Citizenship British Alma mater Imperial College Residence United Kingdom | Name David H. Fields Chemistry Role Chemist | |
Institutions University of Newcastle upon Tyne Known for Daedalus, DREADCO, prediction of fullerenes, arsenic in Napoleon's wallpaper, chemical gardens in space, stability of the bicycle, fake perpetual motion machines | ||
Education Imperial College London | ||
David Edward Hugh Jones (20 April 1938 – 19 July 2017) was a British chemist and author, under the pen name Daedalus, the fictional inventor for DREADCO. Jones' columns as Daedalus were published for 38 years, starting weekly in 1964 in New Scientist starting in the mid-1960s. He then moved on to the journal Nature, and continued to publish until 2002. He published two books with columns from these magazines, along with additional comments and implementation sketches. The first was The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (1982) and the second was The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999).
He was born on April 20, 1938, in Southwark, London. His father, Philip, was an advertising copywriter. His mother was Dorothea, neé Sitters. He attended Crofton Primary School in Orpington, Kent, and then Eltham College. David Jones' professional training was as a chemist. In 1962, he graduated in chemistry and completed a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Imperial College London. He worked for a year for a company specialising in the design on laboratory equipment and then as a post-doctoral fellow at Imperial where he worked on infrared spectroscopy and he began his column for New Scientist. In 1967 he took up a post as an assistant lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. After one year he moved to Runcorn where he worked as a research scientist in spectroscopy for Imperial Chemical Industries. In 1974, he became the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He then became an independent science consultant to industry providing ideas, brain storming services, and scientific demonstrations for television.
Some of his inventions proved practical, about 20%, would be seriously proposed or even patented by others. His most notable scientific contribution as Daedalus was possibly his prediction of hollow carbon molecules before buckminsterfullerene was made, and long before its synthesizers won a Nobel prize for the discovery of fullerenes. Beyond Daedalus, in scientific circles he is perhaps best known for his study of bicycle stability, his determination of arsenic in Napoleon’s wallpaper, and for having designed and flown an experiment to grow a chemical garden in microgravity Recent (late 2016) discussion relates to the claimed invention of 3D printing in 1984 by Chuck Hull, which Jones in his Daedalus persona discussed 10 years earlier (New Scientist, 3 Oct 1974, p80).
He is also known for his series of fake perpetual-motion machines, the latest of which is in the Technisches Museum, Vienna. In 2009 a documentary film about his work and inventions, Perpetual Motion Machine, was made and shown at the Newcastle Science Festival 2010.
He was known in Germany as a regular guest on the 1980s TV science quiz show Kopf um Kopf (Head to Head), presenting interesting physics experiments.
In 1972 he married Jane Burgess but the marriage only lasted one year. He had a long relationship with the artist, Naomi Hunt. His only immediate survivor is his brother, Peter Vaughan Jones, who said Dr. Jones died of complications of prostate cancer on 19 July 2017.