Australians are perhaps more famed for their
sporting feats than for their technological innovation - but a new children's
book aims to change that.
Here are 10 eye-catching inventions that come from
the land down under, according to Christopher Cheng and Lindsay Knight, authors
of Australia's Greatest Inventions and Innovations. In some cases inventors
from other countries may also have a legitimate claim, but Cheng and Knight do
not want the Australian research to go unnoticed.
WI-FI
John O'Sullivan, an astronomy and space science
fellow at Melbourne's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation, is seen in his home country as the father of wi-fi.
"Some of the original seeds were sown in radio
astronomy," says O'Sullivan. "Curiously, it was a failed experiment
to detect exploding mini black holes the size of an atomic particle.
"I certainly had no idea where things would
lead. Back then, we set out to do a wireless network at 100 megabits per
second.
"Many people thought we had rocks in our head
to try do such a thing. We thought it really would be big, but now I look back
and I'm just blown away at how big it has become."
Black box flight recorders
The famous "black box" is, in fact,
coated with bright heat-resistant paint in order to be spotted easily after a
plane crash.
It is the work of an Australian chemist, Dave
Warren, who believed that the dead could help unlock the mysteries of fatal
accidents.
In 1953, it was his brainwave to build a device
that recorded voices from the cockpit as well as data from flight instruments.
His premise was this - if the black box could
remain in one piece after a crash, the final moments of a doomed flight could
be replayed to find out what went wrong and help prevent future catastrophes.
Warren was motivated by a family tragedy. His
father was killed in 1934 in one of Australia's earliest air disasters, the
loss of Miss Hobart in Bass Strait, between the Australian mainland and
Tasmania.
The first models were built in the UK, but the idea
was born under the Southern Cross.
Hills clothes hoists
An archetypal, if not hackneyed, image of suburbia
in one of the world's most urbanised societies. The idea for a rotating
"big metal tree" for drying laundry dates back to the late 19th
Century and was patented by Gilbert Toyne, a blacksmith-turned-inventor, in
Adelaide in 1926.
But it is fellow south Australian Lance Hill who is
best known for making these backyard marvels into household names.
"It's a great energy-saving device," says
Debbie Rudder, a curator at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. "Why burn
fossil fuels when you can use sunshine? Whereas people in some other countries
don't like to have their things seen by the neighbours."
Cochlear implants
Dr Graeme Clark, and the cochlear
implant he invented
The bionic ear has brought the wonder of sound into
the lives of thousands of people. For this, they must thank the persistence of Sydney
doctor Graeme Clark.
In 1967, he began to investigate ways to tap into
the cochlea, the part of the ear that hears, with electrodes. His task seemed
insurmountable - how could he squeeze 20 wires into the equivalent thickness of
a needle?
Inspiration came while on holiday at the beach.
Pushing a blade of grass into a seashell that looked like an inner ear provided
the light bulb moment inventors crave.
In 1985, the cochlear implant was approved by the
US Food and Drug Administration.
"It's one of my favourites because it is such
an amazing idea that has changed so many lives," says Rudder.
Dual-flush toilets
As Australian as turning the tap off while you
brush your teeth. In the world's driest inhabited continent, water-saving
measures are religiously embraced.
The dual flush loo has two buttons to dispatch
different amounts of water from the cistern - a half-flush for liquid waste and
a full one for more heavy-duty deposits.
It was invented in the early 1980s by Bruce
Thompson and is a ubiquitous feature in Australian bathrooms and in a growing
number around the world.
"We used to put a brick inside the cistern but
now the dual-flush loo is fantastic," says Christopher Cheng. "Think
about all the water it is saving."
Mountbatten Braillers
The world's first portable battery-powered braille
writer for people with impaired vision. Each letter in the braille alphabet is
represented by a combination of raised dots and spaces.
"There was an old machine called the Perkins
Brailler that was around for many years, but most users found it heavy and
clunky," says Rudder.
"The Mountbatten Trust in England decided to
have a worldwide competition to design and manufacture an improved version that
was lighter in weight. The company in Sydney that developed it was called
Quantum and a couple of guys mortgaged their houses in order to get it off the
ground."
Super Sopper Rollers
"Aha, here is a backyard invention," says
Rudder. "It was invented on the spur of the moment. A fellow was playing
golf with some friends. There had been a bit of rain and they said, 'Come on,
you're an inventor. Work out how to soak up that water.'"
So the challenge was thrown down to Gordon Withnall
in 1974. With his son, he made a giant rolling sponge that soaks up water from
rain-soaked fields.
Sports grounds for cricket, gridiron, hockey and
horse-racing have all benefited from this super-sized mop.
The smaller model is pushed by hand like a
lawn-mower, while the meatier version is motorised and can remove up to 5,830
gallons (26,500 litres) of water an hour.
Ultrasound
The Commonwealth Acoustic Laboratories in Sydney
played a part in developing one of the greatest gifts to parents around the
world - the first glimpse of their unborn child.
The laboratory was one of many, in a number of
countries, trying to find a way of examining unborn babies without using
X-rays.
"While researching the use of ultrasound
(high-pitched sound) to 'see' inside the human body, [the team] made a
technical breakthrough called 'greyscale imaging'. This was a way of picking
fine differences in ultrasound echoes bouncing off soft tissue in the human
body and converting them into TV pictures," says the
Powerhouse Museum website.
"The Ausonics company commercialised this
technology in 1976 in the UI Octoson scanner. The patient lies on a water bed
covered with a flexible membrane. Ultrasonic waves from eight speakers are
beamed through the water and reflect off the part of the patient's body in
contact with the membrane, and off internal organs... The Octoson was the first
medical instrument to provide good images of internal organs, or of a foetus
inside the uterus, without exposure to damaging X-rays."
Disposable syringes
Cheng and Knight argue that we owe this life-saving
therapeutic tool to the expertise of a toy-maker from South Australia - though,
once again, there are many others thinking the same way at around the same
time.
The development of a convenient and efficient
syringe became imperative with the arrival of the penicillin. The bacterial-fighting
wonder drug tended to clog up glass syringes and make them difficult to reuse.
"In 1951, Harry Willis, a detailer at A M
Bickford and Sons, the drug manufacturing company that was granted the rights
to produce penicillin in commercial quantities patented his design for a cheap,
disposable hypodermic syringe made from plastic," the authors write.
"Needing to find a plastics expert to make his
concept a reality, Willis visited Charles Rothauser, whose South Australian
business, the Quality Toy Company, was using plastic to manufacture dolls.
"With his plastic toy experience, Rothauser's
task was to find a way to produce an inexpensive disposable syringe."
His early creations were cast in polyethylene, a
common plastic. Later his designs were simplified when polypropylene, a more
durable polymer, became widely available.
Plastic banknotes
The
polymer notes even survive being dunked in water then frozen
In the late 1960s, government scientists were asked
by the Reserve Bank of Australia to create a banknote that could not be forged,
following the introduction of a new decimal currency.
The solution was a transparent panel and hologram
embedded in the note, which would be made of plastic.
The waterproof notes were first released in 1988.
Australia now boasts a currency that confounds the counterfeiters, and one that
lasts four times longer than its traditional cousins.
It also prints polymer banknotes for many other countries
including Bangladesh, Chile, Kuwait, New Zealand, Romania and Vietnam.
