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He stood there punching thin air with his fist. As if by magic, the
notes of a keyboard beside him played in time with his hand and the melody
of When the Saints Come Marching In floated across the room.

Mark Stewart, 17, from Cowes High School, Isle of Wight, was demonstrating
his invention – a vertical rectangular frame, crisscrossed by 28 light beams
– for helping a handicapped person to control a computer or compose music.
Breaking a beam activated a cursor on the screen or sounded a musical note.

The invention, accompanied by a video showing it being used by a child
with cerebral palsy to draw pictures on a screen, won Stewart first prize
in the intermediate category in this year’s Young Electronic Designer Awards
(YEDA), now in its seventh year. The competition, judged at the Science
Museum in London and sponsored by Texas Instruments and Mercury Communications,
is designed to alert young engineers to the commercial possibilities of
their inventions.

‘It’s no good having a brilliant invention if it can’t be used commercially,’
commented Malcolm McLaren-Clark, one of the competition organisers, at an
exhibition in the museum where the inventions of 22 finalists were on view.
‘Companies are always complaining that graduates emerge from higher education
with great theoretical knowledge but no commercial sense.’

Marion Hore, 18, from Farnborough (Hampshire) Sixth Form College, then
demonstrated her water flow meter, based on a strain gauge. ‘I had always
been interested in strain gauges,’ she explained ‘and I was dying to use
them for something.’ Her invention, which will be of value to the National
Rivers Authority as well as to geography students, won her second prize
in the category for inventors aged 15 to 17. Talking to her made it clear
that she had grasped YEDA’s message; she believed her idea would be better
and cheaper than another on the market.

‘When the NRA wants to measure a river’s flow rate, they use a device
with a paddle wheel which makes clicks and they have to count the clicks
over a period of time,’ she explained. Her device, by contrast, provides
a direct reading on a meter. ‘I think it could be made for about £50,
rather than the £120 that people have to pay for the other one. I
think that’s a rip-off.’

Price aside, the paddle-wheel device currently used by the NRA typifies
a trend among electronic goods on the British market: they come from abroad.
The product is made in Germany and, when the NRA adopted it for use by its
field workers, a British rival was put out of business.

Figures from the government’s Central Statistical Office show that in
1986 (YEDA’s first year) Britain had an annual trade deficit of Pounds
sterling 2.79 billion in ‘finished electrical goods’, a category which includes
everything from burglar alarms and electric blankets to capacitors and microcircuits.
In 1989, the last year for which full figures are available, the deficit
had grown to £4.43 billion and imports made up 60 per cent of home
consumption – up from 50 per cent in 1986 Last year, the electrical goods
trade gap shrank to £2.56 billion. But a general decrease in economic
activity almost certainly means that the full figures, when available, will
show imports remaining at a high level.

British companies eager to reverse such trends must rely on home-grown
talent to come up with profitable ideas. YEDA encourages such thinking among
the young by awarding a separate prize for ‘commercial potential’ and stipulating
that entries ‘must be suitable for adaptation to commercial production’.

Switched on

The awards clearly demonstrated that, to have a hit in the electronics
world nowadays, it is not enough to be good at hooking transistors together.
The days when an inventor could make millions by cleverly programming a
simple chip and packaging it into a new product, as Clive Sinclair did with
his low-cost calculator in 1974, are long gone. Today you need almost encyclopedic
expertise.

One of this year’s finalists had devised a silent car alarm which could
sense a break-in, automatically radio the police using an encrypted signal
(which included the car licence number) and shut off the fuel pump. Nicholas
English (14) of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne said it took
him two hours to devise the idea and 12 months to realise it. He did not
win a prize but remained undaunted. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Lucas Industries
next month,’ he explained. ‘They’re interested and GEC-Marconi say they
are very very interested. Nissan is also testing a preproduction model.’

All the finalists showed some awareness of the importance of marketing
– lessons learned painfully and at great personal cost by Sinclair with
his C₅ electric car. However, not all the entrants had thought
about selling their ideas.

For example, an ‘on-board digital direction indicator for boats’ used
ingenious machine code programming to measure the movement and position
of a toothed wheel attached to a magnetic rod. Enthusiasm for the device
was tempered by the suspicion that it might be cheaper to use a compass.

It would be churlish to blame teenagers for not being experts at marketing,
given the technical ability they were showing that day. ‘It’s very rare
to find someone young with both marketing and theoretical knowledge,’ commented
Mike Bennett, Technical Director of Racal’s Health and Safety Group. ‘People
don’t normally acquire that until they have been in industry and commerce
for a few years, come face to face with customers and know how companies
·É´Ç°ù°ì.’

Gerald Kent, lecturer in digital electronics at Cheltenham and Gloucester
College of Higher Education, advised the youngsters that if they were going
into Europe, they had to be able to think on a broader basis. If engineers
were going to travel across the Continent and solve systems problems, they
would have to apply their minds to many questions. ‘It might be a software
problem, or hardware, or communications. You can’t just go back to the main
office and get someone else,’ he said.

The teaching of engineering is now moving towards a broader approach
to electronics as a result of pressure from both employers and academics,
he thinks. While large companies can usually maintain an international lead,
small-scale businesses still have problems. ‘Smaller companies haven’t got
the money or the backup,’ Kent explained. ‘Sometimes their R&D is just
a one-man band and the company cannot afford to send them on courses. They
are fighting to survive. We need a really serious government approach which
supports small business.’

Switched off

At this point Stefan Cook, 23, a pupil of Kent’s, added: ‘It would be
good if bankers would support small business too.’ He had designed and built
a ‘mouse’ emulator – a board-sized device which allows disabled people to
operate a computer as if using a ‘mouse’ – and had won second prize in the
Senior category. But he and a business partner had been unable to get a
bank overdraft for their two-man company to build this and other computer
aids for the handicapped, although the same bank intends to spend £80
million developing its central London site to include shops, a restaurant,
a wine bar and 230 000 square feet of new office space.

Although small businesses constantly face this problem, the future for
hopeful young inventors is more promising: they can enter a growing number
of competitions similar to YEDA. Those who keep winning can find themselves
on something resembling a lecture-tour circuit.

Nicholas English’s car alarm came to GEC’s notice through the Young
Engineer of Britain award, which has a pan-European version in which an
overall winner is chosen from the national winners. That took English to
the Continent. ‘There are at least four or five competitions around that
I can enter,’ he says. It was hard to remember that he was a schoolboy
of 14.

While such contests offer the chance to profit from invention, they
also give the entrants some lessons in skills vital to any future selling
of their ideas. Not many business trainees have hours of experience spent
on exhibition stands refining their sales patter, learning how to attract
the meandering public and how to make a display attractive and immediately
comprehensible to the passer-by.

Of course, success in such competitions is no guarantee of commercial
results. But Cheltenham College, which produced two of the six inventions
which took the first and third prizes in the junior category, found itself
greatly encouraged. It won the £2500 prize for fostering the projects
with the ‘most commercial potential’.

This was awarded jointly to two pairs of pupils, David Issott and Tim
McEwan and Jonathan Pepper and Nick Davies. Issott and McEwan had developed
a carbon monoxide monitor consisting of a sensor connected to digital equipment
which gave a read-out in parts per million. It could be used by traffic
police, gas engineers or in garages. Pepper and Davies had devised a steam
iron for the partially sighted, which sounded an audible alarm when the
water level was too low or too high and turned off automatically if it was
left longer than 15 seconds upright.

Ironically, the school is putting the prize money into a ‘fighting fund’
to pay for future entries to competitions because, according to Issott,
its electronics budget has been ‘screwed into the ground’.

In the tunnel linking the museum with South Kensington underground
station, there was a chalk portrait of Albert Einstein. Its caption read:
‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ But in the modern world
it also helps to have healthy budgets for R&D – and some marketing sense.

Charles Arthur is a freelance journalist.