David E. H. Jones

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. 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, née 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 Daedalus 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. It is