Last updated 19:49, Thursday, 28 August 2008

IT’S ENOUGH to make your hair stand on end – if you have any.

The Victorians had imagination and a spirit of invention to match anything on TV’s Dragons’ Den.

They had an invention for almost everything, including the hair restorer that was combined with battery power to have a magical effect on hair growth. The bald truth, however, is that it failed.

Hiram Codd invented a bottle in 1888 which was designed to prevent the fizz escaping from lemonade. They called it codswallop – and that’s where the saying came from.

They’re among dozens of amazing items on show at Keswick’s Museum and Art Gallery in Station Road.

The exhibition – Curios, Contraptions, Gadgets, Gismos and Thingamabobs 1851-1951 – has been such a success that it is being kept on for an extra month until September 27.

They have been loaned by collector Maurice Collins, of London, who has spent decades trawling auction houses, sale rooms and eBay to build up an Aladdin’s cave of historic inventions.

Since he went on TV’s Richard & Judy show, and did a series of radio interviews, people have been telephoning the Keswick museum asking for details of when and where they can see the exhibits.

Curator Jamie Barnes said: “Maurice Collins has been collecting since the 1970s. No-one else has a similar collection and he has about 1,800 items. We have 150 of them on display at the moment.”

Mr Barnes faced a massive task labelling the exhibits when he and collections manager Nicci Tofts got down to the task of producing the display.

“It wasn’t easy matching the descriptions to the items,” he said. “Some people mistakenly think all this is part of our own collection.

“It has certainly prompted a reaction among people young and old and we are running a competition for children to draw their own inventions.”

Mr Barnes’s own favourites include a couple of brandy flasks, disguised as binoculars, for the racing fan who is a secret drinker.

There’s also the Victorian equivalent of a laptop – a railway writing desk which cost 3/6 without paper and five bob with.

It involved string attached to the writer’s wrist and the luggage rack. It didn’t catch on. For theatregoers, bored with the play, there was a monocular periscope that gave the impression the viewer was looking straight ahead, but in fact enabled them to study the goings on in the next door box.

Gentlemen of the Edwardian era were extremely proud of their facial hair and there is a moustache protector to keep whiskers out of the soup, while ladies of the early 1900s had skirt-lifters to enable them to tuck in their dresses when playing sport.

“Obviously these inventors thought they would get rich quick,” said Mr Barnes. “Machines like the yarn winder would have been used in the mills of Northern England, but a lot of the inventions never made it.”

Had there been a Dragons’ Den series in those far-off days, inventors would have shown off their pocket spittoons, clockwork burglar alarms, boot-lifters for jockeys and their thumb-sucking stoppers for kids with bad habits.

Knot unpickers, pin dispensers, envelope wetters and even an outlandish eye massager, said to improve sight and stop blindness, would have had the dragons apoplectic.

Of course some devices did have practical uses like a First World War trench listener, used to listen for the enemy tunnelling under your own side’s battle lines.

l Keswick Museum and Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday between 10am and 4pm and entry is free, although donations are welcomed. A donation from the Friends of Keswick Museum support group helped keep the exhibition of curiosities open for extra weeks, after it was due to close at the end of August.