David E. H. Jones | |
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.jpg) Jones inspects the container for hischemical garden which NASA flew into space | |
| Born | David Edward Hugh Jones (1938-04-20)20 April 1938 Southwark, London, England |
| Died | 19 July 2017(2017-07-19) (aged 79) Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK |
| Alma mater | Imperial College |
| Known for | Daedalus, DREADCO, prediction of fullerenes, arsenic in Napoleon's wallpaper, chemical gardens in space, stability of the bicycle, fake perpetual motion machines, 3D printing |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemistry |
| Institutions | University of Newcastle upon Tyne |
David Edward Hugh Jones (20 April 1938 – 19 July 2017) was a British chemist and writer, who - under the pen name Daedalus - was the fictional inventor for DREADCO. Jones' columns as Daedalus were published for 38 years, starting weekly in 1964 inNew Scientist. He then moved to the journalNature, and continued to publish until 2002. Columns from these magazines, along with additional comments and implementation sketches, were collected in two books:The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (1982) andThe Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999).
He was born inSouthwark, London. His father, Philip, was an advertising copywriter. His mother was Dorothea, née Sitters. He had one brother,Peter Vaughan Jones.[1] He attended Crofton Primary School in Orpington, Kent, and thenEltham College.[2]
His professional training was as a chemist. In 1962, he graduated in chemistry and completed a PhD in organic chemistry fromImperial College London.
Jones worked for a year for a company specialising in the design of laboratory equipment and then as a post-doctoral fellow at Imperial, where he worked oninfrared spectroscopy and began his column forNew Scientist.[2] In 1967, he took up a post as an assistant lecturer at theUniversity of Strathclyde. After one year he moved toRuncorn, Cheshire where he worked as a research scientist in spectroscopy forImperial Chemical Industries.[1] In 1974, he became the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at theUniversity of Newcastle upon Tyne. He then became an independent science consultant to industry providing ideas,brainstorming services, and scientific demonstrations for television.
Some of his Daedalus inventions proved practical; about one-fifth of them were seriously proposed or even patented by others.[2] His most notable scientific contribution as Daedalus was possibly his 1966 prediction of hollow carbon molecules,[3] beforebuckminsterfullerene was made,[4] and long before its synthesizers won a Nobel prize for the discovery offullerenes.[5] It is often claimed that the invention of3D printing was in 1984 byChuck Hull, but Jones in his Daedalus persona laid out the concept inNew Scientist in 1974, 10 years earlier.[6][7] He was an early proposer of aspace elevator (1964) and ofarchaeoacoustics (1969).
Beyond Daedalus, in scientific circles he is known for his study ofbicycle stability,[8] his determination ofarsenic inNapoleon's wallpaper,[9] and for having designed and flown on theSpace Shuttle amicrogravity experiment[10] to grow achemical garden.[11]
He is also known for his series of fakeperpetual motion machines, one of which is in theTechnisches Museum Wien. In 2009, a documentary film about his work and inventions,Perpetual Motion Machine,[12] was made and shown at theNewcastle Science Festival 2010.[13]
He was known in Germany as a regular guest on the 1980s TV science quiz showKopf um Kopf (Head to Head), presenting interesting physics experiments.[14]
In 1972, he married Jane Burgess. The marriage lasted a year, and he later had a long relationship with the artist Naomi Hunt.[2]
He died in 2017 from prostate cancer.[15][1]
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