"I’d spend hours with my granddad in the shed at the bottom of his garden. I’d see him taking scraps of materials and making toys for me and my cousins. I guess he gave me the creative spark which I have never lost.”

As a child, Emily Cummins would stand beside her grandfather, Peter Harrison, watching intently as he taught her how to use the machinery to craft their creations.

The retired engineer could turn his hand to almost anything. “He made furniture for my mum and sisters and he has passed that on to me,” says Emily.

Walking into the technology room at South Craven School in her home village of Cross Hills, near Keighley, Emily instantly felt at home.

She wasn’t perplexed by the machinery she’d be operating to mould and shape metal and wood. This had been familiar territory to her since she was four years old.

At the age of just 23, Emily is already an accomplished inventor. She showcased her skills on a national scale when she designed a toothpaste dispenser as part of her studies.

Watching her other grandfather, Wilf Cummins, struggling to squeeze toothpaste out of a tube, because of his arthritis, prompted Emily to look at designing a dispenser that changed the squeezing action into a pushing one, enabling him to put pressure on the tube with another part of his body other than his hands. “It’s a really simple product that works and it was my first real invention,” she says.

Becoming Yorkshire and Humberside’s regional Young Engineer for Britain was the first of many accolades.

“The school is really proud of me and encouraged me to continue my design work,” says Emily. “The following year I thought I would take on a bit more of a challenge. I wanted to design a product with sustainability in mind and came up with transporting water.”

Mindful of the many miles African women in rural communities walk to collect water, Emily wanted to make their journeys more efficient. She designed a product enabling them to carry up to five containers.

Emily’s invention earned her the Sustainable Design Award, and seeing her work recognised on a national and global scale gave her the impetus to look for more problems to solve. Conscious of the environment, and with sustainability in mind when designing contraptions to help save the planet, she looked at designing a fridge to store medicines or small food items. Using dirty water to power her fridge lessens the reliance on fossil fuels.

Emily spent a gap year in between her studies researching and refining her invention in Namibia, and has since given her plans to townships across Southern Africa, enabling local communities to build their own fridges.

When she returned to the UK, Emily embarked on a degree in management and sustainable development at Leeds University, but inventing was always at the forefront of her mind and, in 2007, she became British Female Innovator of the Year. The following year she won Cosmopolitan’s Ultimate Save-The-Planet Pioneer, and last year was crowned the Barclays Woman of the Year. Actress Maureen Lipman nominated Emily for the award after hearing her talking about technology and young people on a radio programme.

“I pinch myself all the time because, for me, it was my school projects, it was those I was interested in but I never dreamed anything like this would happen,” says Emily.

“People say to me, ‘you have worked so hard, you deserve it’. When you get rewards like that and people believe in you, that motivation keeps you going.”

Now in her final year at university, her attentions are focused on her studies, but she’s constantly thinking about her next invention and how Britain can use its engineering and technological skills to benefit people both here and developing countries.

“I do see things and think, ‘there could definitely be improvements there’, but there is only so much you can do. The children I work with in schools often have the best ideas because they don’t have the view of impossibility. I find they have some brilliant ideas,” she says.

“A lot of young people I work with have amazing talent but don’t shout about it because it’s not seen as cool.

“My school put me forward for a competition which was brilliant, but I wonder how many schools locally are putting their pupils in for competitions.

“It’s not necessarily about putting yourself forward, but if other people put young people forward, that would make a huge difference as well.”