There are not many who would list the trouser press alongside the worldwide web, penicillin and the television as one of Britain’s finest inventions. To a generation that wears jeans to work, it is an item that smacks of a Travelodge instant coffee sachet and a vending machine sarnie; a punchline to an Alan Partridge scene.
But its inventor, Peter Corby, whose death was announced last week, deserves to be on any list that also has Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Alexander Fleming and John Logie Baird. Corby’s father had begun making a version of the clothes press in 1930, but, after a chance meeting with a Concorde engineer, Corby seized on the idea to incorporate an electric heating pad in the early 1960s.
“The Corby trouser
