“Raaahh! Neeeeaaaaoooowww!” Benjamin, the three-year-old brother of Britain’s youngest inventor, Samuel Houghton, charges towards me with his brother’s brainwave.
Two wooden broomsticks tied together with a rubber band could be dangerous, but Samuel quickly restores order to their parents’ living room in Buxton, Derbyshire, northern England.
He then takes hold of the microphone I have brought to record this interview, clasps it to his chest and spends 40 minutes explaining how he devised his invention, what else he is planning to invent and what would happen if inventors like him took over the world.
The UK Intellectual Property Office’s patent No 2438091 this month recorded Samuel as the inventor of the Improved Broom. It is a simple idea that combines two ordinary brooms with different-sized bristles and brush-heads to enable different- sized specks of dirt to be swept up more efficiently.
“The small one gets the first bits and the one at the back gets the bits that are left behind,” as Samuel puts it.
The IPO does not note down the ages of the inventors awarded patents, but says that Samuel is its youngest known patent holder. He was three when he came up with the idea.
“I got it when my dad was brushing up,” he said. “He was doing the leaves and I asked him why he was using different brushes and then I went into the garage and invented. Then I called Daddy to go into the shed and then I said, ‘why swap the brushes when you can use this?’ and that was my invention. Later I said ‘it’s an invention’ because I heard ‘invention’ from Wallace and Gromit and Archie the Inventor.”
As the patent records: “Acknowledgement of the inspiration to invent and the ability to identify an invention, and announce it as such, is hereby given to Archie the Inventor of Balamory.”
Samuel, of course, did not submit the patent for his invention. It was drawn up by his dad, Mark, a former industrial chemist who retrained as a patent attorney: An intellectual property law specialist who takes an inventor’s basic idea, explains the inventive aspects of it and wins a patent, proving the idea is unique and giving the inventor control over it for 20 years.
Mark has obtained patents for 56 different products, mostly relating to aspects of industrial chemistry, as well as the broom.
Samuel believes the best kind of inventions are “cleaning ones.” He wants to produce practical things that will help people. But he is cautious about inventors’ abilities to improve our world.
“If there are too many inventions it goes silly and the world might go crazy,” he said, spinning his Improved Broom around gleefully.
“People might make clocks and everybody might control everybody’s house And the British and the Spanish might go, ‘Aha! I’m going to make a thundering storm on the Spanish and a fire on the Spanish.’”
“And my enemy’s cattle will blow up and bash!” Samuel said.
“Now, now, no blowing up,” Mark said firmly, and took Britain’s youngest inventor up to bed.
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