Maggs Bros.

The four “Provisional Specifications” are “Improvements in Weighing Apparatus”, “Improved Means of Handling, Sorting and Distributing Parcels and other Articles” , “Improvements in Apparatus for Distributing Goods in Warehouses, Clearing-houses and the like” and “Improved Means for Corelating a Desired Operation on a Travelling Carriage with the Distance Travelled, and for Transmitting Adjustments between Travelling Instruments”. In his controversial play “The Apple Cart”, 1930, Shaw rants against Breakages Ltd. - a grand conspiracy by the world’s manufacturers to ensure that enough of their products break in transit to keep them in business. This followed a visit Shaw made to his friend Alfred Warwick Gattie’s New Transport Company at Holborn Viaduct. Shaw opened the door of a large warehouse to see a platform and double railway line with trucks. Despite fear of electrocution, Shaw gamely sat in an armchair on the flat top of one truck with a glass brimming with water balanced at his feet. Gattie pressed various buttons and two trucks moved off down different lines, one with Shaw on top and the other with an empty roof. Shaw wrote: “When the other truck had passed mine, I found myself magically sitting on it, chair and all, with the glass of water unspilled at my feet”. A flurry of correspondence with the Board of Trade left Shaw and Gattie convinced that there was a plot to stifle the invention because the authorities “saw in Gattie an enemy of the human race, a wrecker of homes and a starver of innocent babes”. Gattie envisaged an extensive network of track covering the British home counties, with automated despatch and truck-to-truck transfer of luggage and parcels all controlled by switches at a main clearing house. The packages would move from one truck to another via trays on rollers, all moving at the same speed to avoid any shock and risk of damage. In the preface to his play, Shaw writes “So far, ‘The Apple Cart’ is Gattie’s only shrine”. These patent specifications add to his memorial.