Everyday wonder – The ice house
I’m sat in fingerless gloves like Bob Cratchit to type this as it’s the Big Freeze out there, so this invention would be easy to overlook, but fridges (and their predecessors) truly changed our lives. Allowing us to store food for longer meant people didn’t have to go out to forage every day. Packing things in ice also meant exotic foodstuffs could be transported over longer distances. Plus – it made ice cream possible for those hot summer days! Before the white boxes in our kitchens though, there were these wonderful structures - ice houses. Usually designed with small entrances and a passage leading you deeper into a windowless space, often with sections underground or built into a hillside to keep them dark and cold year round. Blocks of ice could be stored here in layers packed with straw or sawdust to keep them freezing together. Not all ice houses are the same though – you’ll find warehouse scale ones by the coast used to store and pack fish ready for transportation, as well as really quite fancy ones on historic house estates. Or, if you happen to be walking round the northern part of York, take a peek over the wall on the north side – that little brick igloo is an ice house from the early 1800s!
Sustainable energy – The roller mill
The best inventions stand the test of time, but that doesn’t mean they always retain their exact original purpose! The introduction of roller milling at a site in Derbyshire is one example. This Victorian machinery originally revolutionised the production of flour, replacing waterwheels and millstones with water powered turbines and steel-toothed rollers to grind flour more finely. Remarkably this same machinery is still in working order and now the turbine is used to generate fully sustainable hydro-electricity for the entire site, from their lights to their computers – now that’s what you call astounding!
(not so) Natural beauty – The 'Otley Phlox'
The world of invention is not just one of mechanical engineering. These beautiful flowers have also, in a sense, been ‘invented’! And inventors are not always bright young things, or wizened professors who’ve spent their entire working lives tinkering with an idea. No, this beautiful flower was the invention of a man who only turned to the world of gardening in his retirement. Fred Simpson was the son of an ironmonger and worked as a plumber and poultry farmer before ill health led him to retire in his 50s. Over the next 20+ years he used his skills in cross breeding to develop ever more beautiful garden flowers, starting with Chrysanthemums and ending with the Otley Phlox!
Marking time – The heliochronometer
Another invention it’s easy to take for granted is the ability to accurately mark time all over the world – how could you have that zoom meeting with friends in Australia if you weren’t able to arrange a specific time? There have been many innovations along the journey of time keeping but this is a special one for lovers of local history. Invented by James Gibbs in 1906, the heliochronometer accurately shows Greenwich Mean Time to within a minute and is a type of highly sophisticated sundial. Before the BBC pips began to beep in the 1920s there was no easy way to discover the precise time, so it truly was an astounding invention. Only 1,000 were ever made, but one is still in working order at the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory in Preston, which James Gibbs was also responsible for the building of – a man of many talents!
Wonderfully odd - The latin verse machine
Also astounding but more on the bizarre rather than useful end of the scale sits this gem. Eureka is a one-of-a-kind invention that creates Latin poetry. Characteristic of its time it’s a marvel that showcases Victorian art and engineering, something that was taken to exhibitions for people (and potential patrons!) to wonder at. It took its inventor, John Clark (cousin of the shoemaker Clarks) 15 years to create and build. Once wound up, it could not only create a line of prose a minute to music it played, but also create 26.2 million different lines of the verse before it would start to repeat itself.
Many thanks to all our organisers for their stories, particularly for this post: Berwick HODs / Out There Arts / Whitchurch Museum & Archives / Ladybelt Country Park / Caudwell's Mill Trust Ltd / The Otley Courthouse Project / Otley in Bloom / Preston & District Astonomical Society / Alfred Gillett Trust.
Look out for more extra-ordinary stories as we uncover the history of creativity with next year's festival theme: Creativity Unwrapped!
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