Many Inventions

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 6

Many Inventions

T has often been said that New Zealanders are an inventive race, that the know-how of the first pioneers still survives in suburban back-yard, in cowbail and sheep-shed, manifesting itself in a brilliant ability to improvise with such materials (like bale-wire) as would otherwise lie uselessly around the New Zealand landscape. — This ingenuity, sprung into full bloom from the earth of the first turned sod (presumably still under the fingernails of all real New Zealanders) is in fact open to question. Like many another nation’s patriotic attempts to claim a higher level of inventiveness for their people, it will not stand.up to a close investigation. Perhaps this fond belief in our brightmess is part of our general inheritance from Britain, for the British, it has been said "suffer from the delusion that they are, and always have been, a highly inventive people, whose ideas are frequently stolen by other nations." ‘There is, however, an excellent reason why the British should delude themselves in this fashion. Their possession of a workable patent system long before any other nation (antedated only by the system of’ grants practised in the Republic of Florence) not only ensured the preservation of centuries of weighty ’ evidence, but made _ inventiveness worthwhile to begin with. For the popular view that the patent system was a consequence of an upsurge of inventiveness is only a halftruth; the system in fact, by encouraging the upsurge in the first place, laid the foundations of our modern world. It was-as Abraham Lincoln once fremarked-an invention itself, and perhaps the greatest of all time, for "it added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery of new and ‘useful things." The British system-and the fundagnental kernel of our present patent law dates back to 1623, in which year the British Parliament, sick of the monopolies resulting. from the haphazard granting of exclusive rights to Royal. favourites and others by the Crown, passed an Act called the Statute wf Monopolies, This declared that grants for the sole buying, making, using and selling of commodities were contrary to law, with the exception of "letters patents and grants of privileges for the term of fourteen years or under, here to be made of the sole working or making of any manner of new manufactures within this realm, to the true and first inventor and inventors of such manufactures ., ." The merits of a patent system were goon recognised by other nations, and though by 1800 there were only Great

Britain, France and America with formal patent laws, by the end of the century there were nearly half a hundred nations so equipped. One of this half-hundred was New Zealand, English patent law becomingapplicable here immediately after our annexation to New South Wales. As can be expected, the colonists. initially were far too busy hacking a home ott of the wilderness (and hacking at and being hacked by the original inhabitants) to start inventing things, and twenty years were to pass before the first two patents for inventions were granted by the Governor for the Crown. These were the Anderson Pipe Patent and the Purchas and Minnis Flax Patent. In that same year, 1860, New Zealand’s first Patent Act was passed by Parliament, and the legal machinery made ready for the future blossomings of antipodean genius. PATENT OFFICE, as _ anyone examining its records soon discovers, is a faithful mirror of society. Here, in the many superseded, unnecessary, or too revolutionary patents are the worlds that might have been, and beside them those patents that fortuitously or by some hidden evolutionary law made the ‘pattern of ouf everyday existence. Looked at altogether, this multitude

of inventions reflects all the wants and preoccupations that perennially engage the human ego, the wants that are urgent or important and those that are trivial or downright weird. This is as true of New Zealand as elsewhere (and specifications from overseas countries in the N.Z. Patent Library enable a close comparison to be made) for apart from some preoccupations stimulated by the local scene, our patents follow the general pattern. Just as there was reason for the preoccupation of early English inventors with new "Wayes of Makeinge Gonnes," with raising sunken ships, and with methods ‘for draining land (there were so many of the latter that one would assume a good half of Britain was under water in those days), so is there reason for the early New Zealand obsession with flax and gold. It was not until later that cows and sheep became our prime movers, and the field of agricultural patents the pasture in which our inventors throve. Flax and gold were two things that New Zealand had a lot of, and though everyone knew what could be done with the second, the future of flax was an open question. Apart from making tope what else could it be used for? Once machines had been devised to efficiently beat, shred and batter it into

amenability, the inventors turned to ways of utilising the result. One such brainwave was "The New Zealand Eureka Knife Polish" which involved quantities of sandstone, soap, and the ubiquitous Phormium Tenax, all roasted together in a kiln. If there was no problem in utilising gold, there was a problem in how to get it in the first place. Most New Zealand inventors attacked this in the conventional manner, with suggestions for improvements to mills, sluices, and the like. Others sought to approach it from a different angle. One ingenious miner devised "an invention for digging, sluicing, and blasting under water, without communication from above the bottom of seas, lakes and rivers." This was a kind of submarine with "provision" (unspecified) for holding three men at the bottom for twenty-four hours. Whether one was ever built, and launched in fevered secrecy on some Southern river, will always be a mys-tery-three miners would in any event hardly have been missed in an age of unreliable parochial statistics. Equally fresh in approach was a stonemason’s invention, in 1880, for a "Gold and Sand Extractor." This consisted of a boat with a large hollow pipe passing through its bottom, the pipe so mounted that it could be thrust down

rapidly to the bottom of rivers. The upper orifice (inboard) would be below water level, so that when a tap on the top was turned on, the precious golding sand would flow into the boat. Once loaded to the gunwales, the tap was to be turned off, and the miners wallowing (one presumes) in their riches would pull for the shore. At the turn of the century, and in the years preceding the Great War, every other New Zealander seemed to be inventing something. A positive fury of discovery swept the land, and from North Cape to Bluff dozens of amateur geniuses laboured on the pet products and devices that (they hoped) would bring them a fortune, Nothing was beneath their attention: nothing was too complex to solve. Here were improved "bloomers" for protecting the legs of trotters, there a "Tidal Self Acting Compressor" to give those dwelling by the sea a refreshing puff of air twice a day. There were improved steam and electrical machines, revolutionary horse blankets and medicines to cure all ills; better water-closets (dozens of them), better mouse-traps (hundreds of them), new games of skill and chance, and specifics for the pox. Perhaps the greatest passion and fantasy went into the domain of therapeutic and medical patents. This health-through-invention philosophy was then universal, As E. S. Turner has recorded in The Shocking History of Advertising: "At any given moment, up and down the country deluded citizens were sitting down in the privacy of their homes seeking to woo back the faded senses with the aid of preposterous machines, expensively bought." Many of these machines were devised by New Zealanders, or patented in this country by overseas firms, One of the most popular was the "electric belt," which inspired the words of the once popular song: I had a pain in me liver And likewise a pain in me lights I wore your electric belt And I now have electric lights.

One of these. devices was thoughtfully "designed to prevent the blistering of the flesh of the wearer should the current be too intense." In May, 1903, one Carl Ferdinand Bunz of Christchurch devised a "vibrating instrument for the treatment of nerves and other diseases." This was supplied. with a nipple that could be attached to the "vibrating disc" for the purpose of treating earache. Meanwhile another Christchurch resident was seeking a panacea in "Oil of Fowl." Discounting such vagaries as these, the majority of ideas were sound enough in themselves. Too often, however, the inventor omitted to produce ‘anything really new or really wanted, and often --a continuing tragedy with inventions -the idea: came too soon, before engineering practice had been brought to the ‘stage where it could encompass it. It would be intriguing to discover, for instance, whether an airship dreamed up early in the century would really have worked-if airships had not been outmoded before they were really developed. This ambitious craft bristled with propellers "so fixed or arranged relatively to each other as to produce either elevating, propelling, retarding oer depressing effects, or some of these together." Often one is glad that other ideas did nof’ catch on. Such’ as the gimmick devised by two inventors who used nuts

in a new method of advertising. This was to cut nuts in half and insert the advertising message, close them so that no gap could be seen, and then place them with other nuts ready for the unsuspecting purchaser. Their patent application contains, not only an exhaustive description of their technique but also a drawing showing-among other things-two parts of "a separated walnut shell," and a "side elevation of a hazel nut," To come to any conclusion about New Zealand inventiveness, it is necessary to bypass this proliferation of unusual minds and to concentrate on those few things that are peculiarly Sur own. This does not include, as yet, physics (though in such things as carbon-dating New Zealand-evolved methods are said to be superior to overseas systems), but many New Zealanders asked to name a great New Zealand inventor, name Rutherford. Rutherford, however, like Sir Alexander Fleming, was a discoverer, not an inventor, and he lacked the successful inventor’s faculty for anticipating the future. (There is," he once said, "no appreciable energy available to man through atomic disintegration.") Other people will give a more predictable reply when asked this question, choosing George Alfred Julius the inventor of the totalisator odds indicator. This choice would never be questioned in New Zealand, where Julius was educated, or in his adopted country Australia; both here and there, one might say, the value of the tote is beyond any nagging doubt. A second choice might be the inventor of one of the first improved con-stant-flow milking machines (where the milk was delivered out of the system without breaking the vacuum)David Armstrong of. Eltham, whose patent was subject of the only appeal to the Privy Council in the history of New Zealand patent law.

Or one may come to more modern times, and the invention of the Cargon loading system for trucks and aircraft; or to some up-to-the-minute chemical processes, or electrical inventions, whose complexity is such that the layman can only take them for granted. What with atomic physics, electronics, biochemistry, and so on, inventions have become so complex that, as in that fabulous rat-trap to which only intelligent rats could gain entry (presumably the unintelligent, left to themselves were to die of inanition), one can understand them only by becoming an expert. The days when one could become an inventor by thinking up a new way to fix a handle on a broom, or to get cream out of a bottle’ without disturbing the milk, are gone forever. »

The gadgeteer has been discouraged by the many variants of his device that already exist-ninety-nine per cent of which are patents lapsed through lack of interest and/or develo pment. Similarly the amateur pharmacist grinding up tutu, flax, and hops in his backyard has been forestalled by books of formulae compounded by real experts. Perpetual motion enthusiasts also have declined in numbers, the problems of friction (as much with patent attorneys as in their machines) proving finally too much for them. *"T had one perpetual motion friend for twenty" years," a Wellington patent attorney reminisced sadly. "I praised all my friends as being better patent attorneys

than myself so they could take him off my hands. Then he just disappeared. "But perhaps there are worse things than cranks, Take a man who tells you he has a wonderful invention; you wait with bated breath and all it turns out to be is a box. With a compartment. Just a good saleable box that you can buy anywhere already, and he thinks it is unknown, Before a man invents any-thing-especially these days-he should take a look around him. "We are really a very happy sort of country, and if any man has an idea, he is usually in a position to try it out, but he should first make sure that it has the three basic requirements of true invention: novelty, utility, and ingenuity."