Tuesday, July 12, 2005

100 years ago

Alderman Widdowfield, in his characteristic manner, made some forcible comments on the modern motorist. In his observation the awful truth was that practically every man, woman and child in these unhappy isles went daily in fear and trembling of their lives - in fact, carried the slender hair of life itself in their hands, ripe and ready to be ruthlessly snapped asunder by an apparition in goggles and a cloud of dust. A mother could not send her children across the village street without a fear that one or other of the darlings would fall victim to some fiend in a fiery chariot speeding through the land, leaving a wake of death and annihilation behind it. An Evening Press reporter suggested that this opinion was a little overblown, it seemed to him that the average motorist was a gentleman and desired not to skim through the land for his own particular exhilaration and to everyone else's discomfort and danger. However, there did lie a very great danger in the clouds of dust which were sprayed on dwelling houses by all automobiles - dust which probably conveyed millions of germs and particles of decaying matter dangerous to sanitation and even life.

50 years ago

A United States company had produced a radio so small that it could be carried in a man's shirt pocket. It weighed seven ounces, and could be used with a tiny earphone. Equipped with transistors instead of valves, it could be operated for 80 hours on four hearing aid batteries, costing 2s 6d each.

25 years ago

Britain's test tube baby pioneers were to set up on their own, charging women £1,000 each for their treatment. Dr Robert Edwards and Mr Patrick Steptoe would begin business in a mansion in Cambridgeshire in the autumn. "It will cost our patients at least £1,000 - I would think more," said Dr Edwards. The two men, who brought the world's first test tube baby -Louise Brown - into the world, work from 50-room Bourne Hall, an Elizabethan mansion, near Cambridge. Dr Edwards, a father of five, said he hoped the new clinic would "take National Health patients if we possibly can."

Updated: 08:42 Tuesday, July 12, 2005