UKC

Evening all,
Everyone likes an underdog. Who haven't we heard of but perhaps deserves some time in the limelight?

My nomination is Nils Bohlin. He was an engineer working at volvo who invented the three point seat belt, a clever invention but not over exciting I'll admit. However he then decided not to patent it so instead of it being a money maker for volvo it became standard safety equipment on every car since. I'm told people in the know reckon this has saved around a million lives over the years. How about that?

Over to you UKCers,
Greasy

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:
Jimmy Carter for guniea worm eradication programme - cases reduced from 3.5 million per year to 22 per year.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Percy Shaw the inventor of cat's eyes for roads

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Google for shoring up Britain's finances in her hour of need by agreeing to pay £2.50 tax on their £48 trillion profits.

In reply to Trangia:

I'm not sure I would describe Percy Shaw as unsung.

In reply to The New NickB:


I don't know. He died a pauper and I'll be not many people, including on this forum, would know who he was.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Tilly Shilling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Shilling

Many Battle of Britain pilots owed their lives to her orifice....

In reply to Trangia:

He was Percy Shaw, famous for inventing the catseye. Famous as Wallace Carollers or even RJ Mitchell and Barnes Wallace.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Valerie Hanover, a close family friend.

Strictly speaking she is no longer an unsung hero though.

She was awarded the BBC sports unsung hero award in 2006 for 30 years organising Special Olympics for thousands of people with learning difficulties. Also more recently honoured in the Queens Birthday honours list.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Wendy Sly. Silver medalist in the 3000m at the Los Angeles Olympics. Does anyone remember her, no they remember the American drug cheat (Mary Decker-Slaney) and the white South African running for GB (Zola Budd) who she spiked and tripped over, neither of whom medaled.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

How about a unsung villain ? Thomas Midgely, responsible for both lead in petrol and CFCs in fridges !

In reply to Trangia:

A great Yorkshire eccentric who had several tv's all tuned to different stations at the same time.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Irena Sendler. Successfully smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during WW2, saving their lives. Was captured and tortured by the Gestapo before being sentenced to death. Was only saved from execution because her guards were bribed to let her go.

Her story was unknown until in 1999 a group of schoolchildren started researching her, based on a single newspaper clipping.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

good thread.
interesting.

In reply to Chris the Tall:

Didn't he kill himself in some bizarre manner?

In reply to Alyson:



Cool story. Who's the black nurse who was around the same time as Florence Nightingale but nobody's heard of?

In reply to Yanis Nayu:


Mary Seacole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Seacole

In reply to Alyson:

Interesting Wiki entry. She also married the same person twice!

In reply to Yanis Nayu:

It's interesting Nightingale is definitely not unsung but I think she's not remembered in a very fair light. She's still thought of as the 'lady with the lamp' but she was much more influential through her work as a mathematician and social reformer. All this and whilst she was battling chronic brucellosis! What a woman!

If people have a few minutes this is worth a read...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/timelines/z92hsbk

In reply to Yanis Nayu:


Yes, he had polio and strangled himself getting out of bed one morning and into some kind of harness next to it.

In reply to Unknown Climber:

The mentioning of Seacole and Nightingale reminded me of James Barry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_%28surgeon%29

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:


Some years ago, when I was ghostwriting, my client was considering a book about Florence Nightingale. (He abandoned the idea because another book came out at around the same time.) I did a preliminary study. I can't remember the details now but I do remember a sense of awe, of being, albeit vicariously, in the presence of a polymath. It seemed to me that she was viciously set up to fail in the Crimea, by the medical establishment. When she did the best that anyone could have done, in horrific circumstances, it seemed that she was then marginalised by that same (male) establishment as 'the little woman'. And it seemed that such marginalisation had continued to our own day, with her intellectual and managerial abilities being ignored and her efforts at social reform being conveniently sidelined. I wonder what she'd think about the NHS/nursing today!

I'm sad the book was never commissioned. It seemed that no-one had ever done her justice.

Mick

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Archibald McIndoe (IIRC) - he pioneered plastic surgery during the war. What was incredible to me was how holistic his approach was.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_McIndoe

In reply to Trangia:

What puzzles me is that cat's eyes don't seem popular on the continent, so why bother with them here? With modern lights on cars and roads I suspect they are obsolete.

In reply to Mick Ward:

I agree it's a real shame she doesn't recipe the recognition she deserves. It's interesting idea what she'd think of the NHS. On the one hand I think she'd love the idea of free health care and would be blown away with how advanced modern medicine is but I also suspect there's a few glaring errors in the system that she'd spot and correct!

Your post got me thinking that this thread could inspire a really good book. Maybe a chapter each on a selection of unsung figures from history?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:


I would disagree. On many rural roads they are still helpful, particularly on roads you are unfamiliar with.

They are also very useful in rainy weather and where the sides of roads are ill defined.

I've seen them in France, Spain and Italy where I have done a lot of driving.

There is a section of the A21 near Bewl Water where they seem to be triggered by car's headlights and continue to glow for about 10 secs after the car has passed. You can see them still glowing in your rear view mirror. I am not certain how these work?

In reply to Rob Exile Ward:

I always presumed the lack of cat's eyes in France was due to the French not having invented them! They certainly make it very much easier to drive at night.

In reply to Trangia:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11845616/End...

We've had solar powered road studs on the roads near me in Hampshire for about ten years I guess. There was a possible problem identified after they were installed in Essex, it was suggested that because they strobe at around 100hz they could trigger epileptic fits.

In reply to Mick Ward:

I'm struggling with your suggestion. In what way is she unsung?

In reply to Mike Highbury:

He didn't suggest she was, but there was a suggestion that Mick picked up on and added to, that she may have been slightly unfairly remembered by history.

In reply to Alyson:

Your post on Irena Sendler reminded me about the more modest story of a local man from Rugby.

http://www.rugbyadvertiser.co.uk/news/local-news/rugby-s-schindler-remember...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elpis_Lodge

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Ingrid Loyau-Kennet the woman who confronted and calmed Lee Rigby's murderers until the police arrived.

An extraordinary act of courage.

I don't think she ever received any official recognition.

Sadly I understand that she was later detained under the mental health act for an unrelated incident.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Alfred Russell Wallace? Independently came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin. Poor chap did not have Darwin's wealth or connections though so largely unknown.

In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

I knew I'd read about another one recently - the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She discovered pulsars while studying as an undergrad at Cambridge but her supervisor took the credit and subsequently the Nobel Prize for physics which should have been hers.

In reply to Alyson:

She may not be well known to the public, but outside the Cox and Hawking which physists are. She is a Dame though, former President of the Royal Astronomical Society and has honoury Doctorates from 22 Universities.

Another woman who has probably unfairly denied a Nobel Prize, was Rosalind Franklin. Unlike Bell Burnell, she died young and her contribution was never fully appreciated in her lifetime.

In reply to Alyson:


The story is indeed often told that way, but the story is more complicated than that.

Suppose you spend your career developing techniques of radio astronomy, with both theoretical advances and advances in the instrumentation. From that, you conceive of a whole new way of doing radio astronomy, and design an instrument to do it. You then go out and get funding to build it, and manage its construction.

After you've pursued this for 15 years your new radio telescope starts observing. At that point pulsars are "low hanging fruit". That new radio telescope was now sensitive enough that it would start finding pulsars sooner or later, and likely sooner.

In the first year of its operation, a graduate student, who had only been on the project for less than a year, happens to be the one on observer's duty when the telescope scans across the first pulsar.

Now, that graduate student then does a superb job of following up the observations, getting more of them, suggesting new ways to analyse the new type of object. That student fully deserves a large slice of the credit.

But, is it fair to say that the supervisor "took the credit"? Isn't there a fair argument that he fully deserves the lion's share of the credit, and was actually the one primarily responsible for the discovery?

Maybe it would have been better if Jocelyn Bell Burnell had shared in the Nobel Prize, with Ryle and Hewish, but there is no doubt that Hewish fully deserved his reward.

In reply to The New NickB:


Though she, sadly, had died of cancer by the time the Nobel was awarded to Crick and Watson. Since Nobels are not awarded posthumously, it is hard to regard that one as unfair.

In reply to Coel Hellier:


You perhaps have different interpretation of unfair to me!