Tom Lawton: The Brit Inventor Who Never Gave?Up

My whole career has been a perfect balance of highs and lows, of enlightenment and despair. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I first heard of inventor Tom Lawton in January 2012 and have followed his journey ever since. A man with a compellingly curious mind and a tenacity which outmatches most, Tom has overcome countless setbacks to put special products into the world. 

We caught up ahead of the launch of his latest product— Uplift 2.0 which launched on Kickstarter today. Here’s his story:

Newnham: Can you tell me about your background. What you were like growing up? 

Lawton: I am the middle of three kids with an older brother and a younger sister. I grew up with the nickname “Horse” because I was always horsing about — I never remember taking life too seriously. At the same time, I have always been hard working and full of energy.

I was good as gold when I needed to be but was a little mischievous and a bit ridiculous too — never in a malicious way — I just liked to press the button, especially with authority and had a low threshold for boredom. Mainly I’d just daydream in my own little world.

I was sensitive and very empathetic too so I have found good friendships and tend to get along with most people. A virtue of growing up in welcoming village communities I think — it’s normal to trust people and to be nice.

My dad was definitely my biggest inspiration as a child. He was an aerospace engineer — so could field every conceivable question when it came to how things worked. He fixed things too which was a very good habit to adopt. He is also a self-taught jazz pianist and a highly talented one at that. He is ‘also’ an artist who painted painstakingly realistic portraits of local buildings. Mum and dad both encouraged us to pursue our creative passions and mine were drawing and making things.

Equally, Dad’s fascination with new technology meant he was an early adopter of most consumer and creative technologies. So it was a wonderfully interesting mix — a loving home life with a rural backdrop, a steady stream of Japanese and American gadgets — riding about on homemade bikes made from old parts.

Standing over Dad’s shoulder at the kitchen table as he fixed our toys or one of his pieces of kit was probably the best hook to get me interested in how things are made — because I had the motivation to see it working again. But I think the desire to make, to build, is hardwired in me, as is the desire to express myself creatively so I was always looking for a way to channel my imagination, and design became the way as I gained confidence with the things I could actually do. 

But more than anything, there was a philosophical wondering… Here is the world — accept it as it is — or bring something new to it. I am extremely optimistic and so design to me is the best way to show that to the world.

Newnham: How did your parents encourage your curiosity? 

Lawton: My parents simply encouraged curiosity by being curious people themselves — that’s to say, they embrace change and like to challenge themselves. Kids do what they see, not what they are told, and we naturally followed suit. A big area of interest in our family is psychology — why people do the things they do. So a curiosity of self was fostered in me because I felt completely secure in my family life. I could dare to ask challenging questions and try different experiences and was supported emotionally as I attempted to navigate them.

I got a fair amount of resistance too but that’s normal. I am lucky that, together with my own family, they are all still my sounding board.

Newnham: What was your first invention?

Lawton: The first time I designed something that I felt really had market potential was my final year project at university. I had spent a year improving the alarm clock and had devised a novel solution called WakeYoo that came with no sound — instead it put the onus on the user to record a sound of their own choosing — inspiring them to make their own wake up call. This was 1997 before mobile phones were mainstream. 

Of course I left university with no idea how to make WakeYoo a reality. I remember working the summer at a local golf course being paid ￡4.50 per hour while paying a patent attorney ￡150 per hour and realised quickly that inventing was the easy part. 

I sat in the local library with an Argos catalogue, cross referencing products and distributors, looking for a potential manufacturer to licence the invention. Eighteen months later and WakeYoo was in production, licensed to a big American manufacturer. Four years later and I had sold 250,000 of them through all the major UK high street retailers and was on to the next invention. It’s sounds easy, but there were so many lessons — saying that, in many ways it was my biggest success.

Newnham: As kids, we imagine inventors with wild hair and genius ideas. What are the true characteristics of an inventor?

Lawton: First and foremost you have to be a lateral thinker and again, I think that comes naturally to the best inventors. You can’t force yourself to have good ideas. But you can train yourself to, and lateral thinking often comes about through making unusual associations between different things — what if I used this principal like this as opposed to like that? Upside down or wrong thinking yields more innovative results and you have to be a bit daring to think like that — certainly with so much conformity about. Inventors are, on the whole, proud and self-aware people who require great courage to ignore all the naysayers. We often feel like outsiders.

There also has to be passion — a bit like an artist — no one is going to pay you to invent things and claim ownership of them. There isn’t a single employee at Dyson who owns the work they produce but, of course, the talent and ingenuity there is overflowing, so what’s the difference between 2,000 design engineers and their inventor boss? Risk! Or a lack of perception of the fear of risk. The odds are so against you as an inventor that I think you have to be a little bit nuts, certainly in the face of ordinary people who have good, regular jobs. It’s the most insecure profession so there has to be something else guiding you.

Newnham: And what does the invention process look like for you?

Lawton: Every invention has a different story of conception, a different process of development and a different path to execution and commercialisation — so I don’t know what it looks like until I am in it. How can you know when there is no map? But in hindsight you do see all sorts of patterns and there are obvious routes certain ideas should go.

Certainly, when it comes to the actual inventing, for me it’s all about the proof of concept — that’s where the inventive step comes to life. To have taken that nebulous idea, to have reframed that problem as a solution, to have taken it through a sketchbook and now in to some sort of physical form that proves the essence of what you are looking to achieve — that’s like alchemy for your imagination.

Sometimes the process is all I can be sure of — that’s to say — I can never guarantee what the outcome will be. It might fail as an idea or it might fail as a business, but if I am going to do it, I will give it my all. The inventive spirit is what I live for and it’s who I am, and the process is unique as the brilliance of thought.

Newnham: Can you tell me more about your career including some of the highs and lows that shaped it?

Lawton: WakeYoo set me off to a great start but only three months into the manufacturing and distribution deal, the US parent company of the firm I licensed it to decided to streamline their product range and dropped the product, forcing me to quickly catch the ball and establish a new partner, which I did, but with an inferior deal. And I knew, then, that nothing was ever safe nor truly serving my interests while it was in the hands of someone else.

There have been many ups…

The highlight of the WakeYoo story was donating ten of them on the request of Terry Wogan who proceeded to record personalised wake up messages in to them which he later auctioned on BBC Radio 2 for Children in Need raising ￡350 each… not bad for a ￡15 product.

I won the Green Dot Award in Los Angeles for Firewinder, my wind-powered outdoor light, which was a real thrill. We subsequently illuminated Glastonbury Tor with an installation of them and it was an illuminating spectacle in the winter sky that made me lots of druidic friends. It also made it on to the local BBC news due to reports of UFO’s upon the Tor. 

This was in 2009 and I was trying to inspire people to embrace the beauty of renewable energy and to raise environmental awareness but, mostly, it was to visualise the energy in wind.

I was also given the opportunity by Channel 4 to have my own TV series which we filmed through 2013. The show was called ‘Tom’s Fantastic Floating Home’ and co-starred my then six year-old son Barney. It was a real success in TV terms and gave me a wonderful window into that world.

Last year I donated 1,000 of my battery free Million Mile Lights to school children in rural England. It was a joy to see hundreds of them at a time jiggling about in their assembly halls. And every time I see a runner wearing the lights, which are powered by motion and designed to last forever, I get a lovely feeling.

I triumphantly succeeded in handmaking over 440 of my Uplift spiral sculptures which were delivered to customers worldwide in the winter of 2018. They used over 22,000 precision cut and individually assembled pieces of walnut and were each finished with a nail file.

I pioneered mobile 360° video with my BubbleScope invention. I won a Lovie Award for the most experimental use of the web and got coverage in lots of technology press. That was just exciting, to be at the forefront of something really innovative and new, with so much future potential — but I was a number of years too early to market and didn’t have the resource to sustain the business and take it any further.

I did, however, get recognised on the train once, by the ticket inspector no less — “You are the BubbleScope man aren’t you?” — it turned out he was an early customer and had backed me on Kickstarter.

But there have been many downs too…

I will get there. There is no doubt. My whole career has been a perfect balance of highs and lows, of enlightenment and despair.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I had to sell my car to pay for an expensive Firewinder prototype that arrived smashed into cornflake sized pieces. I glued them all back together through the night but it was truly gutting.

My manufacturer had used the wrong bearing specification for the Firewinders production which meant that every single unit failed after prolonged use in the rain. That, with a toxic loan from Barclays and an unsympathetic bank manager meant the business had to close, lumbering me with tens of thousands of pounds in debt. I don’t miss those pre-Kickstarter days where the only way to make the jump to production was to beg, steal and borrow the money.

I was too early in the market with my BubbleScope invention and ultimately failed with two startups in the pursuit of success with that. Neither of them afforded me anything like a regular wage and I lacked the investment to secure one so I worked double jobs to support the businesses and this took an incredible toll on my personal life as I juggled any sort of normal balance.

Another time, I remember a trip I had taken to Orlando to a big camera expo in 2007. I’d gone on the hope a deal would work out with a US corporation I was in talks with. It didn’t. I’d already blown my credit card limit on the flight and accommodation. I didn’t even have enough money for a taxi to the airport so I sold my camera to a guest in the hotel. I took the flight home and when I arrived back in the UK, my car needed refuelling at the airport. I didn’t have enough money to fill it up and was too proud to ask for help so I refilled at a petrol station and drove off without paying. That felt like an act of desperation and I felt ashamed, especially coming home to my wife and newly born son.

Years later, I have seen a billion dollar corporation launch a design based on my hard work, concept and blueprints and have had to sit back and let them get on with it for lack of resource and poor confidence in challenging them. I have certainly learned to let things go and keep my head up high.

The prolonged isolation of both working as a independent designer and living in a rural community has its benefits when you wish to seek solace and I have had to find peace in my aloneness, but there have been really dark and difficult times along this path — times of utter frustration, sadness, lack of motivation and depression. That’s all normal but, at times, I have felt like giving up on everything, on my whole being. But, somehow, everything passes and the constant striving and love from my devoted family pulls me through, even if just to see myself and my work in a new light.

I will get there. There is no doubt. My whole career has been a perfect balance of highs and lows, of enlightenment and despair.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Newnham: Can you tell me more about your latest project Uplift 2.0?

Lawton: Powered by the sun, Uplift is a unique new spiralling sculpture, designed to soothe the soul.

In the same way I experience tranquillity when I am in nature, I wanted to create something transfixing — to slow down the wheels of my mind. But not just beautiful to look at, it had to work in a beautiful way and be sustainably made too.

I launched the first version on Kickstarter in May 2018 and last year I made over 440 units by hand which were sent to customers around the world. One of those was Calm.com who ordered ten units for installation at the offices in San Francisco, other fans included Derren Brown, Matt Haig, Jamie Oliver, Suzi Perry and Gordana Biernat, which together form a wonderful rosette of endorsement.

After the brilliant response to the first Uplift, I asked my audience what they would like to see and the response was unanimous; everyone wanted the spiral to be made from something that was reminiscent of flowing water — a form with translucency that would make it look likes waves. There’s a naturally calming feeling you get when you’re near water and well, most of us live surrounded by concrete, so I liked the idea of that — to bring the ocean on to the window sill in your home or office — somehow?

I was also seeking a more sustainable material for my next version but importantly it had to be just as beautiful as the first, which were all hand assembled from walnut by my own fair hands. So I looked to waste materials and, inspired by the challenge of transformation, I wondered if I could create beauty from waste marine plastic.

After a lot of research, I found a remarkable new source of material made of 100% waste nylon that comes from commercial fishing nets in Cornwall, England and we partnered with the supplier to pioneer a new process to manufacture with it — this hadn’t been done before — and the result is stunning.

The material is mysterious, incredibly pure and beautiful to watch. It behaves like the ocean, dark in the depths but translucent in sunlight.

So Uplift 2.0 has a very unique aesthetic. It has been great to have so much encouraging feedback and we’ve done our best to completely reengineer the product and take Uplift 1.0 from being an object d’art to becoming the classic design piece that is Uplift 2.0. It’s easier to use, more robust and more reliable.

Newnham: Uplift is the antithesis of modern life isn’t it? It is calming, simple, naturalistic. 

Lawton: Yes, I can only speak for myself but have been drawn towards spirals since I was a child, sometimes I could close my eyes and I’d see fractal patterns. When I look to nature I see spirals everywhere too — they are like the thumbprint of life at all scales in the universe — so I don’t think I am alone in my appreciation of them. There is something particularly special about seeing a spiral in motion though, perhaps that is reminiscent of natural patterns too — the water flowing down the sink, a whirlwind, or smoke rising — I don’t know. I think that because a spiral is the opposite to linear movement it encourages the mind to wander, to drift a little, there’s a release and a renewal to it.

When I think of those 80s desktop toys with the suspended metal balls, Newton’s Cradle, that’s the one, the pattern doesn’t encourage your mind to wander, it encourages linear thinking. With the spiral in Uplift there is an infinite flow that appears from nowhere and transcends in to somewhere via the optical illusion of the spiral. It can freely turn either way and there’s a lovely meaning to that whichI have adopted from an ancient eastern philosophy. When the spiral turns anti-clockwise — let go of the past, of all the things that no longer serve you. When it turns clockwise — embrace the future, get in to the flow.

Newnham: How much risk — personal and financial — is involved in inventing?

Lawton: Firstly, I wouldn’t have taken this path in life if I wasn’t capable of walking it or if it wasn’t giving me something back as a reward but that’s certainly never been financial or emotional stability. As I mentioned before, being an inventor is one of the most insecure professions there is — until you have a major breakthrough or tipping point — it will always be an uphill struggle as research and development requires so much upfront investment in terms of time, resource and energy, way before anything ever comes back.

The risk and uncertainty is huge so you have to be incredibly hard working. Not to mention the sheer creative and intellectual challenge of producing work that is inventive and original in the first place. With seven billion other whirling minds on the planet, the odds are stacked heavily against you from the start. Except no one else sees the world just like you, so that’s your greatest strength and there are so many useful tools and technologies to help you make your idea a reality — so in a way we are all piggy backing off of each other and that’s the foundation for progress. There’s no better time to be an inventor.

The most important thing is to keep a balance and when I left University twenty one years ago I was in remarkably good form and I had the confidence to reject much of mainstream thinking. My mind, body and soul were all in alignment — that might sound like hippy guff but it’s really important — I was bright, fit as a fiddle and my heart was full to the brim with love for people and the natural world. That was the base from where I decided to walk this path and it took the sacrifice to do so. It’s also the sense of self I feel when I am centred so I know where I am trying to get back to when I occasionally lose my way.

Newnham: Let’s talk about grit. Was there a time during your career when you had to dig really deep?

Lawton: Yes, there are lots of times. In 2002 I had been working on BubbleScope for about six months when I suffered a terrible car crash in France that left me incapacitated and unable to walk more than a mile for eighteen months. I made a full recovery over time but in reality it took five years of gym work to get running properly again and, being self employed, I wasn’t able to take a single day of paid sick leave.

Nevertheless, the experience served my project well as all that time sat on my bum gave me ample opportunity to research my work and that indeed was the only way I didn’t become eclipsed by frustration. No personal trainers, no private therapies, just me, digging deep with my iPod at the gym — every day for years. I found my fitness and went on to run 2,000 miles a year. 

I also suffered a secondary accident when I slipped on a bathroom floor and undid my first three months of critical healing. That was almost more horrific than the car crash and I picked up an infection at the local hospital. The reason I slipped was partly due to distraction and the shower room was cluttered with plastic bottles. This inspired me to devise a new gravity based shower storage and dispensing system for plastic disposables and as part of the design I suggested a way for manufacturers to reduce the volume of plastic they used. I presented it to the Body Shop in 2003, crutches left in the car, but at that time they were going through a corporate restructure so weren’t interested. I carried on with my main project.

Newnham: You have at least one invention that I know of which was way ahead of its time (BubbleScope) — how do you deal with the frustration of seeing into the future and facing a market which isn’t quite ready for it?

Lawton: That is quite a conundrum; it’s probably the biggest business challenge I have faced. There’s a Steve Jobs quote that goes something like, the farther you think into the future, the less competition there is. That’s true, but it’s also incredibly hard to build a business plan based on future projections of technology and market demand when your customers have no idea what you’re talking about and you can’t be sure if your idea will even work. I think everything we see that’s disruptive today probably started in someone’s imagination at least ten years earlier.

I accept that I can see some things before their time and rather than get too excited I am now incredibly calculated with what inventions I work on. I may limit the scale of my ambitions but I only work on projects that I can actually find the resource to see through. There has to be a strategy to innovation or else you’re just dabbling at it, which is fine but not if you want to build a business and increase your prosperity.

Newnham: How different is it to invent now, in the age of Kickstarter, versus when you started out?

Lawton: In my opinion Kickstarter is, without doubt, the single greatest innovation to enable creatives like me that has appeared this decade. Before then, we inventors faced an age-old dilemma. Through sheer grit and determination we had made a prototype and we knew the market was there, we even had a buyer interested, but a jump to mass production required an investment neither the retailer or the bank would provide. So the inventor would either not be able to proceed with their invention or would have to find another way to raise the finance.

Now Kickstarter has changed that and it’s not just about raising cash. It’s about engaging with an audience and testing the market viability of an idea. It’s an incredibly exciting process and today’s launch marks my sixth campaign.

Newnham: What advice do you have for other inventors looking to crowdsource their idea?

Lawton: Do it. There is a plethora of cases studies out there that probably mirror what you are looking to achieve. Find the best ones and emulate what they have done. Be exceptional as everyone is vying for attention and quality always shines through.

The most powerful thing a campaign has, other than your unique proposition, is an audience who are already engaged with it. There is an art to running a successful campaign that’s longer than my response to this question, but there’s an advantageous consumer psychology to having a campaign that funds quickly, as more people jump on board.

Newnham: It seems like more and more designers are being copied today. How can designers/inventors protect themselves?

Lawton: Yes, copycats are something that I have learned to accept too, they come with the territory and thank goodness they do as I don’t think anyone should hold a monopoly on a good idea. But it can be crushing too, especially when the infringement is blatant and produces an inferior product. There is a lovely accord that exists between the fine art glass blowers of Venice. You can copy anyone’s work so long as you credit it and you bring something new to it. In that way respect is paid and the craft moves forward. 

The best form of protection is a patent but even those are far from being watertight. In 2015, I launched my Million Mile Light and filed a patent. This summer, in 2019, it was granted in the US. In the interim, I have had three copycat products all selling via Amazon and there has been nothing that I can or Amazon are prepared to do about it. Now the patent is granted I can take action and am in the process of doing so. The most galling thing has been seeing them use a picture of me and my product in order to drive sales. That feels like having your apartment robbed by a gang facilitated by a multi-billion dollar corporation. 

Patents are a bugger. Did you know that for other creative arts, like music, art, literature, cinema and photography; it is the legal right of the creator to own their work from the moment of creation — so long as that creation is recorded somehow? That’s copyright. If that work was infringed then it would be deemed a criminal offence and the state would help you defend your right to it. But with patents, we inventors have to pay substantial fees just to be in with a chance of owning our own work then, if infringed, it’s deemed a civil offence and you don’t hold the same right to defence e.g. if a big corporation infringes your patent it’s you vs. them in a court of law. Dyson famously made a fortune successfully defending his patents but, at one point, was ￡1M in debt with legal fees.

But what can you do? The world is not fair and I don’t rest on my laurels. Securing and maintaining ownership over an invention requires the possession of tangible intellectual property, like a patent, design right, copyright, technical know how, trade secret or trademark — but to defend your rights you need either a truck load of money or a really good story. I don’t have the money so my story is everything and the most powerful thing I can do is to build my own customer base.

Newnham: You have had an incredible career. What do you wish your legacy to be?

I’d like to make a highly profitable business with a net zero carbon footprint that demonstrates how I can turn waste materials into something beautiful. That’s the mission of my new venture Uplifting Products Ltd and that’s how I plan to gain my financial independence.

I’d also like to be known as a good man who lived well, and simply strived to make the world a better place. And I think to pass that on I will begin to teach, but I still feel like I have so much to learn.

Newnham: Finally, if you could three pieces of advice to a budding inventor, what would they be?

1. Be true and trust yourself

2. Get a second job

3. Take heart, it’s not your fault that it’s so difficult because — if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Back Tom’s Kickstarter campaign here.

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