Reflecting 50 years on, he said he would probably have been “worth a lot of money” now.
Steven Bostock, of Pleasley, Derbyshire, designed a flat-panel television with a full communication system when he was 11.
His entry won the Blue Peter Year 2000 contest in 1974.
A two-way intercom set, “space age” alarm clocks, and “futuristic radios” for first place winners were among the prizes.
Mr. Bostock responded, “I was just looking at the television we’d got at the time and it’d come on since the one we had a few years earlier, so things were obviously moving on,” when asked where he got the idea for the design.
“I had completely forgotten about the internet, which is the top communication system.
‘Celebrity for the week’
“When it was revealed, I was in disbelief. I didn’t talk about it when I returned to school, but all of my friends had seen it.”
Mr. Bostock, who at the time was a resident of Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, stated that he was subsequently summoned to the headmaster’s office.
Though he expected to be reprimanded, Mr. Bostock was informed that he was “a celebrity for the week” and that the headmaster had invited the media.
The sixty-one-year-old claimed that although technology had “advanced a lot more since 2000,” it had reached the point he had anticipated.
Mr. Bostock acknowledged that he “would be a lot richer than I am now” if he had copyrighted the technique at the time.
