Last updated 13:51, Tuesday, 26 August 2008

It’s enough to make your hair stand on end – if you have any. One thing you’ve got to say about the Victorians, they had imagination and a spirit of invention that is barely matched today by those brave souls who bring their ideas to test the patience of TV’s Dragon’s Den entrepreneurs.

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Cleaning power: Museum assistant Martin Pugmire demonstrates how an innovative spring-loaded clothes washer, from 1900, would have worked

They had an invention for everything – even if most of them disappeared off the scene as quickly as they came.

Well, for a start take that hair restorer and the claim that, combined with battery power, its rays would have a magical effect on hair growth.The bald truth is that it failed. Like many quack inventions and medicines since.

But they were mugs for quackery in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There must have been more quacks on the go in those days than on a farm selling duck eggs.

Of course much of it was codswallop. In fact Hiram Codd invented a bottle in 1888 which was designed to prevent the fizz escaping from lemonade. They called it a load of old codswallop and that’s where the saying came from.

Dozens of these amazing items are currently on show in Keswick’s Museum and Art Gallery in Station Road. The exhibition “Curios, Contraptions, Gadgets, Gismos and Thingamabobs 1851-1951” has been such a success that it is being kept on for an extra month until September 27. Two similar exhibitions are currently running, one in Wrexham and the other in the British Library in London.

Collector Maurice Collins has spent decades trawling auction houses, sale rooms and e-Bay to build up an Aladdin’s cave of these historic inventions.

Since he went on television on the Richard & Judy show, and did a series of radio interviews, people have been telephoning the Keswick Museum asking for details of when and where they can see the exhibits.

Curator Jamie Barnes said: “Maurice Collins has been collecting since the 1970s. No-one else has a similar collection and he has about 1,800 items. We have 150 of them on display at the moment, there are a similar number in the Wrexham Museum and 50 in the British Library, within the patents section.”

Jamie spotted an advert in the Museums Journal 18 months ago and got in touch with Mr Collins to book the Keswick exhibition.

He said: “We have been lucky to ride on the coat tails of all the publicity. He is a great guy and gives the money he makes to charity.”

Maurice Collins, who lives in north London, has been exhibiting his curiosities for the past six years. Now retired and in his 70s, his weird and wonderful collection has provided Keswick Museum with a welcome seasonal boost.

“He has mentioned our exhibition when he’s been doing interviews and, the day he was on Radio 4 with James Naughtie, 260 people turned up over and above our normal visitor levels,” said Jamie.

Jamie faced a massive task labelling the exhibits when he and collections manager Nicci Tofts got down to the task of producing the display.

“It wasn’t easy matching the descriptions to the items,” he said. “Some people mistakenly think all this is part of our own collection. It has certainly prompted a reaction among people young and old and we are running a competition for children to draw their own inventions.”

Jamie’s own favourites include a couple of brandy flasks, disguised as binoculars, for the racing fan who is a secret drinker. There’s also the Victorian equivalent of a laptop – a railway writing desk which cost 3/6 without paper and five bob with. It involved string attached to the writer’s wrist and the luggage rack. It didn’t catch on. For theatregoers, bored with the play, there was a monocular periscope which gave the impression the viewer was looking straight ahead, but in fact enabled them to study the goings on in the next door box.

Gentlemen of the Edwardian era were extremely proud of their facial hair and there is a moustache protector to keep whiskers out of the soup, while ladies of the early 1900s had skirt-lifters to enable them to tuck in their dresses when playing sport.

There’s also a projection clock which had rather naughty connotations. Its nickname, the brothel clock, explains why it was viewed on the ceiling in a dark room. Also the fact it was made by Ever Ready. Obviously ladies of doubtful repute timed their clients by it as they lay on their backs staring upwards.

“Obviously these inventors thought they would get rich quick,” said Mr Barnes. “Machines like the yarn winder would have been used in the mills of Northern England, but a lot of the inventions never made it.”

You wonder what Duncan Bannatyne, Deborah Meaden and Theo Paphitis would have made of a hand stretcher for pianists and a double cigarette holder to enable smokers to clog up their lungs in half the time.

Had there been TV and a Dragon’s Den series in those far-off days, inventors would have come trotting up the stairs to show off their pocket spittoons, their clockwork burglar alarms, their boot lifters for jockeys and their thumb sucking stoppers for kids with bad habits.

Knot unpickers, pin dispensers, envelope wetters and even an outlandish eye massager, said to improve sight and stop blindness, would have had the Dragons apoplectic.

Of course some devices did have practical uses like a First World War trench listener, which was used to listen for the enemy tunnelling under your own side’s battle lines.

Toffs visiting their London club had gold coin change-giving machines, because cab drivers did not carry change for sovereigns, and there were servants’ knife sharpeners and game carriers to make life a bit easier for staff below stairs.

Mr Royle was one inventor who did make it big with his self-pouring teapot in 1886. He franchised the patent worldwide for an article which made full use of Archimedes’ principle of liquid displacement.

Nowadays no house would be able to run smoothly without a washing machine and spin drier and all those other accessories that make life easy.

In 1910 you would have had to work the bellows of the Star vacuum cleaner – mind it was still removing dust from carpets 28 years later so it must have worked reasonably well.

Sadly, most inventors had to return to the day job, their dream of riches unfulfilled, until Maurice Collins came along and injected new life into their way out designs.

Jamie said: “I went to his house in London to collect the exhibition and saw three rooms stuffed full of these items. It truly was an Aladdin’s cave although his wife’s part of the house was a total contrast, with paintings and sculptures. Collecting has obviously taken over his life.”

n Keswick Museum and Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday between 10am and 4pm and entry is free, although donations are welcomed. A donation from the Friends of Keswick Museum support group has helped keep the exhibition of curiosities open for the extra weeks, after it had been due to close at the end of August.