Australia -- birthplace of boomerangs, sport utility vehicles and 'black box' flight recorders    

By Paul Niemann

[SEPT. 18, 2003]  Welcome to Australia, the land "down under." Australia is the largest island in the world and is home to aborigines, Tasmanian devils, koala bears, kangaroos and the Sydney Opera House. It's also home to some of the world's most unique and valuable inventions.

Australia served as a penal colony for England in the 1800s. In 1894, Australia became the first country to allow women to vote. Called "suffrage," it sounds bad, but it's really a good thing. Australia is also the only country to have participated in every modern Olympics.

Our family has been particularly interested in Australia ever since my brother spent two seasons playing pro baseball there in the late 1980s. Many Americans know very little about Australia, and this story focuses on three well-known inventions that originated on this island continent: boomerangs, sport utility vehicles and the "black box" flight recorders used in airplanes.

1. The boomerang

Boomerangs were likely invented for sport by Australian aborigines a couple thousand years ago. While it's generally believed that boomerangs were used for hunting, it would be nearly impossible to use a boomerang to kill any kind of animal large enough to be worth eating. No one knows exactly what makes a boomerang fly the way it does. The name boomerang comes from a tribe in New South Wales.

2. The sport utility vehicle

The story of the utility vehicle, or Ute for short, began in 1932 when a farmer's wife asked the Ford Motor Company in Geelong, Victoria, why they couldn't make a vehicle that could haul the family to church on Sunday and the pigs to market on Monday. The company's designer, 22-year-old Lewis Brandt, designed a vehicle that combined a truck bed with the cab of a car. It was commercialized two years later.

3. The black box

Dr. David Warren was investigating a series of airplane crashes for the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne in 1953 when he invented the "black box" flight data recorder. He based his work on the belief that a flight crew might know what went wrong when a plane crashes and that their conversations would provide some clues. The nearly indestructible device, which was originally painted bright red or orange in order to make it easier to locate after a crash, was in production by 1957.

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Like many popular inventions, the black box was at first deemed unnecessary -- by the Australian government, no less. Fortunately, a British company decided to commercialize it, and in 1960 Australia became the first country to make flight recorders mandatory in aircraft, just three years after it first hit the market. Today, nearly every large aircraft in the world has a black box.

Other notable inventions that come from the land down under include:

• Private ballot box, invented in Victoria in 1856
• Prepaid postage that is used in nearly every country today, invented by the postmaster general of New South Wales in 1838
• Australian football, better known as rugby, invented in 1858
• Electric drill, invented in Melbourne in 1889
• Speedo swimsuit, invented as "racing swimwear" in 1927, soon followed by the world's first swimsuit competition
• Inflatable airplane escape slide, developed by a Qantas Airlines employee in 1965
• Cochlear ear implant, invented by a professor at the University of Melbourne in 1979

G'day, mate!

[Paul Niemann]

Paul Niemann is a contributing author to Inventors' Digest magazine, and he also runs MarketLaunchers.com, building websites for inventors. He can be reached at [e-mail].

Copyright Paul Niemann 2003

Last week's column in LDN: "What do celebrities know about inventing that the rest of us don't?"