No-one was quite sure what the talk from Dr Dave Southall would be like prior to his visit on Monday 15th November. It was entitled “Technological dead ends – ideas which have gone nowhere” which sounded promising, but the organisers were concerned that a talk from a professor of Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester might be a little too technical. We needn’t have worried, because from the first sentence, it was clear that this was going to be a very entertaining evening.
Dave initially justified his qualification to speak on this topic by briefly running through his CV. After an engineering apprenticeship and a degree from the University of Manchester, he undertook a PhD and then became a lecturer at the university. After 18 months, he detected falling academic standards and being unable to change ‘the system’, he ran away to join a circus! He was an acrobat and developed an act where he appeared to walk across Niagara Falls using elaborate props incorporated into a high wire. He soon became noticed as a chap who could build anything, and started making different mechanical props for fellow performers.
After 15 years of this, he returned to the university to become a lecturer once more whilst continuing to build unusual machines in his shed. He became fascinated with single wheeled machines and the talk to the Society was primarily about such machines which had great potential but never achieved commercial success. We learned of a gyroscopic monorail train which potentially had much reduced costs and greater manoeuvrability. This was never commissioned because people didn’t believe it would work, despite a working model being demonstrated. In later life, Dave completed a Master’s degree in 3D design and became involved with Stoke Mandeville hospital, developing a device which harnessed brainwaves to control a wheelchair. Hard to believe, but it is indeed possible, using an electroencephalograph.
Many of the inventions Dave described never gained widespread acceptance due to a phenomenon known as Cultural Acceptance, which basically means that ‘people only like what they already like’. Any radical concept too different or unusual is treated with mistrust to the point that commercial acceptability is never achieved.
All the audience were enthralled by the talk which lasted far longer than scheduled, and Dave spent a good half an hour answering questions before he could begin his long journey back to Glossop, where he was later on duty as an on-call fire-fighter, the latest entry in his fascinating CV. Thankfully, he didn’t arrive on his monowheel – it didn’t have lights so wouldn’t have been safe.
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