with eggs, we now make this a proper problem solving program, where people are given a problem of which they had no previous inkling.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
25:40Are you one of [the scientists who say there isn't any room for God]?
No, I'm not one of them. Um I've I I feel that I've made my bargain uh with God or the Deity or however I like to call it. that I find no uh contradiction between being a scientist and therefore being a rational person. and believing in God, because however rational you are, you ultimately come to a point, whether it's a Big Bang or whatever your particular theories, cosmology might be, where there really has to be something else.
“I feel somehow my manhood is challenged by a piece of domestic equipment which doesn't work.”
“Elegance in engineering is one of the things which I lecture students on. That a piece of an engineering solution can be just as elegant and as creative as an old master or a symphony or a novel.”
“I find no uh contradiction between being a scientist and therefore being a rational person. and believing in God, because however rational you are, you ultimately come to a point, whether it's a Big Bang or whatever your particular theories, cosmology might be, where there really has to be something else.”