Voices of Science

Let’s keep going through your various inventions then. Well, there was wave recorder, the cloverleaf buoy. Dave Cartwright, who was the originator of that, and he – he was talking to me on a train journey down – I think it was somewhere like Edinburgh down to London, and he was talking to me about it. And we – they had different ideas how it should be done and he asked me whether there was a practical way of doing it. And I said, yes, it was simpler because it contained only one gyro instead of four gyros. And you had a reference to the framework and the buoys, which would make it much simpler for analysing and more accurate for a figure. So it was done – designed on the back of a Gold Flake 20 packet of cigarettes that somebody – a cigarette carton that somebody had left in the carriage and we sketched it out there [laughs]. And that we gave to Frank Pearce [ph] afterwards and said, ‘Could we do this?’ And I told him, he’d have to make the tubes to hold the buoys out of a good quality aluminium and to make them light, ‘cause you’ve got to float these speed buoys and you want to throw them [ph] halfway up the side of the buoy. And we took it to NPL when I’d got it all made. Everybody said it would sink [laughs], but it didn’t, it floated halfway up the floats, the three floats, and I was very pleased about that. But unfortunately we flooded the main long tank at the NPL because I called John Ewing [ph], a person who worked there, and asked him for a very long wave, and of course it travelled fast. But for some reason or other it was too high, this wave [laughs], and we flooded the lift shaft and everything else and the tank at NPL. John Ewing [ph] was very upset about that [laughs]. He didn’t think, and we didn’t think, what would happen if we put a very long wave in to prove – prove that it was working properly, we had it recording. But we did and we managed to mop up the NPL before we left and it worked very well indeed.