Fortunately for all involved, he did.

Several weeks of nagging later, four members, Henry Clouting, Fraser Cumming, Robert Turner and Andrew Cresswell, went down to meet Mr Sutherland and find out exactly what he was looking for.

Due to his arthritis Mr Sutherland had trouble using the ever increasingly fiddly buttons on telephones, and also found it very difficult to get to the front door in time to let in visitors. He wanted a simple device that would let him:

• answer the telephone
• call people without having to remember and type in telephone numbers
• talk to people at the front door
• open the front door
• talk to other people in the house

all from his wheelchair.

Mr Sutherland had tried without success to find a product that would let him perform all these tasks, and to this day no such device is commercially available.

The car journey home that night was an amazing buzz of ideas. The team envisioned a device with a large handle, for easy holding, and large simple buttons, and a screen, and a speaker, so the user could see what button had been pressed AND they would be told what button they had pressed. They planned a large silver activate button, so once the user had pressed the button they wanted, and was sure they had the right one, they would then press the activate button to carry it out. They named their device Com-Raid, short for Communications Radio Aid.

They added a wheelchair mount for those who could not hold it, and a panic alarm, so that the user could call for help just by hitting the activate button three times in a row.

They went on to form a company, Com-Raid Limited, and to enter, and win, many competitions. They won the Young Enterprise award for Helping the Disabled, and the John Logie Baird award for Innovation. They won Young Engineer's Club of the Year 2001.

They developed a case, though this proved trickier than expected. Not sure exactly how to draw what they wanted, they asked art teacher Mr Lyle to draw Com-Raid for them, which came out exactly as they had imagined. The first prototype was made out of a kitchen roll tube and an after eight box, sprayed silver. The team tried clay, paper mache, even some sort of pink dental gunge borrowed off Henry's father that remains to this day cemented to the inside of one of the beakers in Mrs Hill's lab. Eventually, with prize money, they had a proper case made in plastic by CA models, at a cost of £1000.

But they could go no further without more money. The team split up as members went off to university, and Com-Raid ended up relegated to the status of "amazing idea that never quite happened".

Then, earlier this year, the team was joined by a fifth member, Benjie Marwick, who brought with him an unexpected inheritance of £1800 and a refusal to accept any excuses why some actual prototypes could not be built this summer. Needless to say, we are now back in business.

On the premise that most projects go wrong at the planning stage we have currently gone back to the proverbial drawing board, nailing down the precise specifications, like how long comraid will carry on working in a power cut and what happens if someone comes to the door while the user is on the phone. The hope of having fully working prototypes by the end of the summer is beginning to look a bit optimistic, but we will soon be looking for people to test out things like different button layouts and different methods of dialling a number.