A Mother of Invention …Minus the Necessity
Award-Winning **VIDEO**
Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel
“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”
~Thomas A. Edison
Meet Colin Furze.
A happy blue-collar mad scientist from Lincolnshire, England, Furze tinkers in his garage turning his eccentric whims and strange ideas into a practical reality.
Produced by director David Beazley, the above little film takes a lighthearted look at Furze and the technological innovations and inventions that are possible in today’s internet age.
Furze, normally a British plumber by day, is constantly striving to create something bigger, faster and more bizarre than what came before it in his off hours. Needless to say, he’s also a bit dotty.
In doing so, he’s achieved world records with his technological marvels. They include, by his own account, the World’s Fastest Toilet, the World’s Fastest Pram, and the World’s Longest Motorbike– as well as a Guinness World Record for the World’s Fastest Mobility Scooter.
His most exhilarating invention so far is his jet bike, seen in the video below. It reaches speeds of up to 50 mph — on a rickety old Raleigh pushbike backed up by Furze’s homemade jet engine.
He spent four months lengthening the frame by a meter so he wouldn’t be scorched by the jet’s flame. He then attached the engine– which uses the same technology as the World War II V1 bombs– to the back.
“This is my craziest creation yet and the scariest one to ride,” said Furze. “My friend’s mom was throwing out her bicycle, which she had ridden into town every day and loved, so I decided to give it a new life,” he revealed. “It’s the most dangerous unsafe bicycle in the world.”
It’s all a bit of a goose chase and a happy-go-lucky sort of lark on the surface, but underneath all the fun and tinkering—and neighbors giving him bits and pieces of junk and materials to work with– is a simple and powerful notion. As Furze puts it: “If we helped people out all the time, God knows what would get made and done.”
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down,” Kurt Vonnegut once opined. And Furze takes that idea into action. It’s the passion, creativity, desire, and sheer craziness of it all that inspires him to get up in the morning, get down to some serious DIY work, and to invent.
“There’s always something to do bigger and better. There’s always something else to make; there’s always something else to make better,” Furze says with a driven motivation.
It just goes to show the world is moving by so fast that the person who says it can’t be done is often interrupted by the other person doing it.
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