Australian Inventions

 

The media in Australia is slow to celebrate Australian based technological success. Journalists seem more comfortable with traditional notions about what Australian are meant to be good at such as competitive sport, teamwork, getting a job done, enjoying life and other cliches that probably date back to ideas from the post WWII era. Innovation in the medical field is a notable exception, where the media is always keen to celebrate news ideas. 

I recently read an interesting book called "Australia's Greatest Inventions and Innovations" by Christopher Cheng and Lindsay Knight (Random House, 2012) which attempts to address this issue by providing a list of Australian inventions along with details of how the ideas were developed, as well as providing some background on the people involved. The book is informative and approachable - you don't need to be a boffin to find the material interesting. It is also a wonderful catalogue of human achievement and imagination. Unfortunately, my own dusty patents didn't make the list but I was happy that two of my friends did make the list. 

 

Here is my selected list (in no special order) based on the book with at least one entry that I think should have been in the book and with emphasis on innovations that actually took place in Australia:

 

Black Box Flight Recorder - invented by David Warren at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne in the late 1950s.

 

Plastic Banknotes - developed by a team at CSIRO in the 1980s

 

Wifi (more correctly high speed WLAN) - developed by a team at CSIRO in the 1990s.

 

Ultrasound Imaging - George Kossoff, David Robinson and William Garrett were key members of a team associated with the Commonwealth Acoustic Laboratories in Sydney that developed the UI Octoson in 1974

 

Victa Mower - Meryvn Richardson developed a practical lawn mower in the early 50s.

 

Sirosmelt Technology - developed at CSIRO in Melbourne by a team lead by Dr John Floyd in the 1970s and than separately developed by his company Ausmelt (now part of Outotec) and Mount Isa Mines. This novel smelting technology is now around the world and still developing as a technology.

 

Froth Flotation - invented by Guillaume Delprat working for BHP in the early 1900s and lead to a great revolution in minerals separation technology ..... perhaps the most important technological development in Australia's history, as it allowed our mineral wealth to be readily exploited.

 

Continuous Refining of Metals - G.K. Williams had demonstrated that continuous refining of lead could be achieved in the 1920s at the BHAS lead smelter in South Australia but Howard Worner demonstrated that the same principle could be extended to copper and steelmaking in the 1960s where he lead a large team of researchers at CRA who carried out ground breaking work at Cockle Creek and Port Kembla.

 

Cochlear Implant - Dr Graeme Clark lead various teams since the 1970s in the development of this impressive medical technology.

 

Sunshine Harvester - James Morrow and HV McKay competed in the 1880s on developing this ket peice of agricultural equipment.

 

Atomic Absorption Spectrometer - Alan Walsh developed the first AAS in the 1950s whilst working at CSIRO.

 

 and the list goes on ....