This Man Builds the World’s Most Pointless (and Brilliant) Machines
- Andy McIlvain
- 10 hours ago
- 2 min read
Video from Britclip
This Man Builds the World’s Most Pointless (and Brilliant) Machines
"Meet Lyndon Yorke, a mechanical philologist—though what exactly that means is open to interpretation—and, quite possibly, Britain’s number one eccentric.
Yorke has spent a good portion of his life building things that nobody asked for, nobody particularly needs, and yet everyone is delighted to see. His creations are one-off mechanical curiosities: peculiar, ingenious, and frequently bordering on the gloriously pointless. Among them are such contraptions as a wicker aircraft and something called the Buskermatic, which is exactly what it sounds like if you imagine a busker, several tons of scrap metal, and a slightly unhinged Victorian inventor all collaborating on a musical project.
At one point Lyndon was voted Britain’s most eccentric person, which in Britain is rather like being voted the dampest cloud in the sky—competition is fierce and the standards are high. Spend even a few minutes with his inventions and you begin to see why he won.
For the very British spectacle of the Henley Royal Regatta, for instance, Lyndon decided that what the Thames truly needed was a fleet of boats that were, in engineering terms, almost entirely useless. They floated—more or less—and moved—sometimes—but their real purpose was to demonstrate that practicality is vastly overrated when compared with imagination and a good set of tools.
Then came the Buskermatic: a nine-piece, life-sized mechanical orchestra assembled from copper tubing, elderly car windscreen-wiper motors, and an alarming quantity of mechanical enthusiasm. In total, thirty-six motors power the thing, which is about thirty-five more than most orchestras require. The control switches, wonderfully, came from a Second World War Lancaster bomber aircrew panel, giving the whole enterprise the reassuring sense that at any moment it might either burst into song or take off for Hamburg.
Lyndon did not stop there. His workshop has since produced a steady stream of mechanical oddities, including a propeller-driven vintage bicycle, the world’s first wicker aeroplane (currently under construction, which is both exciting and mildly concerning), and what appears at first glance to be a propeller-driven car—because of course it is.
Perhaps most impressively, he has also built a fully operational wickerwork car based on a 1922 Citroën B2. Quite why anyone would want a wicker car is a question Lyndon seems never to have considered, which is precisely why the world is better for him having built one." from the video introduction
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