AND GRAY ROLL OUT SELLOTAPE
Sellotape has been generally useful for more than 80 years. Invented in 1937, in Acton, West London, it made short shrift of the wrapping of parcels – once hostage to string – and dozens of around-the-house fixes that required various pots of glues.
It’s a pretty clever tool we rarely stop to appreciate. It’s a simple strip of Cellophane with a rubber resin glue on one side. Developers Colin Kinninmonth and George Gray had planned to call their product Cello-Tape – because that’s what it was (and is) – but Cellophane is a trademark and they were warned off.
Renamed Sellotape, it rapidly became indispensable in the home and the workplace. When the Second World War was declared, two years after Sellotape launched, it was even used for national defence.
As fears of a Blitz grew in 1938 and 1939, so rehearsals for the inevitable began – there were even test runs of blackouts in cities, which gave a taste of the casualties that could be expected in urban environments trying to function in complete darkness. But the immediate concern was the sheer amount of glass potentially flying through the air during a raid. Government issue brown tape soon criss-crossed the nation’s windows – an enduring image of the plucky Home Front. The downside was it required moisture, was fiddly to apply and looked pretty ugly. Sellotape, if you could afford enough rolls, was all but invisible but, apparently, just as effective against ordnance dropped off by the Luftwaffe.
Sellotape continues to be produced in the UK, though the brand is now owned by Henkel, a German company.
STICKLERS FOR THE RULES
Like Hoover for vacuum cleaner, the British use the term Sellotape to mean any variety of sticky tape. The exception to this rule is made by the BBC children’s magazine show, Blue Peter. During their famous ‘makes’ the product is referred to as ‘sticky tape’ so as not to contravene BBC rules about advertising. This is admirable, of course, but past presenters have been known to refer to ‘sticky back plastic’, which is misleading. ‘Sticky back plastic’ refers to cut-to-size sheets of, usually patterned, Cellophane, one side of which has to be peeled off to activate the adhesive. This is the kind of information that wins pub quizzes and one day you’ll thank us for including it.
BELT UP! BUILDER OF WORLD’S FIRST GLIDER ENCOURAGES SERVANT TO CRASH IT
It’s one of the most important inventions of modern times, but the first man to wear a seatbelt didn’t really appreciate it at the time.
In the mid-nineteenth century, John Appleby was a coachman for the ‘father of aviation’ Sir George Cayley. His employer had created a full-sized glider, an aircraft that has no engine but which uses currents of air for flight. As Appleby was about to find out, this would be the world’s first successful glider – complete with a strap device to hold the pilot into the seat.
Appleby’s contribution to aviation cannot be underestimated. He set in stone the aerodynamic forces of flight – weight, lift, drag and thrust – and he dreamt up cambered wings, the fundamental of aircraft design. All of this was about to be put to the test when Cayley’s glider was prepared to take its maiden flight.
But Sir George, then aged 80, was neither light enough nor nimble enough to sit in the driving seat of such a contraption himself, so Appleby was volunteered. Technically Appleby might not have been the first person in the world to fly a glider (if you count probably hundreds of prior attempts), but he was the world’s first wearer of a seatbelt. Just as well. The glider flew 183 m (600 ft) and crash-landed. John reportedly screamed, ‘Sir George, I wish to give notice. I was hired to drive, not to fly.’
Though the seatbelt was later patented for use in cars in the USA in 1885 by New Yorker Edward J. Claghorn, Sir George remains credited as the inventor, and he campaigned to see seatbelts fitted into trains.
On 31 January 1983, it became a legal requirement to wear seatbelts in cars on UK roads.
LOUIS LE PRINCE – KING OF CINEMA
Number One Dock Street in Leeds, a Victorian office and warehouse that’s been converted into luxury apartments, can make a valid claim to being the birthplace of the motion picture.
In 1888, from the window on the third floor, French photographer and inventor Louis Le Prince hand-cranked photographic paper through a camera he had designed and built himself to capture the street scene below. The resulting clip, two seconds long and shot at 20 frames per second, showed horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians crossing Leeds Bridge in almost ‘real’ time. In spite of its brevity, this snippet of life 130 years ago is the most important documentary ever made – the world’s first successful moving picture.
The story of how this defining moment came about begins in France in 1842, when Le Prince was born. As a child, he often visited the studio of his father’s friend Louis Daguerre, who was one of the pioneers of photography.
He moved to Leeds in 1866 after being invited to join a family firm of brass founders by John Whitely, a college friend. He then married John’s sister Elizabeth, who was a talented artist. Together they established a school of applied art, and became renowned for their photography work. It was here that he saw Eadweard Muybridge’s pictures of a galloping horse – taken with a series of 12 still cameras set up along a route and then animated to look like motion. Although Muybridge had succeeded in portraying a galloping horse in a photographic sequence using multiple stills, this was not an economical, practical or easy way of creating moving images. Le Prince wanted to go one step further and capture moving images on a single camera.
Le Prince’s first film camera was partly inspired by Muybridge’s multiple-camera setup. It featured 16 lenses, and each took one photograph, fractions of a second apart. Although the camera was capable of ‘capturing’ motion, this wasn’t a complete success because each lens photographed the subject from a slightly different viewpoint, meaning that the projected image jumped about.
Then came Louis’ eureka moment. He realised that he needed to use one lens and capture multiple images on a single strip of paper, to avoid the laborious task of stitching the still images together. By turning a handle, Le Prince was able to spool a roll of photographic paper past a rotating shutter. However, in order to capture a steady, non-blurred image, he had to invent a clamping and releasing mechanism that would ensure the paper held steady for the fraction of time it needed to be correctly exposed. His first attempts managed to capture 12 frames per second – not enough to portray smooth, real-looking motion. Remodelling the camera to shoot 20 frames per second, he lugged it up three flights of stairs in Dock Street and positioned it at the window. He deliberately chose the location, knowing it to be one of the busiest spots in Leeds, and started to turn the crank. The rest is…
Well, actually, it isn’t. In spite of his remarkable achievement, Le Prince is anything but a household name. He’d ploughed all of his money into developing his camera, and applying for UK and European patents was proving to be a complicated logistical and bureaucratic challenge. There was an enormous amount of interest in his work – especially from agents of the Edison Company in the USA. That may have spurred Le Prince into arranging to travel to America to demonstrate his camera and get a US patent before anyone else could. But first he needed to pay a quick visit to the continent, to see his architect brother in France – in order to claim his share of an inheritance. Not only did he fail to stake his claim but the trip also seems to have cost him his life. On 16 September 1890, Louis Le Prince boarded a train at Dijon, bound for Paris. He never arrived. Louis and his luggage – among it his precious camera – seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Le Prince’s body
