Reads Novels In Bath, But Really Invents

Northern Advocate, 27 May 1941, Page 10

Reads Novels In Bath, But Really Invents

MELBOURNE. April 28. A professor who tests an invention while sitting in a bath reading a detective novel, and who, despite his many inventions, dislikes the term inventor, sounds eccentric. This one isn't, except perhaps in one thing—he likes inventing things that save lives. He is Professor A. F. Burstall, of Melbourne University Engineering School. In, his office at the university today he told a reporter about his new device to produce fresh water from the human breath. He lias presented the patent rights of it to the university, 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, about the hardships of wrecked sailors on rafts without water. “You ought to be able to work out some means of producing fresh water from salt water,” Professor Payne had said. So Professor Burstall set out to solve the problem. After he had found distillation of salt water impracticable, he decided he must convert the twfo-thirds of body moisture normally lost in breath back into water. With a piece of bent copper piping he experimented for hours in the hath 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. Looks Like a Saxaphone In place of the bent piping, Professor Burstall today has a nickel-plated 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 the time of the infantile paralysis epidemic, and was approached almost at 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 with a sleeping child in it.

It is one of his greatest treasures, as he was there to see the children get their brehth and drop off into their first easy sleep.

Holland. —The Germans have banned unauthorised travel from the Hook of Holland southward to the Belgian border. The penalty for infringement is six months’ imprisonment