WAR INVENTIONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 December 1945, Page 7

WAR INVENTIONS

THEIR USE IN PEACE A little piece of rubber, no more than a small section of a bicycle inner tube, is, according to Australian experts, fast revolutionising an entire range of industrial processes writes a staff correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald.” It is not much to look, at and the principle of its application's flatly simple, but it has the power and the purpose of greatness. It is one of the 19,000 submissions made to the Australian Army Inventions Directorate during the war years. The ‘ little piece of rubber —which may be natural or the most inferior of laboratory substitutes, for all it cares —is known as the Larymore-Keeseal coupling. Engineers, scientists, industrialists, and workmen combine to claim that it is one of the greatest little things that have come industry’s way .for a long time. The Australian Inventions Directorate will soon move away from Army control io function under a form of Government supervision not yet defined. The discoveries it has helped to develop, or has developed in full, are being rapidly applied to peacetime uses, and the Directorate’s work will continue. Already it is playing a' notable part in the fashioning of the new post-war world. The manager of the Directorate’s Now South Wales branch, Mr. R. M. Service, formerly in practice as a consulting and practical engineer, told in permissible part the story of the flood of war-time inventions that clamoured for his organisation’s attention. Gadgets for a multitude of purposes, gadgets that proved .to have none, massive models of new-type cranes, and fantastic representations of mach-ine-guns made'of clothes pegs, match boxes, and pieces of wilted lead wire, ships that could not be torpedoed, ships that could not even float, mousetraps, bomb busters, screens to catch fish, aeroplanes, buzz bombs and rockets —they, all earns to the Directorate for judgment. And nothing was too grotesque or Heath Robinsonish for the experts’ attention. The craziest contraption of stick and string, probably devised to intercept V2 weapons and “bat” them back to the enemy, and precisely built and scientifically sound working models, were treated with equal respect, until a formal verdict was reached. LITTLE PIECE OF RUBBER. And the Larymore-Keeseal coupling: A piece of waterpipe and a mating socket, a little piece of rubber drawn over the pipe, the application of a littlfe oil to the rubber, the junction of socket and pipe—and there is a perfect union which 10001 b of hydraulic pressure per square inch, applied at Sydney University under the direction of .Professor Macdonald, did not break. The invention was quickly “taken u.p, ! ‘ and its industrial application began. It is claimed that the little piece of rubber and the lubricant makes taps, dies, die-stocks, pipe tongs, litharge, and glycerine obsolete; it greatly reduces the time taken to make joints; it causes a pipe to last longer" (there is no weakening of the pipe through screw cutting or rust at the joint—and already the LarymoreKeeseal has been in use under continuous test for four years on water lines. , . Another application of this coupling joint is in attaching handles to heads of axes, hammers, shovels, and other tools. , ~ Samples seen recently show the handles sb firmly seated that a special device of extraordinary power, or the heat of a blow lamp, would be necessary to separate them from their heads. n . . .. One firm uses the coupling in int? manufacture of axes, and the axeit makes is in itself revolutionary,’ and another proof of Australian inventiveness. Devised by Mr. Goicion Keech, a metallurgist, the axchead is cast and grooved. As a cast head, it is claimed to be the first cl its type in the world. _ Grooving allows continuous lubrication of the head, the metal content of which is a secret. Its inventor describes the implement as “’really of razor design, but used as a sledge —in dthei woids, a keen-edged tool capable of bearing the shock of great force. Use of the Larymore-Keeseai coupling will allow Australian woods Ito be- used far more widely as axe handles, for the rubber will supply resiliency and absorb the jar and shock, of blows. Hickory could not be obtained from America during the war, but Australian spotted gum. a common local timber, was called into the breach. Thus, Australia will bo saved, Mr. Keech and Mr. Service claim, about £150,000 yearly on its timber import bill. BULLET-PROOF RADIATOR. Then there is, among a host of other things developed by the Directorate, the bullet-proof radiator, m which’ a system of grids reaching in ingenious arrangement ahead of the radiator tubes has, under test, deflected a stream of machine-gun bullets. This invention, primarily developed for war purposes, has its use in peace the creation of what is expected to jirove a completely crash-proof radiator structure for commercial and agricultural vehicles. "Army Inventions exhibited a clockwork aerial navigation map, devised by Captain Charles Gatenby, of Tasmania. This device, which embodies a strip map that moves in synchronisation with the speed of the aircraft in which it is carried, seems to make the human navigator redundant. At any time, an aviator may know his position to within a few miles, and may 7 oven check off that deviation by picking up the radio beams of broadcasting stations, which the map sets out for him in the regions of their operation. If it is necessary for any purpose to make a forced landing, the ma p.—again Jn the appropriate maparea—discloses available - aerodromes and their dimensions. It is, in a word, navigation without, books, references, or navigator. Devised originally for line-bombing, the device will "probably be found of inestimablevalue on the fixed civil airline routes. These are but a few of the successful- inventions with . which the Directorate has dealt. Of course, not’ all the inventions that come Mr. Service’s way are’practical.