Is it my dodgy memory, or didn't he once appear on an edition of "Take Hart" with a Heath Robinson style machine that turned eggs into cubes?
Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died
Professor Heinz Wolff, the bonkers-haired boffin who brought delight and joy to millions of BBC viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, has died aged 89. The German-born professor, who arrived in the UK aged 11 along with his Jewish family on the day that the Second World War broke out, was best known for his BBC 2 series The Great …
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Monday 18th December 2017 14:39 GMT andy 103
Ali G
The only thing I remember this guy for was that he appeared in an episode of Ali G, where he was asked about "what is infinity?" and if there was anything smaller than "a sand".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fWSILCCYns
He must have a memorable face though because I haven't seen that for about 15 years and instantly recognised him!
RIP.
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Monday 18th December 2017 14:42 GMT Anonymous Custard
A Sad Day :(
Another of my childhood (and indeed adulthood) heroes gone, and as many have said one of the inspirations in getting people (including me) into science and engineering.
Had the honour of meeting him a few years ago at a "family fun" event where he gave a lecture/demonstration on various science bits, including supergluing a hot-dog onto his hand as an extra finger. We must have talked for 10-15 minutes afterwards (he was there for ages talking to everyone and anyone who wanted a chat), and he was one of the most humble, warm, engaging and enthusiastic speakers on the subject I've ever met.
Farewell Professor, and thank you...
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Monday 18th December 2017 14:48 GMT graeme leggett
Great Egg Race
BBC archive has a dozen episodes from 1979 (Brian Cant presenting) to 1984 available to view.
One could argue that the programme is at the start of the evolution that gave us Scrapheap Challenge, Robot Wars and the like.
Interesting that in first series BBC Radio stations were competing in the Egg carrying part. I'm guessing they were engineers and the like.
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Monday 18th December 2017 20:41 GMT Chris King
Re: Great Egg Race
A lot of the "archived" BBC pages won't work with a modern version of Flash - the same thing happened with the "Classic" Doctor Who pages. Even worse, older stuff was RealVideo/RealAudio and that all died when they scrapped their RealPlayer servers (that broke most of their Cult TV sub-site).
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Monday 18th December 2017 14:48 GMT Tom 7
A definite genius of a man.
Though one of my dads colleagues went to UCL with him and apparently he had perfect english then which meant I could never watch him on the telly with dad around or he would remind me of this every time.
He has to be congratulated for cultivating the mad German professor role which I think inspired thousands of others.
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Monday 18th December 2017 18:45 GMT Niall Mac Caughey
Re: A definite genius of a man.
Interestingly, it may not have been a performance - at least not entirely.
I noticed this many years ago when I met a public figure who had grown up in France. Although he had been English-speaking all his adult life, I commented that his French accent was hard to understand. I was told by a bystander that this reversion to one's birth accent with advancing years was a known phenomenon. I have searched (briefly) but haven't found any reference to this.
Anyone else encountered this?
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Monday 18th December 2017 20:33 GMT TWB
Re: A definite genius of a man.
@Niall Mac Caughey
Anyone else encountered this? - yes, when I were a lad of 8 or 9, a new family from Yorkshire moved into my village in Oxfordshire. I made friends with the boys but it always seemed really odd to me that the youngest never seemed to lose his Yorkshire dialect and accent - he was only 7 or 8!....
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 14:09 GMT AlanT
Re: A definite genius of a man.
Yes, with my grandfather. Growing up I remember him as an extremely well spoken man, and his Aberdeen roots were very much in the background. The last time I saw him was a few months before his final illness, and he'd mentally slowed. And was again speaking the Doric of his youth.
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Monday 18th December 2017 15:24 GMT Outski
Re: Goodbye, and thank you
I absolutely loved the Great Egg Race as a boy, and Professor Wolff's infectious energy was a large part of that.
Even though my later studies focused on the wacky art of theology & religion in general (know thine enemy), I always remembered how he showed how much fun science and its application can be.
Difficult to choose an appropriate icon, but this one, I guess, as I raise a glass
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Monday 18th December 2017 15:48 GMT x 7
He was one of the judges when I took part (as part of a team) in the BBC "Young Scientist of the Year" competition back in the 1970s. He and Sir George Porter (one of the other judges) are probably the two nicest people I've ever met.
Heinz claimed he had a cupboard full of teddy bears in his office at Brunel......he said he psychoanalysed them to see which had "friendly" faces and which were "evil". I guess he must have had a lot of fun waving teddies at babies to see which ones caused smiles and which ones caused tears. Ever since I've had a mental image of him with an office stuffed full of stuffed animals. I don't know how true to life that is, but it seems a nice way to remember him.
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 12:15 GMT x 7
teddy bears
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/saturdaylive/2006/10/professor_heinz_wolff.html
"Despite being one the country's leading scientific experts, Professor Heinz Wolff reveals that his true passion lies in his collection of teddy bears. Yes it's true...........
"But Prof Wolff is also an expert in the facial expressions of toy bears, and believes that much can be revealed from the positioning of their glass eyes and embroidered noses."
I'd have loved to see that collection. I wonder what will happen to them?
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 22:26 GMT Intractable Potsherd
Young Scientist of the Year
If anyone was serious about getting young people into STEM subjects, this would be back on the TV. I used to watch it regularly when I was a youth, and we had several of the yearbooks around the house. In fact, it is YSotY that I associate Heinz Wolff with, not "The Great Egg Race", because you could see his enthusiasm and support for the contestants.
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Wednesday 20th December 2017 13:18 GMT x 7
Re: Young Scientist of the Year
All the judges I met on there were truly dedicated and enthusiastic. They believed in education and saw the programme as a way to interest kids in science and technology.
George Porter appears to have been the driving force: he gave us a personally guided tour of the Royal Institution and his drive to educate was impossible to resist.
As I said earlier, Porter, Wolff and the others.......these are the people who should have been in charge of the UK education system, driving toward meaningful teaching off STEM subjects
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 15:43 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: Helen Sharman to become the first Briton in space.
They all do, especially in current times of the Russian rockets being the only way to get up there. Everything's labelled in Russian, so you need to be able to read it to use it, and of course the launch control is in Russia (or at least Russian speaking territory) so speaking it helps too.
And Michael Foale also beat Tim Peake as the first male Briton to space (just after Sharman did iirc), but he had dual US/UK nationality and flew as an American as a result. Peake was the first "true" Briton to go up there.
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Monday 18th December 2017 17:30 GMT DuchessofDukeStreet
I met him once as part of a schools' Great Egg Race event and he was as mad, exuberant, engaging and clever as his television persona, which reinforced my juvenile interest in attacking things with screwdrivers and asking "why?" and "how?".
My dad, who was responsible for the greater part of that interest, had met him some years earlier when the Professor had been engaged to deliver an evening lecture to an RAF research team. Unfortunately the Professor had become so engrossed in his conversation with a fellow passenger on his train that he'd missed his stop by over an hour and had to be rescued by a combination of guard and station manager (who phoned the lecture organiser to explain) and returned in the correct direction.
Strangely enough Dad and I had only been talking about him a few weeks ago whilst I was trying to explain the appeal of Robot Wars. Between Prof Wolff and Tomorrow's World, I miss the time when inspiration came from scientists and engineers...and it was mainstream aspiration. Now everyone just wants to make a dotcom fortune instead...
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Monday 18th December 2017 18:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hero
As a young boy I saw him once with his wife having dinner in a restaurant. I was itching to go up and say hello, but didn't (that would have been rude!). And now I can never meet him, and all we have now is memories. Which makes me sad. But such great memories!
Thanks in part to him I've turned out to be a half competent engineer of various sorts, and I'd liked to have been able to say Thank You. So I'll do that here. Cheers, Heinz!
Just in case I'll ask to be buried with an egg plus a gadget of some sort to transport it as quickly as possible for the greatest possible distance without breaking it...
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Monday 18th December 2017 21:44 GMT x 7
Re: A British friend tells me he also helped judge "Young Scientists of the Year"
"So he'd been into the whole "STEM outreach" thing for decades."
I just refreshed my memory as to who the judges were the year I took part
Heinz Wolff
George Porter
Ian Fells
Fred Holliday
Colin Refrew
Tony Bradshaw
Jack Meadows
hard to think of a more illustrious bunch, all dedicated to teaching STEM subjects at school level.
They're the kind of people who should have been directing UK educational policy. How the hell as a country did we screw it up so badly?
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 02:02 GMT Clive Harris
Re: Young Scientists of the Year
Hey, that brings back some old memories. Were you on "Young Scientists" the same year I was (1975)? I still remember my meetings with Heinz Wolff, Sir George Porter (Nobel prize and don't you forget it!), Patrick Lowther, Paddy Feeney and a few others whose names I've forgotten, up at Pebble Mill.
I think I've still got that "YS" tie somewhere, the one material thing I got out of the show (apparently the union insisted we got those or otherwise the BBC would have been forced to pay us). I wore the tie for years until people kept asking me why I'd joined the Young Socialists.
We won our first round and then got knocked out in the finals by a couple of girls who'd discovered an interesting quirk in a common chemical reaction (which impressed Sir George immensely)
I'm afraid I also assumed that Heinz had "passed on" years ago, but I do remember him as a really nice bloke, who was very nice to us school kids and who played a big part at the start of our scientific careers.
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Thursday 21st December 2017 23:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A British friend tells me he also helped judge "Young Scientists of the Year"
What's the point in allowing second rate journalists to present science and nature programs? True scientists and engineers are much better, more entertaining and educational.
Science is great and speaks for itself, it isn't meant to be dumbed down politically correct show business. It is fascinating and frustrating which is why Heinz Wolff was so good at it.
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Monday 18th December 2017 20:53 GMT CentralCoasty
Am glad the Reg picked up on this - was a bit disappointed to have to read this first in the "main stream" news first.
Isn't it amazing - that when it comes down to it our role-models in life consist(ed) of a bunch of men with very strange/bad hair-do's. Show's that its what's between the ears that really counts.
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 15:50 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: What a loss.
Not just educator, but entertainer with it.
He (and a few others of that generation such as Johnny Ball and Magnus Pyke) had the quality to make science a show as well, either fun or at least captivating, so you ended up almost learning stuff without noticing it as you were so wrapped up in the spectacle of it all.
Certainly an eccentric too, which definitely helped the showman side of things. But your sentiment about needing loads more of them these days is definitely spot on.
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 00:16 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
...you'll find me in the building named after me
He seemed very happy to have had one of the campus buildings named after him – to the point of basing his office inside it.
There is a comment to his obituary in The Guardian by Keir Thorpe...
"The one memorable phrase that stays with me was 'I'm Heinz Wolff, you'll find me in the building named after me' with a whimsical tone, which both showed how valued he was and also how delightfully self-deprecating."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/17/heinz-wolff-obituary#comment-109837030
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 09:47 GMT Pat Harkin
I met him once in the late 90s.
I wanted to talk about The Great Egg Race but as soon as he found out I was a doctor, he just wanted to talk about his new implantable defibrillator, of which he was immensely proud! So we talked my shop rather than his - but I enjoyed it greatly and still remember it clearly.
A great communicator. Sadly missed.
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Friday 2nd November 2018 14:52 GMT Nigel...
Re: I met him once in the late 90s.
I met him when he had it implanted! I was the app support engineer from the company and chatted to him for a few mins before the anaesthetist caused him to stop talking. He said to me "So tell me Mr..., if I lean over the fence and punch my neighbour in the face, can I blame the device?" !
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Tuesday 19th December 2017 11:43 GMT Mooseman
RIP Mr Wolff
I met him once many years ago when I was doing lighting for a science and technology awards show on board the SS Great Britain, we filled the hold with smoke and dry ice and fired lasers through it. He waxed lyrical about the properties of the light and talked knowledgably about everything. A really nice bloke too, from my brief meeting with him.
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Thursday 21st December 2017 11:40 GMT john.w
I was studying electrical engineering at Brunel when he join the university. He gave a interesting lecture about the perception of aids for the old and disabled. He compared our acceptance of help for the very young or simple tasks like drilling a hole in a wall but rejection of simple aids at the end of our lives. It provide very useful when I needed to persuade my father that he should start using a walking stick and grab rails. A great loss.