David E. H. Jones

David E. H. Jones (1938-2017) was a British chemist and author, perhaps best known for his weekly lighthearted, provocative scientific column, started in the mid-1960s in New Scientist under the pen name Daedalus. In the 1980s he transferred the Daedalus column to Nature and The Guardian, where it continued for many years. He published two books with columns from these magazines, along with additional comments and implementation sketches: The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes (1982) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999). He has worked in academia, industry and television. Jones’s most notable scientific contribution as Daedalus is possibly his prediction of hollow carbon molecules before buckminsterfullerene was made, and long before its synthesizers won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of fullerenes. Other than 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. In 2009 a documentary film about his work and inventions, Perpetual Motion Machine, was made and shown at the Newcastle Science Festival, 2010.