Voices of Science

Oh, I was furiously building with Meccano. And I had these instruction books, and there was a boy on the cover making the Forth Bridge. And I decided I wanted to be an engineer and build the Forth Bridge. [Laughs] And Meccano sets came in numbers. You started with number one, I suppose, I think I started with number two. Then you got number two A, which built you up to a three. And then three A built you up to a four. And I got as far as six, and I desperately wanted a six A because then I’d be able to build a motor car and a slot machine, which worked. And I never got a six A, which would have brought me up to a seven. I got a few extras, actually, like motor car tyres, erm, in order to build one or two of the number seven things. But that was the sort of thing that I was keen on. And my brother was given a chemistry set and I was given an electrical set. He became a chemist and I became a physicist.