“It all began with a tin of cat food, an empty coffee tin and a hairdryer. When air was forced between the two tins, the ensemble began to float on its own little cushion of air. Thus, through a combination of eccentricity and genius, Sir Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft, in a shed, in a boatyard, in Norfolk”.

The hovercraft, whilst as a passenger carrying vehicle was superseded by the channel tunnel, is very much a British success story.

Development was largely funded under the aegis of the National Research and Development Corporation, a government body set up in 1948 expressly to help British inventors develop and commercialise their work. As well as the hovercraft, other British inventions which benefited from NRDC assistance include:

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Interferon
• Continually Variable Transmission, &
• Disposable daily contact lenses

The NRDC was privatised in 1992 after being renamed British Technology Group, and thus public funding of research and development ended. BTG itself scaled its operation right down in 2005 to concentrate only on medical research. Of course, private enterprise hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful in bringing brand new products to market, as Clive Sinclair, Eric Laithwaite, James Dyson, and Trevor Baylis proved (though the first two clearly could have benefitted from better help in making their inventions commercially successful), but in an era where enterprise is supposed to be key to Getting Us Out Of The Recession(tm), what real help is government offering to British inventors? Indeed, what real help has government offered for enterprise in the last 25 years?

Now I’m not saying it’s not interesting, or even not important, but what drew my attention to this story was that I walked away from my desk for a few minutes to talk to somebody down the corridor, and came back to find the BBC News Desktop alert had flashed this headline up onto my screen – a feature usually reserved for breaking news stories such as floods, famines, and pestilences. And of course ministerial resignations.

I wonder how many people were distracted from their work at this time by this? I wonder how much network bandwidth was used, and what the hit on the performance of the news web server was by all those people (including myself) simultaneously clicking to see the full details of the story?

Fair enough, it is indeed a news item, but surely a news item to be left on the home page for when people naturally go to look to see what’s happenned in the world in the last hour, rather than treated as being a major breaking news story with the nation on tenterhooks to learn the outcome…