Roger Field is still not a houshehold name, reports Shane Hegarty.
You have probably never heard of him, but Roger Field has been profiled 648 times, which makes this the 649th. That doesn't count the couple of thousand publications those profiles have filtered into. He has a file of all the cuttings as evidence, and it weighs in at 20lbs. It is added to at a steady rate of about one article a week, although at its peak it would have been two a week. Already this year, he has been profiled in Austria, Australia and Liverpool. Field is most proud of the recent article about him in Russian Playboy. "I love the idea of randy Russians buying Playboy, opening up the magazine and being instantly turned off by my face staring out at them." In 1991, Field decided that the only way to push himself forward as a serious inventor was to get publicity, lots of it. He began a quest to become the world's most profiled man. "When you're an inventor, companies tend to swindle you, bad things happen. I didn't want that to happen to me so much, and I reckoned that if I was even slightly well known it was less likely to happen."
The 57-year old Englishman has invented a sterilised handpiece for dentists, a folding guitar and a helicopter machine cannon that stops the shell casings from falling out into the rotors of helicopters below. "I didn't invent it because I'm into killing people, only because it seemed such an obvious problem." He found it difficult to interest weapons companies in the idea, mainly because the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the decline of the weapons industry. "Nobody's interested in guns anymore."
The kernel of the idea to become famous, however, came when giving Arnold Schwarzenegger English lessons during the 1970s. "He was 260lbs, funny and tremendously full of himself. He was always saying that he was the greatest and that he would become the world's biggest actor. I would tell him that my idea of an actor was James Mason.
"One day we were in a restaurant, and I was correcting him for always saying 'de' instead of 'the'. Anyway, he got really frustrated and banged his fist on the table and yelled, 'I'm going to be the greatest, and you'll always be zero'." Field makes sure to mention him in each of his interviews, knowing that Schwarzenegger's agent gets every scrap of publicity in which the star is mentioned. "It's just a good anecdote to make things more interesting. I haven't spoken to him about it, because the whole point of the story would be a bit silly if I had a connection with him." It hasn't quite made him a wealthy inventor yet, although he has high hopes for a new type of non-perforated film and a compatible camera that he has developed. He is travelling to the US later in the year to pitch it to companies. He is related to Henry Winkler, best known as the Fonz, and Field is hoping he will help him out. "Hopefully, Arnold might be able to help too."
When he is on holidays he'll always call into the local paper in the hope of interesting them, but otherwise bombards the world's press from his Munich home. As of this morning, then, he is one step closer to his dream. "To be honest I'm not sure if I want to get into the Guinness Book. It will only stop the fun," he confesses.