Astounding inventions

Born in Alnwick, Sir George Biddell Airy earned a reputation at school for making the best pea-shooters. He went on to measure the density of the Earth, and as Astronomer Royal he would establish Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.

Alnwick lad, John Busby, emigrated to Australia with his wife, six sons and two daughters. There, he invented a way to bring water to Sydney through a tunnel that became known as "Busby's Bore".

As far as we know Elanor never visited Alnwick but the four lions that guard the Percy Tenantry Column came from her "Artificial Stone Manufactory". She was the entrepreneur and businesswoman who perfected both the recipe and the firing process for articial stone.

At the 1851 Great Exhibition an American company exhibited a reaping machine that was just like the one that John Common had invented 40 years earlier in Alnwick. Was he right to claimed that McCormick had used his designs?

Robert Smart was a bit of an eccentric, who lived at Hobberlaw. He built a flying machine, from leather and feathers. After summoning friends and servants to witness his first flight, he jumped off his granary stairs. Did it work? No. He landed (unhurt) in a gooseberry bush.

George Wilkin was born at Dunstan, near Craster, but moved Alnwick, where he worked for his brother, Henry, who was in partnership with William Dickman. George registered a design for a self-acting water closet, that would be installed at Newcastle Station.

"Silk Mercer, General Draper & Clothier,,... ", who became "one of the Merchant Princes of Alnwick" and "the patentee of several useful inventions".