Inventors – eccentric old men living in tumbledown, cluttered houses – would seem to only exist in works of fiction, like Dr Emmett Brown in 1980s film Back to the Future.
But in an age where most new bits of technology are produced by vast teams of researchers and technicians, Trevor Baylis is one of those rare men who can genuinely give ‘inventor’ as his occupation. 
His success is grounded in his ability to spot a need, usually among disabled or impoverished people, and develop a simple, elegant solution. Baylis’ most famous invention, the wind-up radio, is typical of this: it brought technology we take for granted in the west to a wide swathe of the third world. He began developing the prototype after watching a documentary on AIDS and realising how radio broadcasts could help fight the disease.
Baylis would be nowhere, however, if he did not have great stamina and a dogged determination in the face of public indifference. His wind-up radio was turned down by everyone he approached, until a slot on BBC’s Tomorrow’s World brought the product to general attention.
Design awards, documentaries, meetings with Nelson Mandela, an OBE and eleven honorary doctorates soon followed – not to mention a factory in South Africa churning out the radios, now equipped with a solar panel.
Baylis’ back-story is interesting, as one would expect. As a teenager, he was part of the Great Britain swimming team, and later – having trained as an engineer – worked for Purley Pools, the company making the first ever free-standing swimming pools.
Crowds turned up to see Baylis perform diving, underwater and other swimming stunts in the new pools. He used money raised from performing underwater escape stunts for the Berlin Circus to set up Shotline Steel Swimming Pools, his first company.
Baylis’s concern with the underprivileged goes back to this era, when contact with injured stuntmen friends instilled in him a particular empathy with the disabled, for whom he later developed products called Orange Aids.
His difficulty in securing funding for his wind-up radio led Baylis to set up his own foundation to support innovators in his field. Trevor Baylis Brands plc helps provide inventors with professional and financial services.
