WAR INVENTIONS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 18 April 1944, Page 3

WAR INVENTIONS

OVER 60 ACCEPTED IN AUSTRALIA QUEST FOR IDEAS TO BEAT ENEMY | Australian inventors send 140 war inventions every week to the Army Inventions Directorate. More than 15.400 have been received since the Directorate was set up in March, 1942. So far only 64 have been officially accepted, but among them are some which may conceivably influence Allied offensive operations and bring fame and reward to their originators, writes Edward Axford in the '‘Sydney Morning Herald.” Remarkably few of the submissions received are of the Heath Robinson or dingbat variety. The people who propose fantastic schemes for winning the war, such as dropping tins of treacle on to the windscreens of enemy planes , or exploding enemy mines with battalions of trained sea lions, are getting rather tired of having their fabulous brain-waves rejected. When the war began approximatelyly 10 per cent of all inventions submitted were hopelessly impracticable. To-day less than 5 per cent are in the hopeless class. The man who writes to say that the war can be won by making soldiers invisible, or* by destroying internal combustion engines with a secret ray, has undoubtedly “got something there,” as the Americans would say, but so far no one has been able to suggest how to make the soldier invisible or how to produce the secret ray. Of the 15,400 submissions which have been finalised less than onehalf of one per cent have been officially accepted, but at least 15 per cent were thought sufficiently good to warrant careful investigation by military and scientific experts before they were finally rejected. TYPICAL INVENTIONS What sort of ideas is the Army looking for? One cannot be too specific without giving away just what the enemy is anxious to know. A war invention whose character and purpose are broadcast to the world loses much of its potency. Nevertheless some indication can be given of the kind of thing upon which the Directorate is prepared to spend the funds at its disposal for research and development. For example, recent developments in airborne operations are producing a whole crop of significant ideas, particularly since publicity was given to General MacArthur’s appeal to the men of the fighting forces to come forward with practical suggestions for new equipment or developments of existing equipment. To use his words: “Some new device might be of inestimable value. We must try to anticipate the enemy in ingenuity and in the introduction of new ideas.” An officer’s suggestion, based on knowledge of conditions in New Guinea, led to the adaptation of the 25-pounder gun for parachute dropping—an idea which produced what is now known in the Australian Army as the short 25-pounder, or pack howitzer, detachable in a small number of parts for airborne transport. An airman was recently released from the Air Force to work on an original notion for improving the recoil apparatus of guns. His researches are of immense importance, in view of the revolutionary tendencies, now manifest in America, Britain, Russia and Germany to increase the offensive and defensive armament of fighters and bombers. The outstanding example is the incorporation of a 75-millimetre gun in the Mitchell medium bomber. Obviously the bigger the guns the greater the necessity to cushion the shock. PROFESSIONAL INVENTORS Two of the 64 ideas officially accepted are products of the fertile imagination of one of Australia’s most successful inventors, Mr Edward Both, ipventor of the famous Nuffield iron lung and Both electro-cardio-graph. Working in his own laboratory in Adelaide, he has, since the beginning ofthe war, successfully turned his scientific talents from humanitarian research to the invention of new ways of dealing out destruction. One of his inventions, accepted by the directorate, an accurate and instantaneous method of measuring the bores of gun barrels, has been adopted by the Army and by private companies engaged on ordnance production. Another inventor of this type is Mr John Pomeroy, of Melbourne, who was awarded £25,000 for his invention of the incendiary bullet in the last war.