Trevor Baylis

Trevor Baylis was born in Kilburn in 1937 and grew up in Southall. He left school at fifteen for a soil mechanics laboratory, studying engineering one day a week, and swam for Britain as a teenager, missing the 1956 Olympic team by a fraction. National service made him a physical training instructor. He sold swimming pools, then earned a living as a stunt swimmer and underwater escape artist in a glass tank, including a spell in a Berlin circus.

Friends in that trade were often injured, and in the 1980s he began designing devices for disabled people, a range of one-handed tools he called Orange Aids. Around 1991 he saw a television programme about the spread of AIDS in Africa, which said that radio was the best way to reach people but that batteries were unaffordable. Within half an hour in his workshop he had joined a toy motor, a music box spring and a transistor radio. Winding the handle played the radio.

He filed a patent in 1992 and was turned down by everyone he approached. In 1994 the BBC programme Tomorrow\'s World showed the prototype, backers appeared, and a factory in Cape Town began production, employing many disabled workers. The Freeplay radio won design awards and was sold across the world.

The design was re-engineered around his patent and he ended up with little. He lived on Eel Pie Island in the Thames in a house he had built himself, and spent his last twenty years arguing that inventors deserved better protection. He died in 2018.