GENESIS
I would have to say that invention has at once illuminated and blighted my life, though in truth like Linus Torvalds I have always felt that life is nothing much without a project. I have thus lived it somewhat vicariously, the livings that I earned serving principally to fuel the indulgence of coming up with different ideas. There are only really two sorts of people in life viz. those who accept things for what they are, and those who invariably see a need for change in much that we do or much that we use. As often as not in the airline industry in which I passed the bulk of my time I would be characterised as one who argued with the instructors in between visits to transport museums.
Inventors are cherished in the UK, which despite boasting the foremost industrial schools of design still values the ~ almost invariably guy ~ in the garden shed. The difference between the UK and US in this regard however is that in the latter case something is supposed to come of it, whereas in the former it merely forms a thread in the great tapestry of British cultural individualism. Specifically it is seen to be something that meets some immediate exigency, like Whittle’s pursuit of his jet engine during WW2 in the face of considerable domestic opposition.
I’d had a brief flirtation with the nascent days of desk-top computing, although I never once enjoyed or felt the remotest need to learn to program one of these things, feeling then as I do now that the literary use of language is altogether the more satisfying. It is strange then and not a little inconvenient that I should be persisting in the design of a multicopter that relies in the main upon sophisticated hard- and software. Although I did get to administer commercial systems in the form of what were then known as minicomputers during a long period in London, it was word-processors that first got me involved in their realm. At the time these were dedicated systems that replaced the electric typewriters of the time with electronic document systems and printers.
As a by-product of this I would go on to some success with developing a secure signature system, although whilst the conventional signature still guarantees most legal proceedings at the end of the day, they rarely feature in day to day means of verification of ID. The project did open doors however, funded as it was by the same UK body that drew on national sources of funding in order to back the hovercraft, MRI scanning and most pandemically-relevant today, monoclonal antibody research. At the same time I would get to meet Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory, the co-founder of packet-switching, and lunch with Donald Kitz who would be part of the team in the UK that commercialised the early computers developed at Manchester in the form of desk-top calculators.
In the end and despite the best efforts of my mentor Peter Hawkes, nothing much would come of it and if I have drawn two conclusions about entrepreneurialism in my lifetime it would be that the ultimate success of any number of inventions is down to serendipity and that the common ingredient in every case is the ability to stick with it through which and thin. It is a criticism of most inventors that they are too soon working on the Mark II before seeing much success with the Mark I and I am as guilty as any on this regard, though the condition does appear to have improved with age. In fact wit the multicopter I have gotten to the point where sticking with it in the face of unreason has become the modus operandi and a means by which I measure its worth, much like the Dadaists and their determination to pursue art purely for art’s sake.
The number of patent specifications that I have filed literally runs then to hundreds, although a criticism of the system would probably be that if anything starting the process at the Patent Office is if anything too simple and accessible. This is true now moreso than ever, when everything can be done on line and I have long been on at the organisation to persuade them to get into ‘technical disclosure’ too i.e. a defensive means of publication that does not involve commercial rights but does prevent anyone else from pursuing a monopoly using the self-same idea. I did then in earlier days spend many happy hours in the original Patent Office co-located with the Science Reference Library in Holborn in central London ~ now sadly decamped online and located near to Cardiff as a part of the government’s largely failed efforts to re-energise the outlying regions of the UK.
Thus it would be that once finished with a glancing encounter with computing in London I would instead occupy the airports around its periphery as I pursued a career in aviation that began as so many others did at the time with work as a flying instructor. I think this earned me at one stage just twenty-three pence an hour, whilst latterly as a captain in China this would have risen to over twenty thousand pounds per month after tax. Truth is in life, it makes little difference, the more you earn merely fuelling a concomitant growth in spending and invariably it is the early days of struggle that multi-millionaires invariably look back at most fondly. For an inventor too cash is in many ways a curse, the best of technology often proving to be the means to reduce a reliance on an abundance of resources to the minimum.
Thus it was that whilst I would go on to spend over fifteen thousand hours flying principally in airliners, as often as not in the class-room or simulator I would be looking out the window dreaming of other things, as indeed I would in the cruise at 35,000 feet; although they do say be careful what you wish for, and that is certainly something I am most conscious of nowadays as I survey a cold and draughty workshop. “I’ve suffered for my art,” as Neil Innes put it, “and now it’s your turn.”
Accordingly you might not be surprised to hear that the current layout for the outline of the drone I’ve pioneered would be conceived at around 35,000 feet over the South China Sea. As often as not my airline career involved working around the world as a contractor, which in turn meant that a great deal of time would be spent away in hotels. Here there would be nothing to do once the local sights had been taken in than either exercise the body in the gym or the mind with invention. In truth therefore this meant that I could develop these ideas in the hotel room itself ~ often re-cast as an artisanal workshop with a bench and tooling ~ beside the flight-deck where an ample supply of NOTAMS (or notices to airmen) provided the necessary stationery for sketching.
I cannot even recall how or why it occurred to me to design a multicopter, or how and where I first discovered the notion that these things were becoming big enough to support a pilot on flight. I do know that if anything I came late to the party, having been preceded by the likes of BlackFly and its ‘Opener’ by any number of years development. The key though to this emergent industry was however the fact that one single complex drive-train like that seen on a helicopter could be replaced by any number of electrical motors, such was the power of these along with that of batteries and processors. For the entire shebang is basically only possible off the back of the computer industry I had flirted with prior to flying, albeit reduced in proportion and enlarged in processing power.
I have always leaned toward the design of structures before and beyond all else, these forming the foundation to my mind of all else that follows. As often as not this is from necessity, my lacking the expertise to do much else and especially as regards the software, firmware and hardware associated with the sort of miniaturised components that feature say in your smartphone. I’ve always been adept at seeing the bigger picture however, having been described so far as this current project is concerned at least as someone who figuratively holds it together like glue.
Accordingly, given the need for a minimum number of motors and propellers to keep the thktg flying in the event of a a single failure ~ something I was daily prepared for in flying airliners ~ then the task involved the best way to dispose these around my human frame. In the event this would appear in the patent specification in the form of a noughts-and-crosses outline (tic-tac-toe in the US) or else the pattern in a ‘9’ domino in which I may appear in the centre surrounded by eight propeller disks disposed around a square. This to my mind featured the most aerodynamically efficient arrangement conceivable, albeit when it came to vertical lift in particular.
But there was more, too. Helicopters had evolved from a basic arrangement wherein the engine sat either at the feet of the crew as in the Whirlwind or Wessex in the UK, else behind their seat as in the Bell-47 or Robinson R22, to relocating it out of the way above the cabin. This allowed for shorter runs to the principal users in the form of main and tail rotors, and had become possible because the development of the jet turbine meant that sufficient power could be drawn from a relatively lightweight and compact unit.
Nonetheless it meant that at the outset every helicopter began life on a blank canvas as a structure that had to support a deal of weight up top, in the way that any architect had conventionally to allow sufficient strength in every domestic house to support a roof comprising decidedly weight tiles. It was many years before I realised why the roof of a house has to be among its heaviest elements: because otherwise it would be blowing off in the first gale. From my own point of view returning to outlining a flying machine, however, this encumbrance in the overhead would need to be avoided at the outset if the machine were to be optimised in weight reduction and the consequent structural mass.
It was for this reason therefore that the patent specification would feature a hollowed out centre-section such that the surrounding eight motors and ducts could separately take off and levitate themselves into the overhead, form whence they would engage the upper end of the passenger compartment in order to raise it into flight… something like the way that you see those gantry cranes engage with containers at automated ports. This had the benefit of a modularity that meant the flying machine could be designed and built essentially distinct from the passenger compartment, whilst at the same time the latter could be fashioned in any number of imaginative ways like the cylindrical and transparent booths so often seen on sci-fi movies as a means of teleportation.
It also meant that the accommodation might mimic the iconic booth that featured in my childhood in the UK in the form of the GPO or General Post Office telephone box. It had the advantage as a concept of being wholly original compared with the competition out there, beside the fact my father had spent forty years or more working as a telephone engineer. With a young son of my own, I liked the idea that he might in turn become a TELEDRONE engineer in time instead, which is from whence I got the idea for the name. Needless to say the domain had been registered and I may have spent as much as £1700 or thereabouts to secure it, but the balance between developing a brand on the one hand and a product on the other is ever delicate, and I believe it to be money well spent.
Or it will be, so long as I would continue with the development. It was like Tom Hanks had said to Private Ryan when he asked how he could ever repay the debt of being saved from the Germans in WW2… “Earn it.”
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| Motors start, quadcopter rises, you get on. |
