Over the past 20 years I have sought the help of Business Link in the commercialisation of several ideas and innovations.

The Alexander Cell is the only way to determin if corrosion is taking place on buried and submerged steel pipelines.

The Room Conditioner takes advantage of the fact that humans are exothermic, and recyles body heat, thus saving more than 25% of the energy normally used to heat domestic accomodation.

The Inflatable Umbrella... speaks for itself.

The Airsledge is a leisure vehicle which travels on a cushion of air generated by forward motion.

Windscreen Heat Mats clear the frost and 'misting up' of vehicle windscreens. They are improve safety, while being less poluting than chemical methods.

The Cashflow Project is a financial software tool.

The Inventions Library is a system to promote inventions and to remove an obvious 'log jam' in the present way of dealing with innovations.

The Alexander Cell

This seems to have been taken up by a possible foreign investor and is no longer available.


The Room Conditioner

This was designed as a solution to the condition of my sons bedroom which was cold and damp.

The house was heated by gas/air central heating utilising ducts to reach each room. My sons room was theoretically heatd by a vent to the upstairs landing but this did not work.

I developed the room conditioner as a window fitting in a very small photographic dark room in which there was a condensation problem.

The success of this unit was such that I fitted a unit flush to the wall of my sons bedroom and the success of this caused me to fit one to the wall of the main bedroom.

Thinking that this would be useful in a lot of accomodation I contacted Everest Double Glazing who might be interested in marketing the system.

They sent a couple of scientists who fitted sensing instruments for a period and confrimed that the results were more beneficial than their own product, and could be used complimentary to double glazing with great advantage and energy saving.

I contacted Business Link for guidance in promoting the Room Conditioner and they put me in contact with Company called Starnes McLeish.

Everest, meanwhile, had contacted a sister company called Nuair operating out of South Wales, who also sent two scientists with instruments to evaluate the system.

They were enthusiastic and their board said that they would raise a budget for the project in the next financial year which was 3 months away.

Starnes McLeish disappeared from my life having found a way of making more money in the USA and the whole matter was forgotten.


The Inflatable Umbrella It was during a low financial period of my life when I was driving a taxi and doing paper rounds to support my second wife, step son and son (in secondary school).

I was caught in the rain and had no umbrella.

I went home and made an inflatable umbrella using sticky tape, a bin liner and the nozzle from an old beach ball.

It folded up in my pocket and worked like magic to the amazement of everyone who saw it.

Raycon of Wokingham made plastic welding machines (and were amazed), One of their engineers found an old inflatable umbrella which they had produced for a South African doctor, but that had not worked due to bad design assumptions.

I paid for them to make a welding tool so that they could make a few prototypes and contacted two distributers. One wanted to order 10,000 as advertising products at major events and the other wanted 100,000 as a first run for world wide sales. They worked out their territory between them and one of them had a factory in Taiwan who he thought would manufacture them.

The Taiwanese manager reported that he could not manufacture them as conventional umbrellas were a major industry in that part of the world and his life would be in danger if he made inflatable ones.

I contacted the owner of a plastic welding works in Fleet, Hampshire, who was willing to buy a new machine to produce them if I would buy the tool to produce them in a single hit. This would cost £5,000 which I did not have and could not raise, so the whole project fell flat.

The Airsledge Project

I was single again and living in my flat in Bracknell, doing any work I could find through an agency.

I contacted Business Link to see if there might be an opportunity to launch one of my innovations for which there seemed to be a market demand.

Bob Haggit came to my flat and we went through the list. He selected the Airsledge project as suitable for application for a NESTA grant and we went through the whole process.

It was successful until it got to the final review by the trustees who turned it down on the grounds that I had experience in marketing Airsledges. This despite the provision for marketing in the business plan and the international demand that I had created through my website.

I was later told (by an insider) that the real reason that I had been turned down was that I live in a council flat.


Windscreen Heat Mats

I was threatened with eviction from my Council Flat as I had got behind with my rent due to the unpaid time I had spent trying to commercialise my inventions. I was forced to work for 12 hours at night at Waitrose Warehouse and a four hour split shift during the day testing cars for Ethyl Corporation through an agency.

I did this for six months, to clear my debts, when in September the co-driver on the car test reported that he could not carry out the morning test due to the windscreens being frosted up.

The specification of the 'cold start test' was that the cars should each be run for exactly one mile, from cold, at not more than 30 mph and then parked for at least three hours to allow them to cool again.

The problem was not clearing the outside of the windscreen with chemicals but that the condensation of the drivers breath on the inside made the vehicle immediately undrivable.

The use of hot water was a failure as the heat from this would not penetrate over a sufficient area and there was the risk of dynamic heat expansion cracking the glass.

Heating the whole car interior for a period before the test was considered to be impractical due to the lack of mains supply in the car park.

I came up with the Windsceen Heat Mats which are heated in the microwave or with a kettle of boiling water, folded to retain the heat, then spread over the vision areas, directly conducting the small amount of heat required to raise that area above freezing.

They worked so well that I sold many sets to workers and managers at Ethyl and got my direct managers approval to market them using the Ethyl experience as my field trials in advertising.

I gain approached Business Link, who put me in touch with the Prison Service as a possible manufacturer. They could not use the glue that was essential for the manufature but offered to sew the compnoets together. I researched the possibility of mass production in the UK and China and set up a small distribution chain through the Bouncy Castle Industry for whom I was constructing websites.

Business link put me in contact with the buyer for Halfords who said that they would be interested in marketing the product but that they required a mark up of 500%.

I calculated my income from the venture to be extremely low and was forced to drop the whole thing.

The Cash Flow Project

This is a software product that can be used in financial forcasting, marketing and business planning.

It is unlike any other financial software as it works from the bottom up and assumptions are thus diluted to reality by the number of users.

A brief description has been on my website for a few years but when I described it to visitors from Business Link they did not understand it.

This is significant as it indicates that the business community do not understand the whole picture of of the political/financial structure of the modern world.


The Inventions Library

This is the solution to a problem that is causing a 'log jam' in the world of innovation and to which I have been subjected for over 30 years.

Innovators need money to live on.

Most inventions have been thought of before and most of the other ideas are rubbish.

Good ideas are solutions to well known and widespread problems.

The Inventions Library is a way that innovations can be drawn to the attention of government and investors without the inventor losing money or giving away their intellectual property..

The inventor publishes the problem but not the solution.

The Invention Library arranges that the government or an investor pays a small fee (plus expenses) to the inventor, to meet and describe, in confidence, the solution to the problem.

This allows the government/investor access to a solution to a social problem or a market opportunity that would otherwise be denied them because the inventor cannot afford the time and expense of the first stage of promoting the idea.

The present situation requires financial and intellectual input from the inventor to GIVE AWAY their intellectual property. Throughout history inventors have been cheated and society has been deprived of the benefits of innovation because of the restrictive practices of those controlling the innovation to market process.

My previous attempts to launch such a library, on-line met with ferocious opposition from 'Patents Attorneys' in the USA and other 'businessmen' who are cheating inventors at the present time.

A meeting was held on the 21st August 2007 to discuss the above.