Press Release · August 2026

British inventor Tom Lawton publishes An Inventor’s Tale — a love letter to living with imagination

Inventor and artist behind Million Mile Light, BubbleScope and Wonder completes an unconventional memoir begun in earnest while in prison.

London, United Kingdom For immediate release

London, August 2026 — British inventor and artist Tom Lawton has published An Inventor’s Tale, a deeply personal account of a life spent following ideas — through invention, success, failure, fatherhood, love, upheaval, prison and an enduring belief in the power of imagination.

Lawton began writing the book years ago, but it took an extraordinary turn in his life for the story finally to emerge. In August 2025, while on remand at HMP Winchester, he began writing in earnest, filling page after page in Biro. What followed became a 70-chapter book that is part memoir, part inventor’s notebook and part meditation on what it means to remain curious when life does not go according to plan.

Lawton is the inventor behind products including Million Mile Light, BubbleScope, Firewinder and WakeYoo. His more recent work has moved increasingly between engineering, sculpture and philosophy, including Wonder, a continuously moving bi-helical kinetic sculpture developed over seven years.

See Wonder in motion: www.inwonderwetrust.com/wonder

But An Inventor’s Tale is not simply a book about inventions.

It is about the life around them: childhood curiosity, family, ambition, accidents, ideas that worked and ideas that didn’t, television, business, marriage and separation, fatherhood, friendship, prison, starting again — and the peculiar compulsion to keep making things.

“The path appears as you walk it.”

The final chapter, Ground Zero, finds Lawton in Greenwich, back at the beginning again: carrying proposals for the future, thinking about time, movement and a new engineering idea he calls Gentle Force.

“I didn’t want to write a success story. Life isn’t like that. I wanted to write what actually happened — the ridiculous bits, the painful bits, the beautiful bits, the inventions, the people I love and the things I still don’t understand. More than anything, it became a love letter to being alive.”

An Inventor’s Tale has been independently published as a digital edition, accompanied by photography, artwork, music and material from Lawton’s life and work.

The book and further information can be found at aninventorstale.com. Lawton can also be followed on Instagram @tomlawton.