MOO-sic for chilled out milk! Meet the scientists and inventors coming up with wacky solutions to improve our lives

• e-mail

WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY   

by Mark Stevenson (Profile £12.99)

Working one day in his garden shed in Bishop’s Stortford, Peter Dearman applied some antifreeze to the engine of his lawnmower.

It had precisely the desired effect. But Dearman wasn’t trying to cut the grass in a cold snap. He was an amateur inventor making an engine that can run on fresh air.

In India, Mark Stevenson witnesses cows listening to classical music (it’s been proven to relax them, so they produce more milk)

It’s the sort of heroism that fills this inspirational book. Mark Stevenson has toured the world meeting people who refuse to take ‘status quo’ for an answer.

As Ronald Reagan told us: ‘Status quo is Latin for “the mess we’re in”.’

Oil is a very powerful fuel — a gallon of gasoline would charge your iPhone once a day for 20 years — but it’s expensive, finite and dirty. (As one expert quoted in the book says: ‘You may have noticed the environment is starting to send back invoices.’)

Dearman dreamed of an engine that could take liquid air, 700 times denser than normal air, and use the expansion as it turned back into a gas to drive a piston.

The problem was keeping the temperature high enough for long enough to deliver the oomph.

Having ‘hacked’ his lawnmower to run on liquid air, Dearman injected antifreeze on each stroke — and it worked. The technology is still being improved, but the breakthrough has been made.

Fresh thinking is needed in all sorts of areas. Healthcare, for instance. Stevenson meets Jamie Heywood, founder of American website PatientsLikeMe, which lets ill people swap details of their symptoms, treatments and so on.

Heywood knows data brings results: dieters who keep a food diary, for instance, lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. And so it proved with disease. The website helped an epilepsy sufferer find a cure. A conventional one, yes — but one her doctor had failed to prescribe.

The medical establishment can be lazy at best, incompetent at worst. The NHS used voice recognition software that misheard ‘DKA’ (diabetic ketoacidosis) as ‘BKA’ (below-the-knee amputation), and marked a patient’s records accordingly. It took four hospital visits before someone noticed the person still had both legs.

Down on the farm, new methods are emerging to rival the irrigation-heavy techniques that threaten our water supplies and the pesticides that poison our soil. More and more rice is grown by ‘SRI’ (System of Rice Intensification), where plants are transferred from nursery to field at an earlier stage, and spaced more widely and evenly.

It brings a much higher yield than the old ‘spray and pray’ method — but because it came from outside the mainstream, many still shun it. As a supporter of the system says: ‘If some rice scientist came up with a seed that could do what [SRI] is doing they’d be getting a Nobel prize.’

We also meet David Price, a musician charged with getting children interested in classical music. He advised teachers to ask the children about the music they liked. The teachers objected that ‘the kids will choose hip-hop or some music that I don’t know anything about!’ Price replied: ‘Well, you have a pair of ears, don’t you?’

The book works so well because Stevenson gets out there to see things for himself. In India, he witnesses cows listening to classical music (it’s been proven to relax them, so they produce more milk), while inside a Welsh mountain he finds Europe’s largest man-made cavern.

Big enough to house St Paul’s Cathedral, it contains a water-driven power station that can go from a standing start to full power in 16 seconds: a conventional station takes 12 hours. Meanwhile, in Austria, he visits Güssing, the town that provides its own power by burning woodchips.

It perservered with the technology, even though the local utility company (whose power costs twice as much) bullied the project’s bank into withdrawing its funding. Stevenson stands next to the building that stores the bio-gas: ‘This is no place for a crafty cigarette.’

He’s also good at explaining the technicalities, even to readers (like me) with the engineering nous of a small pebble. We learn that, as part of his campaign to persuade people to use AC rather than DC electricity, Thomas Edison publicly electrocuted an elephant.

The rebels in this book make plenty of mistakes, and it’s never a case of ‘old way completely wrong, new way completely right’.

But even when they mess up, they’re prepared to admit it. Internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe promised to eat his words if one of his predictions failed to come true. It did fail — so he shredded the magazine column in question, added water and, in front of an audience, ‘ate the resulting frappe with a spoon’.

And who cares that the pioneers aren’t perfect? Their contrariness is appealing, and most of mankind’s great achievements have depended on people like them.

As an old Chinese proverb puts it: ‘When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills.’ This is a book about the windmills.