A PROFESSOR'S WAY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 305, 14 May 1941, Page 3

A PROFESSOR'S WAY

READS NOVELS IN BATH BUT REALLY INVENTS A professor who tests am invention while sitting in a bath reading a detectivc novel and who, despite his many inventions, dislikes the term inventor, sounds* eccentric. This one isn't, except perhaps in one thing.—lie likes inventing' things that s'ave lives. He is Professor A. F. Burstall, of Melbourne University Engineering School. In his office at the University today lie told about his; new device to produce fresh water from the human breath. He has presented the patent rights of it to the Uni> vcrsity, and intends to try to interest the Navy in it. Some time ago he was talking With the Emeritus'. Professor of Engineering, Professor H. Payne, aboutt he hardships, of wrecked KailorSi on rafts without water. "You ought to be able to work nut some mean?- of producing fresh water from salt water," Professor Pavne had said. So Professor Burstall, set out to solve the: problem. After he had found distillation of salt water impracticable, he deluded he must convert the twothirds of bodj' moisture normally lost in breath back into water. With a piece of bent copper piping he experimented for hours in the bath at his home, much to his wife's annoyance. He would breathe through this pipe into the water, reading a detective novel to pass the time away. In place of the bent piping, Professor Burstall to-day has a nickelplated device, looking like a saxophone without the final upward bend. Breath put through the mouthpiece' condenses along a nest of four tubes and falls into a bottom cup. Before he came to Melbourne University in 1937, he had several inventions and patents to his credit, devised while working, with Imperial Chemical Industries in England. He arrived in Melbourne at th? time of the infantile paralysis epidemic. and was approached almost ut once by Lady Latham to produce respirators of the cabinet type, using a method of coupling several respirators to the one mechanically operated unit. He turned out two respirators In five days. Professor Burstall has on the wall of his office a picture of these two respirators, each Avith a sleeping chikl in it. It is one of his greatest treasures, as he was there to see the children get their breatli and drop off to their first sleep.