ON February 23 1948, the inventor Geoffrey Pyke was reported dead at his home in Hampstead by his landlady. He had clearly committed suicide, aged 54, though no-one was precisely sure why.

It was a tragic end to a life which had contained a great deal of achievement — and a great deal of pain. Obituaries noted his almost unparalleled importance as a thinker (“one of the greatest geniuses of his time”), his lack of public recognition and his eccentricity.

At the start of the first world war, Pyke had come up with the brilliant idea of becoming an undercover journalist for a British newspaper — in Berlin. At that time, the British secret service had failed to insert any of its agents into Germany, and Pyke didn’t speak German, so the odds weren’t really on his side. In October 1914, despite his forged US passport, he was arrested within a few days.

He ended up in an internment camp which was well-known to be escape-proof, and escaped from it by perfecting a new method of crawling over the ground which wouldn’t be picked up by searchlights.

Back in Britain, this adventure made him a celebrity for a while, though it also brought him to the attention of the secret state. MI5 didn’t believe his escape was possible without the co-operation of the Germans.

Thirty years later, the same organisation became convinced that he was a Soviet spy. It’s possible that he was — nobody knows for sure — though recruiting such an unpredictable, conspicuously odd, weirdly dressed, easily bored man as a mole would be a brave move.

Pyke was a socialist, and he had many communist contacts, but above all, he seems to have been guided by a fundamental contempt for the idiots who ran the country.

Pyke had endured an awful time in his teens at an elite public school, not least because — although he was an atheist — his devout mother insisted that he live at school as an Orthodox Jew, observant in diet, dress and sabbath-keeping. He was the only Jewish boy in the place, and the results were horribly predictable. He later recalled being chased by packs of pupils, in conscious imitation of a foxhunt.

After his escape from Germany, he was invited to speak at the school, as a temporarily famous old boy. He told the assembled scholars and teachers that even at his very lowest point in captivity, even when he was expecting to be shot as a spy, he was “never so completely miserable as I’d been when I was a boy here.”

When Pyke himself became a father, he was so determined his son should enjoy a rational, progressive education that he set up his own school, raising the money via a foolproof, scientific method of speculating on the metals markets.

The foolproof method later failed but is now considered to have pioneered a new approach to City investment. The child-centred school didn’t last long, either, but likewise was highly influential on later educational thought around the world.

From 1934 onwards, Pyke’s overriding obsession was anti-fascism. His plans to create an international research institute to counter Nazi racial theories came to nothing, but when the fascists mutinied in Spain he founded Voluntary Industrial Aid: British workers would perform unpaid overtime, with the resultant goods being sent as solidarity gifts to the Spanish republic. He also organised the gathering of sphagnum moss, for the Spanish comrades to use in dressing wounds.

It was the second world war which saw Pyke reach his peak of influence and productivity, becoming one of the wild-haired boffins whose outrageous proposals could make it straight onto Mountbatten’s desk, and from his to Churchill’s. One of these schemes is still remembered today: the gigantic aircraft carrier made of ice.

Steel was expensive and hard to come by; ice was free and easily available. Project Habbakuk led to the development of a virtually indestructible building material named Pykrete, which Mountbatten demonstrated to Churchill by dropping a lump of it into the prime minister’s bath. Both men were excited by the possibilities and prototypes were created, though in the end the war moved faster than the research and no full-size ship was ever built.

In his final years, Pyke suffered from severe depression, frequent physical pain from undiagnosed illness, financial stress and above all frustration. Pyke wasn’t a scientist or an engineer, he was an inventor. He had ideas which, either during or after his lifetime, would often be developed by others into innovations of global importance.

(A complete list would take up this column, and would include such unexpected items as Special Forces, the Office for National Statistics, and underwater oil pipes.)

His main subject was the art, psychology and sociology of invention itself. If the nature of radical innovation could be properly understood, everyone could be an inventor.

Not long before his death, Pyke said in a BBC broadcast that showing “bad manners to new ideas” should be considered a “public offence,” because it was equivalent to sabotage during wartime. It was in effect “an offence against the possibility of more food, more housing, more fun.”

It didn’t matter whether the ideas were sound or crazy, it was the principle of creative and innovative thinking that mattered, and society’s attitude to it. Intellectual caution and conservatism retarded progress and endangered human survival.

One of Pyke’s favourite quotations was from the Father Brown stories: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”

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