Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist. He comes from a long line of academics. His father,

an astronomer, recruited him to help build a homemade aeroplane, but luckily the project was

abandoned before its fatal design fault had been detected. His passion in life has been to try to

make science popular. His books, including Eye and Brain and The Intelligent Eye, have been

bestsellers. His lectures have been televised and his famous foundation the exploratory in

Bristol is visited by thousands of people every year.

He's invented robots, a deaf aid and imitating his great-great-grandfather who was a friend of Isaac Newton

a telescope he is professor Richard Gregory tell me first about the flawed flying

machine professor Gregory did you and your father seriously intend to fly?

Oh yes, we built it. It took about three years. It was called the Flying Flea, and it was designed by a Frenchman

called Minniee and just as we got the thing finished, two people, or maybe three,

crashed there, and I think two or three people actually got killed that weekend, and we were

just learning to fly on a rather bumpy field field and we never got more than about six foot

off the ground which is probably a good thing. It had a design fault so that if you

dived it it couldn't actually recover. There wasn't enough control to get it out of a dive.

So it would have gone into a permanent nose dive?

But that was of course back in the 20s.

I mean flying was still a potentially dangerous business then.

Yes indeed.

It's unusual I think to make an actual airplane.

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