Author Description

Who was Henry Hoke? Watt, Boulton, Stephenson, Whitworth, Edison... these are the great engineers and inventors of the past who laid the foundation of our industrial strength and prosperity. Now there is a new name to add to that stellar field: Henry Hoke. Henry Hoke has only recently passed away, leaving a shed full of his life's work. the Hoke family contacted Mark thomson, author of the cult classic, Blokes & Sheds and the Research Director of the Australasian Institute of Backyard Studies as they felt his work had unfortunately escaped greater recognition within his own lifetime. What the Institute's researchers found was astounding: a range of baffling and enigmatic tools and objects (or more often, the containers in which they had been) which appear to defy the accepted laws of physics and the principles of engineering. Henry Hoke, through his Hoke's tool Company, was (potentially at least) our own thomas Edison: to the end a sceptical, energetic man whose intellect ranged far and wide over the broadest field of human endeavour imaginable and even, at times, beyond.