Mad inventions and eureka moments

Words Max Anderson

WHEN pressed to name an Australian invention, most of us reach for the Hills hoist. Quite why this has stuck in the collective national consciousness is unclear, though I can venture two personal reasons: (1) it took me three weeks to dismantle an original 1950s Hills, which was bigger than the Parkes dish; and (2) the elegant, foreign- made version I put up in its place collapsed when hung with the first pair of jocks.

In truth, Lance Hill didn’t invent anything. He bought 1920s patents from two Adelaide inventors and based his 1945 product on that. However, so ubiquitous did the Hills hoist become that it cemented itself in the national psyche as deeply as the one originally cemented in my backyard. Moreover, as a design, it’s so very Australian: practical yet whimsical (is there a kid who hasn’t swung on one?); stark yet endearing; and robust enough to withstand anything the weather throws at it, including Cyclone Tracy.

But we really should be better informed about the inventions that have sprung from our relatively small population. The fact is, Australians are wildly inventive, and the archive of bright ideas – our stock of eureka moments – is positively bulging.

Nineteenth-century inventions were not only important in the country’s growth, they reveal something about our inventiveness. Take three examples: the stump-jump plough, which helped settlers carve paddocks from gnarly bushland; the horse-drawn grain stripper, which reduced the number of men needed to harvest wheat; and the world’s first electric-powered drill, used for drilling coal faces. Early Australian farmers and miners were driven especially hard by that mother of invention, necessity. Not only were they isolated from the populous labour markets of Europe, they were contending with an alien climate, soils they didn’t understand, and those twin incubators of thought: loneliness and boredom.

Isolation spurred Australians to find new ways to stay connected. The nation had pre-paid postage in 1838, two years before Britain. In 1898, a steam car designed and built by David Shearer travelled 200 kilometres from the river town of Mannum to Adelaide and back without a hitch. And in 1934 the world got its first ute, at the instigation of an Australian woman.

The unnamed wife of a Gippsland farmer wrote on her husband’s behalf to the managing director of Ford Australia in Melbourne. “Would Ford build for me a vehicle,” she asked. “The front is the Coupe, to suit my need of taking the family to Church on Sunday; the back is to be the Roadster Utility box, so I can take the pigs to town on Monday.” A 22-year-old designer, Lewis Bandt, was put to work combining a Model T Ford coupe with an integrated utility tray. After assuring his boss “them pigs are going to have a luxury ride”, the first model came off the Melbourne production line in 1934. Henry Ford was so impressed with the “kangaroo chaser” he had it built in America as the Ranchero.

With so much hard yakka, it’s tempting to think a hard-earned thirst might have driven James Harrison to invent the world’s first refrigerator in 1856. Harrison was Scottish-born and Victorian-based, and his revolutionary ice-making machine used a compressor to turn ether into a liquid to effect cooling (modern fridges rely on the same bit of physics). Indeed, so efficient was his design that he earned a huge commission from the beer industry.

At this point we should clear up a common misconception that Australia invented the screwcap that now seals almost all the nation’s wine bottles. While Clare Valley winemakers did much to prove its effectiveness in the 1990s, the honour for the patent lies with a French company. An Australian was, however, responsible for the first plastic wine cask. The bladder-in-a-box was dreamed up by winemaker Thomas Angove in 1965, and although it was derided with unlovely names such as “chateau cardboard” and “the goon bag” (originating perhaps from the word flagon), it was a practical and economical piece of packaging that prevented spoilage of opened wine. (It also neatly takes us back to the Hills hoist, which has been used for a wine-guzzling game called Goon of Fortune. A circle of participants gather around a hoist with a bag of goon pegged to the line; the hoist is spun and whomever it stops at has to take a hefty chug. Another Australian invention, one would think.)

If these inventions are already known to you, let’s turn to some true curios of the patent office. Trivial pursuit question. A bowl of Granny Smith apples is surrounded by three common kitchen implements: an electric juicer, an automatic apple peeler and an apple corer. If you’re asked to pick the Australian invention, which would it be?

Big points if you chose the bowl of apples. The English-sounding Granny Smith was cultivated in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood in 1868 by Maria Ann Smith (called “Granny” in her later years). She’d been testing French crab apples for cooking and throwing the apple cores out the kitchen window. She ended up cultivating the resultant seedlings and, after a crab apple was pollinated by a domestic apple, she produced a well-storing fruit that was not tart but “sweet and crisp”. Years later, local growers took the apple to market, where they were gobbled up. By 1975, 40 per cent of Australia’s apple crop was Granny Smith.

Similarly, who knew the movie clapperboard was an Australian innovation? Attributed to FW Thring, the head of Efftee Studios in Melbourne from 1930-35, the visual closing of the clapper stick and the sound made by the clapper meant film reels and audio recordings could be more easily aligned in post production.

Athletes’ starting blocks were off and running in 1929, invented by champion sprinter Charlie Booth. Runners used to dig small pits for their feet in running tracks; when Booth arrived at a race to use his invention – fashioned from a T-bar and a block of wood – he earned a lifetime ban from the sport. Presumably the appeal of the device prevailed and the ban was rescinded a few weeks later.

Commercially speaking, Tasmanian Alfred Alexander did very well when a lack of money drove him to make his own tennis racquet in 1922. His design used strips of dry wood of varying types, which were bent and laminated. The racquet proved so strong it quickly generated huge demand and even helped Australian champion Jack Crawford to victory at Wimbledon in 1933. The Alexander Patent Racket Company became the largest manufacturer of sporting goods in the world and was later bought by Spalding.

Perhaps the most remarkable story of invention goes not to a specific invention, but to an individual. David Unaipon was born David Ngunaitponi in 1872 at a remote Christian mission on the banks of Lake Alexandrina north of the Coorong in South Australia. His first language was Yaraldi and he left school at 13 to work as a servant and apprentice boot maker. Possessed of a brilliant mind, he was particularly obsessed with the idea of perpetual motion. Several devices (and patents) came from his lifelong work, including the first straight-line motion sheep-shearing comb, widely adopted across the nation after he invented it in 1909. By 1914, after his ideas on helicopter flight and the polarisation of light were publicised, he’d earned the name “Australia’s Leonardo” from a bemused and often condescending public.

Since Unaipon earned nothing from his patents, it’s somewhat ironic that he’s depicted on the 1995 issue of the $50 note. This design was updated in 2018 with Indigenous cultural depictions, but his shearer’s comb featured on the earlier note – effectively pairing a groundbreaking invention with a groundbreaking banknote. The world’s first polymer notes were perfectly unforgeable owing to a see-through panel with an embedded hologram, the result of 20 years of research by the CSIRO.

If we’re looking to champion a true blue hothouse of invention, consider the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO. It’s been a wellspring of extraordinary work since it began in 1916 as the Advisory Council of Science and Industry, and serves as a reminder to CEOs and billionaires everywhere that paying one’s taxes really is a good thing. Whip away the white sheet and behold just a few CSIRO inventions: solar hot water (1953), wi-fi (1996), the world’s first effective influenza treatment (1987), the formula for Aerogard (1943), progressive spectacle lenses (1990), extended-wear soft contact lenses (1991), the atomic absorption spectrometer (1955), gene shears (1986), Hendra virus vaccine (2011), the permanent pleat in fabrics (1957) ...

Whatever will we think of next?