A S H E T News

1
ASHET News January 2008
ASHET
News
Volume 2, number 1
January 2009
Newsletter of the Australian Society for History of Engineering and Technology
Anniversaries in 2009
2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. It is the
100th anniversary of the birth of the German structural engineer Fritz
Leonhardt. See below for brief articles on each of these.
The 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Guglielmo Marconi
and Karl Ferdinand Braun for the development of wireless telegraphy.
1909 also saw the first radio broadcast, by Einar Dessau, using a shortwave radio transmitter.
1909 was an important year for aviation, with the first powered and
unpowered flights in Australia. On July 25, 1909, Louis Bleriot was the
first man to fly across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air craft.
Fifty years later, in 1959, The Soviet Union launched Luna 1, the first
man-made object to escape the earth’s orbit. It flew close to the moon.
In the same year, Luna 2 was the first man-made object to impact the
moon, and Luna 3 the first to transmit photos to earth of the far side of
the moon.
Charles Darwin
This year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles
Darwin on February 12, 1809. 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of his
landmark publication On the Origin of Species, on November 24, 1859.
Because of Darwin, evolution has become an accepted theory, explaining
the great diversity of animal and plant life on Earth and underpinning
much of the medical, psychological, agricultural and biological research
going on in the world today. Evolutionary theory has permeated many
other facets of modern life from economics to politics to theology.
These events are being recognised at a free one day Symposium
at the Visions Theatre, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, on
Thursday 26 February 2009. For details go to http://www.nma.gov.au/
events/darwin_symposium/.
There will be a one week conference in Melbourne, 8–13 February
2009, Evolution the Experience, details at http://evolution09.com.au/
index.php.
There will be more events during 2009. ASHET is planning a talk
later in the year on Darwin and his visit to Australia in 1836.
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the son of
Robert Waring Darwin and his wife Susannah, and grandson of the
scientist Erasmus Darwin and of the potter Josiah Wedgwood. His mother
died when he was eight years old and he was brought up by his sister.
He was taught classics at
Shrewsbury, then sent to
Edinburgh to study medicine,
which he hated. A final
attempt at educating him
was made by sending him to
Christ’s College, Cambridge,
to study theology (1827).
During that period he
collected plants, insects, and
geological specimens, guided
by his cousin William Darwin
Fox, an entomologist. His
scientific inclinations were
encouraged by his botany
professor, John Stevens
Henslow, who was instrumental, despite heavy paternal opposition, in
securing a place for Darwin as a naturalist on the surveying expedition of
HMS Beagle to Patagonia (1831-6).
Under Captain Robert Fitzroy Darwin visited Tenerife, the Cape Verde
Islands, Brazil, Montevideo, Tierra del Fuego, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso,
Chile, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia.
He published several works on the geological and zoological
discoveries of his voyage and became secretary of the Geological Society
(1838-41). In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood.
From 1842 he lived at Downe, Kent, and there addressed himself
to the great work of his life – the problem of the origin of species. He
drew up his observations initially in short notes, expanded in 1844 into
a sketch of conclusions for his own use. These embodied the principle
of natural selection, the germ of the Darwinian theory, but with typical
caution he delayed publication of his hypothesis.
However, in 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a memoir of the
Malay Archipelago, which, to Darwin’s surprise, contained in essence
the main ideas of his own theory of natural selection. Lyell and Joseph
Hooker persuaded him to submit a paper of his own, based on his 1844
sketch, which was read simultaneously with Wallace’s before the Linnean
Society in 1858. Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present on that historic
occasion.
Darwin then set to work to condense his vast mass of notes and
compiled his great work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, published in 1859. It immediately aroused international
interest.
Darwin died in 1882 after a long illness, leaving eight children, several
of whom achieved great distinction. Though not the sole originator of the
evolution hypothesis, nor even the first to apply the concept of descent
to plants and animals, he was the first thinker to gain for that theory
a wide acceptance among biological experts. By adding to the crude
evolutionism of Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck and others, his own specific
idea of natural selection, Darwin supplied a sufficient cause, which raised
it from a hypothesis to a verifiable theory.
For more information on Darwin”s life and work, go to Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin. For more on Darwin in
Australia, read the book Charles Darwin In Australia, by Frank Nicholas
and Jan Nicholas, published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press.
In this issue
Anniveraries in 2009
1
Charles Darwin
1
ASHET events
2
Fritz Leonhardt
3
Louis Braille
3
Owen Peake
3
First flight in Australia
3
Early days of cereal chemistry in Australia
4
A career in cereal chemistry; Sam Marshall
talks to Ian Arthur
5
2
ASHET News January 2008
ASHET events
Next ASHET event
Tuesday 24 February, 2009
Talk by Carroll Pursell
Technologies of Play: Surf boards and skate
boards in the United States
As David Edgerton has recently noted in his book The Shock of
the Old, through time technologies not only appear but disappear,
sometimes reappear, and are often transformed creating new
hybrid forms.
In this paper Carroll Pursell will trace some of these changes
through the burgeoning of two extreme and impolite sports
in the United States after World War II. In the postwar years,
some traditional children’s technologies, like wagons, scooters,
tricycles and roller skates, virtually disappeared from the public
consciousness. By the end of the 20th century, however, roller
skates had returned to meld with surf boards, producing skate
boards (a kind of scooter). Even the dreary household chore of
ironing had its technologies (iron and board) appropriated for the
sport of Extreme Ironing. Like so many other technologies, these
moved quickly from small-scale production to large, amateur to
professional, casual to organized, and recreation to big business.
All the while, however, the technologies have continued to
change, sometimes with significant design input from the users
themselves.
Carroll Pursell is Adjunct Professor of Modern History at
Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the author of, among other
works, The Machine in America (revised edition, 2007), White
Heat (1994) and Technology in Postwar America (2007) as well
as editor of the Blackwell Companion to American Technology
(2005) and A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History
of Technology and the African-American Experience (2005). He
has served as the President of the International Committee for
the History of Technology, and as President of the Society for the
History of Technology, which awarded him its Leonardo da Vinci
Medal. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. A joint RAHS and ASHET activity.
This is a joint activity of ASHET and the Royal Australian
Historical Society (RAHS).
Venue: History House, 133 Macquarie Street, Sydney
Time: 5.30 for 6 pm
Cost: $7.00 Includes light refreshments on arrival
Bookings: phone RAHS on (02) 9247 8001 or email
[email protected].
More ASHET events
Wednesday 25 March 2008
Talk by Paul-Alan Johnson
Augustus Alt: Soldier, Engineer, Surveyor
and Isopsephist.
Paul-Alan Johnson, Senior Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of the
Built Environment at the University of New South Wales, will
speak on Augustus Alt, Australia’s first Surveyor-General.
In his talk he will briefly cover the ancestral family, Alt’s early
years and military career and his life as Australia’s first surveyorgeneral, a life that he declared in his Memorial was “chequered
with Vicissitudes and oppressed by unmerited Calamities”. It
will highlight these significant moments of fact, synchronicity,
coincidence and strangeness that brought him to Australia, and
involved him in the laying out of the first three towns of the NSW
settlement, equipping him for the magistracy.
This is a joint activity of ASHET and the Royal Australian
Historical Society (RAHS).
Venue: History House, 133 Macquarie Street, Sydney
Time: 5.30 for 6 pm
Cost: $7.00 Includes light refreshments on arrival
Bookings: phone RAHS on (02) 9247 8001 or email history@
rahs.org.au.
Thursday 23 April, 2009
ASHET Annual General Meeting
Talk by Alan Perry
Changes in Furniture Manufacture in
Australia during the 20th Century
IFurniture made in the early 1900s was almost exclusively of
solid timber. Oak and maple was used in the reproduction of
early Jacobean, Gothic and Queen Anne style furniture and some
Australian timbers such as blackwood, silky oak, cedar and
walnut were used during the Art Nouveau and Art Deco Period.
Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, plywood and veneered solid core
were introduced. The influence of Scandanavian and Danish
design in the 1950s and 1960s and the need for a new material
in keeping with the flat panel design, saw the introduction of
particle board to furniture manufacture. Then new technology in
computer-aided manufacture and revolutionary finishes changed
the industry again.
Alan Perry, who started as an apprentice Cabinetmaker at Ricketts
and Thorp P/L, furniture manufacturer in 1954, is a retired
TAFE teacher and a founding member of the Furniture History
Society [Australasia]. Alan will trace the changes to 20th Century
furniture manufacture in this talk.
His talk, to a joint meeting of ASHET and Royal Australian
Historical Society (RAHS), will immediately follow the brief
ASHET Annual General Meeting.
Venue: History House, 133 Macquarie Street, Sydney
Time: 5.30 for 6 pm
Cost: $7.00 Includes light refreshments on arrival
Bookings: phone RAHS on (02) 9247 8001 or email
[email protected].
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ASHET News January 2008
Fritz Leonhardt
Owen Peake
Fritz Leonhardt was born in 1909 in Stuttgart. He studied at Stuttgart
and Purdue Universities. At age 28 he was appointed Chief Engineer for
the Cologne Rodenkirchen Bridge, a suspension bridge across the Rhine.
The bridge was destroyed by bombing in 1945 but rebuilt.
In 1954 he formed the consulting firm Leonhardt und Andrä, and from
1958 to 1974 taught the design of reinforced concrete and prestressed
concrete at Stuttgart University. He became recognised as a world expert
and innovator in both these fields, making important contributions to
the design of prestressed cable anchorages and to structural analysis.
He received doctorates from six universities, many awards and the Gold
Medal of the British Institution of Structural Engineers
He designed the Stuttgart TV Tower, the first modern TV tower.
He was also a pioneer in the
design of cable-stayed bridges
including the Pasco-Kennewick
bridge (1978) in the USA, and
the Helgeland Bridge (1981) in
Norway.
Among
his
many
innovations was a now widelyused method of launching
prestressed concrete bridges,
first used in his 1963 bridge
over the Caroní River in Ciudad
Guayana, Venezuela.
The Fritz Leonhardt Prize
was established in 1999 on
the 90th anniversary of his
birth, to recognise outstanding
achievements in structural
engineering. He died in the
same year.
In November 2008, ASHET’s only member form the Northern Territory,
Owen Peake, became on Honorary Fellow of Engineers Australia.
Owen is currently National
President of Engineering
Heritage Australia. And
is a past president of
Engineering
Australia’s
northern Divison.
Owen
has
made
many contributions to the
history and conservation
of machinery, particulurly
machinery
for
power
generation, in Australia.
Louis Braille
Louis Braille was born on on 4 January 1809, and became blind at the
age of three, following an accident to one eye and an infection that spread
to the other. He earned a scholrship at age 10 to the Royal Institute for
Blind Youth in Paris. In 1821, while he was a student there, the school
was visited by an Army Captain, Charles Barbier, who demonstrated his
invention, ‘night writing’. This was a code of 12 raised dots and several
dashes, intended to allow soldiers to communicate silently and secretly
at night. It proved too complicated for soldiers to learn, but Braille
immediately saw how it could be simplified to a code of six dots arranged
so any letter could be read by a single finger tip without having to move
it.
Braille had perfected his system by 1824 and extended it to
mathematics and music in 1829. Braille became a teacher at the Institute
as well as a talented
musician and organist who
played in churches all over
France. His system was
never taught at the Institute
until 1854, two years after
his death, when it became
officially recognised in
France. Braille’s body was
disinterred in 1952, the
100th anniversary of his
death, and re-interred in the
Pantheon, recognising him
as one of the nation’s most
distinguished citizens.
First flight in Australia
In December 1909, George Taylor and others made a series of flights at
Narrabeen Beach, Sydney, in Taylor’s glider. These were the first heavier
than air flight recorded in Australia. In the same month, Colin Defries
using a Wright biplane and a Blériot, flew 100 metres and achieved a
height of five metres before crashing.
The following year, Harry Houdini, who in 1909 had flown a Voisin
biplane in Hamburg, brought his aircraft to Australia and flew it at
Digger’s Rest, north of Melbourne on 21 March.
John Duigan, an Australian who had studied engineering at Finsbury
College in London, became interested in aviation. On his return to
Australia in 1908 he and his brother Reginald commenced experiments.
They designed
and built an
aircraft based
on the Farman
biplane which
had flown a
kilometre
in
France in 1908.
John
Duigan
made a seven Taylor gliding at Narrabeen
metre hop in this
aircraft on the family property at Mia Mia in central Victoria on 16 July
1910, and on 7 October he made his first sustained flight of 178 metres
at a height of around three metres. He applied to the Commonwealth
government for the prize £5,000 it had offered in 1909 to the builder of
an aircraft suitable for military purposes. His application was rejected
on the grounds that it had missed the closing date of 31 March1910.
The Defence Department requested a demonstration of the aircraft in
1911. Duigan made around sixty flights in his machine, which in 1920
he donated to the Industrial and Technological Museum of Victoria. A
replica is now on display at the Melbourne Museum.
John Duigan at the controls of his plane, 1910
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ASHET News January 2008
Early days of cereal chemistry in
Australia
A career in cereal chemistry; Sam Marshall
talks to Ian Arthur
Frederick Guthrie joined the New South Wales Department of
Agriculture as a chemist in 1890, shortly after its formation. In
his first job, assisting the wheat-breeder William Farrer, Guthrie
devised models of mill and bakery conditions suitable for50 to
100 gram samples––at a time when wheat-breeding was in its
infancy and when selection for suitable grain quality was hardly
considered by overseas breeders. This kind of cooperation
between chemist and plant breeder was unique at the time,
though it has later become an integral part or wheat breeding.
Farrer and Guthrie used Indian wheats to confer early maturity
and tolerance to drought, combined with Canadian Fife parents
which contributed to good baking quality.
After this pioneering work on breeding wheats for good
baking quality, virtually no progress was made for 25 years.
Australian wheat marketed as ‘fair average quality’ declined in
quality over the years, reaching its ultimate depth with the release
of the variety Free Gallipoli in 1926.
Bob Bottomley commenced work in 1936 with Victorian flour
millers W. S. Kimpton, the first qualified chemist to be employed
in the industry. The Chief, V. Y. Kimton, instead of presenting
Bottomley with a program of work, asked him what he proposed
to do in his brand new laboratory. Bottomley, who had never been
in a flour mill or a bakery, found the question hard to answer.
After a few days it was agreed that he should find out at first
hand just what bakers expected from their flour. So for the first
three months, he worked in different laboratories at night, while
designing and equipping the laboratory by day.
In the years between 1936 and 1940 Bottomley carried out
laboratory studies on the qualities of Australian wheat varieties,
and wrote two paper that gained him a Master of Science degree
from the University of Melbourne. In 1939, backed by the
evidence of test baking results, Kimpton’s announced that they
would no longer buy wheat from areas where Free Gallipoli was
grown. At that time, 75 per cent of wheat grown in Victoria was
Free Gallipoli.
In 1945 the Wheat Advisory Committee of the Victorian
Department of Agriculture formed a sub-committee with the
primary objective of ensuring through industry participation
that new varieties of wheat were not released unless they had
better milling and baking qualities than the ones they replaced.
Bottomley was one of the three industry representatives on the
sub-committee. In 1947 another milestone was reached with
the establishment of the Bread Research Institute.. By this time
chemists in the state Departments of Agriculture were meeting
amongst themselves and with industry chemists such as Bottomley
to discuss wheat quality.
Around this time, Jack O’Brien, from the Victorian Department
of Agriculture, became secretary of the local Branch of the Royal
Australian Chemical Institute, and was able to establish close
relations with its Council. This association was valuable when
it came to forming and funding an Australia-wide Cereal Group
within the Institute. This Group was formed in 1951 with 35
members. It held its first annual conference at Sydney in October
that year. The group has held a conference every year since then,
and has grown to a present membership of over 100.
This note is based on a paper by Sam Marshall presented to
the annual conference of the Cereal Chemistry Group of the Royal
Australian Chemical Institute in 1988. The source of information
on Frederick Guthrie is his entry in the Australian Dictionary of
Biography.
Sam Marshall grew up on a farm in central Victoria. At 19 he graduated
from the Bendigo School of Mines with a diploma in Applied Chemistry.
Theb he commenced work as a chemist in Melbourne with the Australian
Jam Company (AJC).
His special responsibility was to monitor the cooking of the company’s
main product, tomato sauce, and determine scientifically when the sauce
was ready for bottling. Until Sam joined the company, it was the foreman,
Tom Higgins, looking at a sample on an enamel plate, who decided when
the sauce had boiled down enough to bottle.
Sam Marshall
Soon after he joined AJC, Sam was summoned by the manager and
shown twelve bottles of tomato sauce. The manager said that Tom had
told him the sauce was half-cooked, and asked Sam he had to say about
this. Sam replied that he knew the sauce in the bottles was undercooked;
he had seen Tom filling them.
Sam’s next job, and the real start of his career as a cereal chemist,
was with Creamoata, a New Zealand company which had established an
oat mill in Melbourne, mainly to supply rolled oats to the breakfast food
market. Its by-product was oat hulls, a stock food that was difficult to sell
in Australia because it was not very nutritious. Creamoata’s solution was
to buy a flour mill, that produced as well as flour, bran and pollard that
could be mixed with the oat hulls to make a readily saleable stock food.
Sam’s job was to run the laboratory, whose prime function was quality
control on the range of stock food products that were produced in the
‘chook-house’.
In the year he Joined Creamoata, 1951, Sam also became one of the
founding members of the Cereal Chemistry Group of the Royal Australian
Chemical Institute and attended its first annual conference in Sydney that
year.. He became one of its leading members.
5
ASHET News January 2008
The British biscuit industry
In 1955, Sam, now married and with itchy feet, set sail for Britain. He
found a job, in the west of England, with Meredith and Drew, a large
biscuit maker. It’s biggest customer was Marks and Spencer, a notoriously
fussy purchaser, who meticulously inspected and tested everything they
bought and refused to take delivery if it failed to meet their demanding
standards.
The job at M. and D. was demanding and interesting in other ways.
British industry was just recovering from the focus on survival and
the lack of investment of the war years. The limited range of biscuits
produced was being expanded to something like that before the war
as food rationing ended. But the pre-war export markets had largely
disappeared as local manufacturing grew in developing countries and
competition from Europe increased. New health requirements were being
imposed.
Three was also a revolution in packaging, led by the Americans,
the world’s largest consumers of biscuits, known there as cookies and
crackers. Traditionally, biscuit manufacturers in Britain (and in Australia)
sold biscuits to grocers in returnable tins. The new idea, that caught on
rapidly, was for the manufacturer to pack the biscuits ready for retail sale,
in plastic that looked attractive, reduced breakage and increased shelf
life.
Sam found the British biscuit makers were a close-knit group. A
few large, long established companies supplied the national market, and
competed with very similar ranges of products. Bakers and technologists
moved from one company to another, and kept their secrets in little black
books that were consulted whenever problems arose.
Back in Australia
Sam returned to Australia in 1957 and joined Brockhoff’s in Melbourne,
where he was able to put his recent experience to good use. Brockhoff’s
was a family company, run by the sons of the founder. It was keen to
keep up with new technology and to introduce new varieties of biscuits.
In particular, it kept a close watch on American processes and products,
and copied them.
Then in 1961 he was invited to join John Darling, a large, longestablished Melbourne miller producing flour mainly for export. Darling’s
were then engaged in a major modernisation program. Wheat that
formerly arrived in bags unloaded at the company’s railway siding, was
now handled in bulk. Within the mill, the bucket elevators that conveyed
the wheat and mill products were being replaced by pneumatic systems
that conveyed the products in aluminium tubes. The one big electric
motor that formerly drove all the mill machinery by shafts and belts was
replaced by individual electric motors on each piece of machinery. Small
grinding mills were being replaced by new ones several times the size.
The modernised mill produced around 12 tonnes of flour per hour, and
ran continuously, so long as the products could be sold.
Sam’s special job in 1961 was to take advantage of the mill’s new
machinery to produce flours suited to specific market requirements. Flour
could be produced with protein content as low as 7 per cent for cakes and
soft biscuits, and up to 13 per cent for bread.
At this time, the Australian milling industry had enough capacity
to feed 20 million people, while the Australian population was around
half that. Asia was the main export market. It was declining because
Asian countries were buying complete flour mills, that were vigorously
marketed by British manufacturers. The result was that the smaller
Australian mills that depended on exports could not afford to modernise,
and closed. The larger companies consolidated and concentrated on the
local market Darling’s became part of Allied Mills, based in Sydney. Sam
was sent there to help establish a new part of the company’s business,
producing packaged products for the grocery trade. This kept him busy
for several years, during which he visited America, the source of most of
the new packaging technology used in the industry.
John Darling’s Albion Mill
Arnott’s
In 1972 Sam joined Arnott’s, Australia’s largest biscuit manufacturer,
based in Sydney, as its first Research Manager. He held this position until
he retired in 1987. During the 1960s, Arnott’s had been acquiring other
biscuit companies around Australia, including Brockhoff’s as well as the
two other leading Victorian manufacturers, Guest’s and Swallow and
Ariel’s. Sam’s job was to establish and run a new research laboratory for
the expanded company.
There was much to do. There was an ongoing program to specify and
purchase flours suited to making various types of biscuits. This involved
physical and chemical testing and test baking. The research laboratory
participated in developing new varieties of biscuits, and in producing old
varieties of biscuits on new machinery.
New competition from the American giant Nabisco added a sense of
urgency and uncertainty. Nabisco had made a takeover offer for Swallow’s
in 1964 and this had resulted in a bidding war that ended with Arnott’s
acquiring 51 per cent of Swallow’s. Nabisco countered by starting its
own Australian operation from scratch.
Arnott’s continued to expand and diversify. By 1975, when it acquired
the Australian operations of its major rival Peak Frean, it had around 70
per cent of the Australian biscuit market.
A major challenge for the new research laboratory was how to use and
adapt the machinery available in the factory to make the various kinds of
dough needed for the range of biscuits. Unlike most biscuit manufacturers,
Arnott’s designed and built much of its equipment in its own workshops.
While it assiduously copied successful designs from overseas, it was still
at a disadvantage compared with the major manufactures in America and
Europe, which had scientific
and technical resources that
Arnott’s could not afford. This
applied particularly to dough
mixing machinery. Mixing is a
complex process that must be
adapted to the kind of product
being made. Mixing is not just a
process of blending ingredients;
some doughs require air to
be incorporated during the
mixing process, others do not;
some require to be kneaded to
develop the elastic properties of
the gluten in the flour, others do
not; most doughs incorporate
raising agents that change the
William Arnott (1827–1901)
properties of the dough during
6
Arnott’s factory at Homebush
the mixing process as well as inducing chemical changes during baking.
Sam’s research laboratory was also concerned with nutrition. Biscuits
have become part of Australians’ eating pattern partly because they
are enjoyable to eat, but also because they are convenient (keep well,
transport well and are easily stored). They are not considered to be an
essential part of a healthy diet.
By the early 1980s it was clear to Sam that the traditional slot for
biscuits would come under increasing threat as people were encouraged
to view diet as the pathway to health. He correctly saw that as statistics
from all developed countries showed n increasing incidence of obesity
this view would be reinforced. There were basically two messages:
• If you eat too much fat, sugar or salt you will die from heart disease
or cancer;.
• If you eat wisely and include large amounts of fibre in your diet you
will remain healthy.
He recognised that in terms of total diet, biscuits were not to have
great significance, contributing around 4 % of fat, 6% of sugar and 6%
of total energy consumed. But he saw that these messages would have an
impact o the food industry. He recommended that the industry respond
by reviewing processing methods to minimise levels of shortening (fats),
minimise sodium, monitor reaction to sweet products, especially those
the icing and cream fillings, and explore ways of including whole grains
into biscuits without losing palatability.
Retirement?
Characteristically, after Sam retired in 1987 he took the opportunity to
make a contributions in some other areas that would utilise his knowledge
and experience. He worked with Standards Australia on the development
of new standards for the chemical industry. He worked as a consultant
with organisations in Thailand, Kirribati and the Philippines to help
introduce new technology and to improve health and safety standards,
and in Australia with an Asian company seeking to establish itself in the
Australian market.
Sam worked in Asia through an organization, AESOP, (Australian
Executive Service Overseas Program) established in 1981 by the
Australian Government and the Australian Confederation of Trade and
Industry. In 2001 the organization was renamed Australian Business
Volunteers.
In Thailand, Sam had a four week project with a company located
in a village about 100 km. north of Bangkok. The factory, attached to a
shop and restaurant, employed about fifty people making and packing a
cake product for local sale. The product’s shelf life in the humid Thailand
climate was around three days. The objective of the project was to extend
this to around three weeks. Sam’s first step was to improve the hygiene
in the factory to reduce contamination of the product by moulds and
other organisms that led to rapid deterioration in its quality. The second
step was to replace the air atmosphere in the pack with an inert gas. The
ASHET News January 2008
experiments with this, using the only inert gas readily available, carbon
dioxide from the local hospital, were successful. Sam then worked with
the local mechanic to build a simple machine for installation in the factory
and arranged for a supply of carbon dioxide from Bangkok. At the same
time, Sam and the manager visited the flour mill that supplied the factory
and were able to negotiate for the supply of a flour that improved the
quality of the company’s cake product.
Sam helped a small industry in Kiribati producing shark’s fin by
putting it in touch with CSIRO Division of fisheries and an Australian
company in Bundaberg, Queensland that were able to provide special
expertise.
In the Philippines, Sam worked with a small family company in a
town about 150 km. from Manila that made a variety of confectionery
and baked products, and that was keen to add Western style products to its
range. He was quickly able to make improvements to the company’s most
popular product, a confection made from buffalo milk. Improvements to
hygiene were the first step, and then changing from boiling in an open pan
to using a closed pan. The packaging was changed to glass jars. The jars
wee made at the brewery in Manila, the only source of glass manufacture
in the Philippines. Sam was able to help the company with ideas for new
products by giving it an Australian home cookery book.
Back in Australia, Sam worked as a consultant to a New South Wales
company, Jabuna Foods, established by an Indonesian family to make
muesli bars and similar products. The company was originally located
at Dee Why, but moved to a new factory at Charmhaven. Sam helped
the company purchase and use laboratory equipment for production
control and product development. The product development was focused
on making a muesli bar that was palatable and had a low fat content.
The company then underwent a major change when it was taken over
by Kellogg’s. Kellogg’s immediately set about replacing the small-scale
labour intensive manufacturing processes with new American machinery,
expanded production and put the company’s products into supermarkets,
while retaining the company’s original management. Sam was able to
help them make this transition successfully.
I’ve known Sam now as a personal friend for almost sixty years.
His common sense, good judgement and dedication to the job in hand
have always stood out, and over the years I have grown to appreciate the
important contributions he made to the progress of cereal chemistry and
the food industry in Australia.
About ASHET
ASHET, the Australian Society for History of Engineering and
Technology, is a non-profit society, incorporated in New South Wales
and affiliated with the Royal Australian Historical Society.
ASHET was formed in Sydney in 2003. Its objects are to encourage
and promote community interest and education in the history of
engineering and technology in Australia. ASHET currently has 95
members throughout Australia.
.For more information, go to the ASHET website http://www.ashet.
org.au/.
ASHET News is the newsletter of the Australian Society for History of
Engineering and Technology Incorporated
ABN 47 874 656 639
ISSN 1835-5943
11 Heights Crescent Middle Cove NSW 2068
Phone: 02 9958 8397 Fax: 02 9967 0724
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.ashet.org.au
ASHET