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David E. H. Jones

British chemist and writer

Summary

British chemist and writer

Field	Value
name	David E. H. Jones
birth_name	David Edward Hugh Jones
birth_date
birth_place	Southwark, London, England
death_date
death_place	Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK
image	ChemicalGardenInspection (4298635010).jpg
caption	Jones inspects the container for his chemical garden which NASA flew into space
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
fields	Chemistry
alma_mater	Imperial College
work_institution	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 in New Scientist. He then moved to the journal Nature, 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) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999).

Early life and education

He was born in Southwark, London. His father, Philip, was an advertising copywriter. His mother was Dorothea, née Sitters. He had one brother, Peter Vaughan Jones.{{cite news |access-date=1 August 2017

His professional training was as a chemist. In 1962, he graduated in chemistry and completed a PhD in organic chemistry from Imperial College London.

Career

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 on infrared spectroscopy and began his column for New Scientist. In 1967, he took up a post as an assistant lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. After one year he moved to Runcorn, Cheshire where he worked as a research scientist in spectroscopy for Imperial Chemical Industries. In 1974, he became the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University 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. His most notable scientific contribution as Daedalus was possibly his 1966 prediction of hollow carbon molecules,{{cite journal

Beyond Daedalus, in scientific circles he is known for his study of bicycle stability,{{cite journal

He is also known for his series of fake perpetual motion machines, one of which is in the Technisches Museum Wien. In 2009, a documentary film about his work and inventions, Perpetual Motion Machine, was made and shown at the Newcastle Science Festival 2010.

He was known in Germany as a regular guest on the 1980s TV science quiz show Kopf um Kopf (Head to Head), presenting interesting physics experiments.

Personal life

In 1972, he married Jane Burgess. The marriage lasted a year, and he later had a long relationship with the artist Naomi Hunt.

He died in 2017 from prostate cancer.

Bibliography

The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes, (1982) W. H. Freeman ;
The Further Inventions of Daedalus, (1999) Oxford University Press
The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity (2011) Johns Hopkins University Press
Why Are We Conscious?: A Scientist's Take on Consciousness and Extrasensory Perception (2017) CRC Press ,

References

(1993). "Dreams in a Charcoal Fire: Predictions about Giant Fullerenes and Graphite Nanotubes [and Discussion]". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
(31 July 2017). "David Jones, British chemist and 'court jester in the palace of science,' dies at 79". The Washington Post.
(3 October 1974). "Ariadne".
(9 November 2016). "Letter: 3D printing: you read it here first".
(14 October 1982). "Arsenic in Napoleon's wallpaper". Nature.
Barge. (2015). "From Chemical Gardens to Chemobrionics". Chemical Reviews.
"Website of Perpetual Motion Machine film". [[Blogspot]].
[http://www.gallopingfilms.com/gf/2DocHumanInt2.html#Anchor-PMM Writeup of Perpetual Motion Machine film]
[http://cnr.lwlss.net/DavidJones Blog entry on film, with photographs]
(6 January 2012). "WDR – Kopf um Kopf – 1986, David Jones enters at 23:00".
(27 July 2017). "David Jones, 'Daedalus', the scientific joker – obituary". [[Telegraph Media Group.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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