Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

Archie Blue
Years ago, long before the advent of magnetic tape, Archie Blue devised
a way of recording on steel wire.
He applied for patents in America, Britain and New Zealand. "Got
them okay," he says, turning a screw which tightens a wire on his latest
invention.
"I went to the States and tried to get the Victor Talking Machine
Company (later RCA Victor and then HMV Victor in England) interested.
"But it wasn't a commercial proposition. You could only record the one
wire at a time, whereas with discs they could make as many as they wanted
off the one die.
"So I left it. If I'd worked on it further, I would have come up with the
tape," he says with a laugh.
There's a fair bit of humour deep down inside Archie Blue, an inventor
since he was about nineteen. An electrician by trade, he's applied for
dozens of patents, including one which was granted him and his friend
Ross Wood in 1939 for "improvements in or relating to TV or like apparatus."
Another, which has been used a fair bit, was for a round corrugated disc
to keep speaker cones in shape. He sold the design for an automatic switch
to an American company, years ago.
There were other things, too. So long ago it's hard to remember them
all without getting all the papers. "I've made hardly anything from my
inventions," he says.
But he hopes to make something from his latest, a device originally
intended to be a source of cheap fuel. . . He's applied for separate patents
for that.
"When I started work on it, four or five years ago, I was investigating
the use of hydrogen as fuel for a heater. And then I thought "I might as
well try to drive a car with it.'"
From The Sunday Times. May 14, 1978
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