The Gurney Inventors Competition

Cornwall has a rich history of inventors, including Bude-based inventor Sir Goldsworthy Gurney. He started out as a surgeon before being inspired to create a range of inventions, his most successful being the Gurney stove, using cast iron fins to maximise the output of heat and reduce the amount of energy required to heat large areas. A revolutionary idea at the time. Even his home was an experiment, building The Castle, Bude, upon sand using a concrete raft.  It was in Bude that Gurney experimented with light, introducing lime (calcium oxide) into a flame to create a very bright light.  He then created his ‘Bude Light’ the design of which used a unique shape and mirrors to make the light travel further. Just three of his lights could replace 280 candles in the Houses of Parliament. He illuminated his Castle home using limelight and mirrors to reflect it into different rooms. It is said he also beamed the light from The Castle to illuminate a room at the Falcon Hotel more than 350 meters away!

This competition is here to encourage everyone to get inventing. Many of the inventions we use today were created by people new to the field of inventing like Gurney or were invented by mistake like Penicillin. So we want everybody to get involved and give this competition a go.  There will be a series of free workshops to get started and spark ideas. You don’t need to be an expert, super smart, or have made something before. We often think of inventions as being created by genius inventors devoting their life to something groundbreaking like flight, rather than something that solves a problem and or makes small improvements like a litter picker to make picking up litter easier. Gurney was interested in how to make the world a better place, and if he were alive today, he would surely have an interest in the environment and green technology. If we are to solve the climate crisis and other environmental problems, we need everybody to start experimenting with solutions rather than leaving it to the “inventors”.