[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Paul Eisler (Inventor of the printed curcit board)
“Eisler was born in Vienna, and qualified in engineering at
Vienna University in 1930. After some time in [Belgrade] installing
radios into trains, he returned to Vienna where he worked as a
printer. In 1934 he was forced out of his job by the Austrian
fascists and, armed with some patents, he left for England in
1936.“Initially unemployed and – with no work-permit – unemployable,
he began to make a radio with a printed circuit board in his
Hempstead boarding house. While trying to sell his ideas, he was
taken on by the Odeon to work on their cinema technology, where he
had the idea of covering the seats with a blotchy yellow fabric.
The cinemas were plagued by children who would wipe their ice cream
on the seats, but with the new fabric, any sticky seats could
marked with ‘reserved’ signs and removed for cleaning at the end of
each day with no customers any wiser or stickier.”