2 weeks ago
15
I was pleased to read Edward Posnett’s review (19 February) of Tim Minshall’s Your Life Is Manufactured . Little attention is currently paid to manufacturing, perhaps because it comprises only 8% of British GDP.
The opening of the review focuses on the domestic kettle, Posnett emphasising that the “tocks” of automatic kettles switching off are as significant for us as the nightingale’s song was for John Keats. But despite this cultural significance, no electric kettles are made in Britain now.
Posnett’s discussion of the kettle comes from a case study in Minshall’s book. Minshall describes how John Crawshaw Taylor, and his company, Strix Controls, manufacture the thermostats that switch off automatic kettles all over the world. While Taylor invented the modern form of kettle thermostat, he did not invent the automatic kettle. My father, Bill Russell, took out the first patent to switch off a boiling kettle in 1955. With his business partner, Peter Hobbs, he founded Russell Hobbs in 1952 and from 1955 built automatic kettles in a small factory in south London. In 1960, the firm bought out the iconic K2 design, which was in production for 20 years, gracing wedding gift lists well into the 1970s.
Protected by patent, Russell Hobbs had a monopoly. Other manufacturers had a strong incentive to get round the Russell Hobbs patent. The man who broke it was John C Taylor in the late 1960s, more than a decade after Russell Hobbs began making automatic kettles. Taylor spotted a flaw in their thermostat patent and devised a way round it. Taylor and Strix have subsequently been successful, rare stories of modern British manufacturing achievement.
It is a pity that the postwar generation of British design innovators, epitomised by Bill Russell, have been forgotten. Russell Hobbs persists, as does another British brand, Morphy Richards. John Taylor and James Dyson are famous contemporary inventors and designers. Equally significant earlier industrial designers, such as Bill Russell and Donal Morphy of Morphy Richards, are hardly remembered. Bill and Peter anticipated that they might be forgotten even if their firm survived. They considered themselves mere “household names” rather than notable individuals.
I tell their story in my book Household Names: Russell Hobbs and the Automatic Kettle – A Story of Invention and Design.
Dr Nicholas Russell
Emeritus reader in science communication, Imperial College London
