Trevor Baylis occupation businessperson
Inventing career
Baylis's work as a stunt man exposed him to the needs of disabled people, through colleagues whose injuries had ended their performing careers. By 1985, this involvement had led him to invent and develop a range of products for the disabled called Orange Aids.In the late 1980s or early 1990s, Baylis saw a television programme about the spread of AIDS in Africa and realised that a way to halt the spread of the disease would be to educate and disseminate information by radio. Within 30 minutes, he had assembled the first prototype of his most well-known invention, the wind-up radio. The original prototype included a small transistor radio, an electric motor from a toy car, and the clockwork mechanism from a music box. Baylis filed his first patent in 1992.While the prototype worked well, Baylis struggled to find a production partner. The turning point came in 1994 when his prototype was featured on a film produced by Liz Tucker for the BBC TV programme Tomorrow's World, which resulted in an investor coming forward to back the product. With money from investors he formed a company called Freeplay Energy; in 1996, the Freeplay radio was given the BBC Design Awards for Best Product and Best Design. In the same year Baylis met Queen Elizabeth II and Nelson Mandela at a state banquet, and also travelled to Africa with the Dutch Television Service to produce a documentary about his life. He was awarded the 1996 World Vision Award for Development Initiative that year.The year 1997 saw the production in South Africa of the new generation Freeplay radio, a smaller and cheaper model designed for the Western consumer market which uses rechargeable cells with a generic crank generator.During the 1990s, Baylis was also a regular on the Channel 4 breakfast programme, The Big Breakfast.In 2001, Baylis completed a 100-mile walk across the Namib Desert, demonstrating his electric shoes and raising money for the Mines Advisory Group. The "electric shoes", developed in collaboration with the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, use piezoelectric contacts in the heels to charge a small battery that can be used to operate a radio transceiver or cellular telephone.Baylis set up the Trevor Baylis Foundation to "promote the activity of Invention by encouraging and supporting Inventors and Engineers". This led in September 2002 to the formation of the company 'Trevor Baylis Brands PLC' which provided inventors with professional partnership and services to enable them to establish the originality of their ideas, to patent or otherwise protect them, and to get their products to market. The company's primary goal was to secure licence agreements for inventors, but it also considered starting up new companies around good ideas. The company was based in Richmond, London. In 2013 it was reported that the company was financially struggling and was primarily reliant upon Baylis' personal finances to keep itself running. A few months after his death, Trevor Baylis Brands PLC became insolvent, and in early 2019 it ceased trading.
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