The Dynasphere

An inventor has to be a mix of the visionary, an iconoclast willing to challenge the status quo, and a little bit mad. Dr John Archibald Purves, the man who introduced the world to the Dynasphere, dubbed the high speed vehicle of the future, seems to fit the bill perfectly.

So, what was the Dynasphere. Modern Mechanics in its June 1932 edition explained all. Inside the wheel, on either side, tracks run completely around. The motor is geared to the track so that, when the engine is started, the motor pulls the track toward it and so starts the wheel in motion. Centre of gravity is low to prevent the wheel from tipping over.

The weight of the motor and driver is sufficient to keep them always parallel with the ground—if the driving apparatus were sufficiently light, the motor might conceivably climb up the geared track instead of pulling it and the attached wheel around. Speeds of thirty miles an hour, with two occupying the seat, have been comfortably attained. The lattice-work in front of the driver’s eyes disappears when the wheel is in motion, flashing past so rapidly that he has a good view of the road he is travelling.”

Margaret Partridge, writing in the 1934 edition of Women Engineer noted that its controls were similar to those of “an ordinary car” and that its inability to skid was due to the fact that its propulsion was not dependent upon the “mutual pull between wheel and road”. In other words, Purves had devised a large monowheel that accommodated two people and was long lasting due to the lack of deterioration that friction creates. Partridge argued that its “mobility, economy, and efficiency” made it superior to any other vehicle around.

A filmed test drive was held on a beach at Weston-super-Mare in 1932, after which Purves claimed that the Dynasphere had “reduced locomotion to the simplest possible form, with consequent economy of power”. He had two prototypes, one with a 2.5 hp petrol engine, sufficient to propel the 1,000 lb wheel, and the other powered by electricity. In 1935, he developed a bus version, capable of holding more passengers.

Sadly, though, the car of the future had no future. While it moved perfectly well, it proved almost impossible to steer or brake. Perhaps even more disconcertingly, the Dynasphere was prone to the phenomenon of “gerbiling”, the tendency when accelerating or braking for the independent housing holding the driver within the monowheel to spin within the moving structure.

And so, the dream of roads filled with electrically propelled monowheels remained just that.

This Little Measure

A review of This Little Measure by Sara Woods – 251205

The first of a quintet of Anglo-Canadian Sara Woods’ Antony Maitland novels reissued by the enterprising Dean Street Press on December 1, 2025, This Little Measure takes its title from a quotation from Shakespear’s Julius Ceasar – are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils shrunk to this little measure? The family whose reputation is shrunk by the unfolding of the book’s plot is are the Gaskells, shipping magnates, the head of whom, Roderick aka The Pirate King, died six months before the story begins. Although buccaneering in his business approach, there is a puritanical streak running through the family, no more so than in his son and heir, Andrew.

In his will, Roderick adds an intriguing codicil which reads, “To my son Andrew, I leave the problem of the Velasquez. He had made an attempt to buy a Velasquez from a gallery in Liverpool but shortly thereafter it was stolen. It is found in a secret compartment in Roderick’s house and the family bitterly disagree as to whether it should be returned or kept. Before a resolution is arrived at and before Antony Maitland and his uncle, the irascible, no-nonsense QC, Sir Nicholas Harding, have the opportunity to view it, it is stolen once more, only to be found in Roddy’s office, Roddy having been bitterly opposed to Andrew’s plans.

Worse is to follow as shortly after a family dinner at which Andrew indicates that he knows the identity of the thief, the clear implication being that they are around the table, he is found dead, having been poisoned by a strain of aconite in capsules that Roddy was instructed to collect and deliver to him. Then to compound matters, the matriarch of the family, Priscilla, who delights in sitting beneath the portrait of her husband, Roderick, and knowing every little thing that goes on in her family, is also poisoned, Jenny, Antony’s wife, also suffering from the attack. While Priscilla’s dose is fatal, Jenny’s is only enough to hospitalize.

All fingers point to Roddy as the murderer and the thief, but Maitland and Harding are called in to mount his defence, the attack on Jenny causing Antony a moral dilemma, but convinced of Roddy’s innocence, he decides to continue with the brief and redoubles his efforts to find the culprit. There is the inevitable court room drama and the pace of the novel notches up a gear or two as it hurtles to its denouement with a metaphorical bomb being hurled into the courtroom by Antony which has the effect of disclosing the culprit.

Despite it being originally published in 1964, there is a very distinct old-fashioned feel about the novel. The Gaskell family seem to be straight out of central casting, a quasi-Edwardian family stuck in its way, riven by tension, where cousin marries cousin, and operating in its own tiny bubble, oblivious to the changing outside world. There are even servants, even a “sullen parlourmaid pushing a laden trolley” and sandwiches made with anchovy paste. Ah, anchovy paste, a perfect medium in which to disguise the taste of aconite and make a targeted strike as only Priscilla liked them. Jenny was an innocent victim as she tasted one out of politeness.

Indeed, the only nod of the head to modernity is the fact that the crucial witness, who is able to confirm the identity of the aconite used, the hair colour of the person he gave it to and its purpose, flies in covering a distance that would have taken a couple of months to travel by sea. It is a story of rebellion, incipient madness, and neuralgia, which, given its early languor, startles as it rushes to its denouement. Even Sir Nicholas seems a little off colour as he wrestles with an offer he can decline. Nevertheless, although not one of Woods’ best, it is an entertaining enough read, and at least I had the satisfaction of identifying the culprit before the reveal.

Curiously, Woods is at pains to point out that the action takes place before the earlier Trusted Like The Fox, although a reader coming to the book without having followed the series would not be troubled by this knowledge.

I am indebted to Victoria Eade for a review copy.

The Merry Widow Hat

Franz Lehár’s operetta, Die lustige Witwe, first performed on December 30, 1905 in Vienna and better known over here as The Merry Widow, proved a cultural hit both for its popular tunes but also for its mark on fashion history. In the 1907 English adaptation the statuesque Lily Elsie played the main character, Hanna Glawari. Her costume, designed by Lucile, featured a black, wide-brimmed hat covered with filmy chiffon and festooned with piles of feathers. It was a sensation and became the must have look for fashionable Edwardian ladies.

It was a direct descendent of the “Gainsborough” hat which Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, had worn while posing for her famous portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough between 1785 and 1787, and complimented the change in women’s fashion which was moving from the languid S-curve of the early 1900s to the streamlined, athletic look popular in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

As women sought to outdo each other with their Merry Widow hats, as they became known, they became even more extravagant, made of straw, often more than 18 inches wide and topped with all kinds of trimmings, even the occasional stuffed bird. This new fashion was meat and drink to the Edwardian satirists and popular magazines such as Punch frequently poked fun at the difficulties a Merry Widow Hat posed to both wearer and bystander.   

The dangers posed by a Merry Widow hat were not just the figments of the satirical mind. In October 1908, Joseph Lewis, a farmer from Bloomington in Illinois, was rushing to catch a train when he collided with a woman wearing an enormous brimmed hat. According to newspaper reports at the time, the corner of the hat “pierced Lewis’ eye, inflicting an injury which speedily cost him the vision”. Doctors feared that he might lose sight in his other eye “through sympathy”. As for the woman, she must have also been in a hurry as “she kept on her way ignorant of the unfortunate mishap which befell Lewis.”

In New York the Merry Widow craze was not just restricted to hats. Corsets, cigars, chocolates, liqueurs and the like were produced to cash in on the craze and the nascent American film industry was not about to miss the boat, rushing out snappy one-reelers based around merry widows in their ludicrously extravagant hats. The Merry Widow retained its popularity until the onset of the First World War, although its pre-eminence was imperilled by the fad for smaller (and more practical) toques and turbans popularised by Paul Poiret.

As for Lehár, even before the days of lucrative merchandising contracts, this operetta made him a multi-millionaire.

The Heel Of Achilles

A review of The Heel of Achilles by E and M A Radford – 251202

The eighth book in the Doctor Harry Manson series, originally published in 1950 and reissued by Dean Street Press, is the first foray by the husband and wife crime writing duo of Edwin and Mona Radford into the sub genre of inverted murder mysteries. The twist with inverted murder mysteries is that the reader knows the who, why, and how of one or more murders and then follows the twists and turns of the investigatory process as the sleuth, whether they be professional or amateur, seeks to uncover the identity of the culprit. Well done and it can be exhilarating but poorly done it lacks the tension that a conventional murder mystery possesses. On the whole this veers towards the former category although, curiously, there was then a six year hiatus before the Radfords published their next novel. Had they run out of steam?

Jack Porter, a garage proprietor who has built his business up from scratch and is happily married, prides himself in having committed the perfect murder, a tour de force of meticulous planning, a judicious choice of fatal blow, fastidious cleaning of the site, and enormous chutzpah. His victim is James Canley, who earns his living by gambling, thieving and the odd spot of blackmail. The pair, under different guises, Porter as Jack Edwins and Canley as James Sprogson, while Porter was on holiday in Paignton.

Despite the dire warnings of his then girlfriend, Mary Reed, Porter falls under Canley’s influence and is unwittingly lured into carrying out a jewelry raid on a house which goes wrong, resulting in Canley being arrested and imprisoned for three years. Porter escapes with the jewels but as his identity has been disclosed to the police he has to disappear and change identity. The two bump into each other after Canley’s release, ironically while watching the procession of a judge, and Canley begins to blackmail Porter, his demands increasing to such an extent that Porter is forced to take drastic action. Canley is found decapitated by a railway crossing and the presumption is that he was struck by a train in a tragic accident or in a suicide attempt.

Of course, what Jack had failed to take into account when devising his perfect crime was that he would be up against the mighty intellect and forensic know-how of Dr Harry Manson of the Yard, head of its Crime Forensics Research Laboratory, his fearsome portable laboratory, his “Box of Tricks”, and his diligent sidekick, Sergeant Merry. The book falls into two parts, the set up which describes the circumstances leading up to the murder and its aftermath, and the much longer section which deals with the investigations.

Broadly, the investigation falls into three parts, initially establishing that Canley’s death was the result of murder rather than accidental, then reconstructing what happened in Canley’s house on the fateful evening, and then the identification of the culprit. Police procedurals can be as dull as ditch water but the Radfords have fortunately decided to leaven proceedings with no little humour, the sceptical attitude of the local police force to Manson’s methods, and some wonderful incidental characters such as the fire and brimstone housekeeper. Manson is no means infallible, as the authors cheerfully point out in notes appended to the text, and goes off chasing a wild goose when he finds a hat in Canley’s garden.

Whatever Mona’s role was in the writing partnership it was not to imbue the book with any feminist perspective. It is distinctly old school and male-orientated, where women are entirely different creatures with different intellectual capabilities and emotions. There is also a strong evangelical streak running through the book, ramming home the message that crime does not pay, even more of a racing certainty when you are up against Doctor Manson and his new-fangled forensic ways. Nevertheless, the writers are sympathetic to Porter, a hard-working, essentially honest man who fell into bad company and paid a heavy price for a youthful indiscretion. It is this recognition of Porter’s human frailties that lifts the book out of the ordinary. Even the highly focused Manson begins to lose heart as he has to bring this victim of circumstances to justice.

Much of the action centres around Thames Pagnall, which features in the Radfords’ earlier Murder Isn’t Cricket and the bluff local Chief Constable, Colonel Mainforce, returns to arbitrate between his luddite policemen and the fusspots that are the boys from London. This is one to try even if you are not a great fan of inverted murder mysteries.

Scheele’s Green

By 1775 the Swedish scientist, Carl Scheele, had finally created an artificial green colourant, a notoriously difficult colour to replicate convincingly, by heating sodium carbonate, adding arsenious oxide, stirring until the mixture was dissolved, and then adding copper sulphate to the final solution. It produced a striking green, accurately reflecting the hues found in nature, not too yellow, not too teal, without grey tints or any underlying hint of brown. It was cheap to produce.

Earlier in the decade Scheele had also produced a bright yellow paint from chlorine and oxygen which was later known as Turner’s patent yellow after the British manufacturer who had stolen the patent. With his green Scheele had better luck, although he did have some misgivings, admitting to a friend in a letter that he felt users should be made aware of its potentially poisonous attributes.

It struck a chord at the time, the onset of the industrial revolution with its dark, smoky, satanic buildings was counterbalanced by a rise in movements such as the Romantics who idealized the countryside and sought to replicate its beauty. Alive now to the charms of nature, they started to copy it in carvings and as designs in fabrics. Green was the colour most synonymous with nature and Scheele’s Green provided the closest approximation to it that was available.

The foul atmosphere and the overly warm sitting rooms heated by a roaring fire were anathema to bouquets of flowers and to compensate a craze began for artificial flowers. Workshops sprang up, often ill-lit fetid places, where young women worked away in grim conditions for a pittance. The biggest danger, though, came from the material they were working with.

In 1859 Dr. Ange-Gabriel-Maxime Vernois visited one workshop in Paris, walking among the tables, stopping to examine the hands of the ateliers. Their nails, cuticles, arms, and even the dreases of their elbows were caked with brilliant green dust, which, of course, was arsenic-laced dye, and after long exposure deadly poisonous. In London a 19-year-old flower maker, Matilda Schurer, died on November 20, 1861. During her final illness she vomited green waters, the whites of her eyes turning green, and everything she saw looked green. The autopsy revealed that the arsenic she had inhaled while at work, dusting artificial leaves with green powder to make them appear more lifelike, had reached her stomach, liver, and lungs.

Scheele’s green was also used to dye clothing and to colour costume jewellery. Where it made contact with the skin it could leave the with a rash or some form of skin irritation or, at worst, an oozing sore. It also made its way into foodstuffs, bakers using it as food, colouring, one London chef using it to make an amazingly green dessert and killing three diners in the process, and restaurants to their drinks to give them extra pizzazz.

In 1858, twenty-one people died in Bradford from arsenic-laced boiled sweets, adulterated because of the high cost of sugar, sold by Humbug Billy. “On a wave of public revulsion” the Bradford tragedy led to the passing of the Adulteration of Food and Drink Act 1860 and were instrumental to the restrictions imposed on chemists in the Pharmacy Act 1869.

However, the damage caused by Scheele’s Green did not stop there, as we shall see next time.