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They sound like the battlefield contraptions from a science fiction film: an aircraft carrier built from an iceberg, aerial mines and even a rocket-propelled wheel.

However, they are all ideas dreamt up by a scientific innovator more commonly known as Britain’s greatest wartime prime minister – Winston Churchill.

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While most know Churchill as a politician, a celebrated orator, a painter and even a respected author, few people know him as Churchill the science enthusiast.

Which other prime minister had a scientist continually at his elbow?

Now an exhibition at the Science Museum in London is to showcase some of his more outlandish scientific ideas, as well as highlighting the debt that modern Britain owes to his championing of innovation, technology and discovery.

Without Churchill the country may never had moved to modern warfare techniques which helped win both world wars, including the use of tanks and radar.

He fostered an environment where the brightest scientists could build ground-breaking machines, such as the Bernard Lovell telescope, and make world-changing discoveries, in molecular genetics, radio astronomy, nuclear power, nerve and brain function and robotics.