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1 ASHET News January 2008

Volume 2, number 1January 2009A S H E T News

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 short-wave 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.

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

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.


ASHET events

Next ASHET eventTuesday 24 February, 2009 Talk by Carroll Pursell Technologies of Play: Surf boards and skate boards in the United StatesAs 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 eventsWednesday 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 surveyor-general, 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).


Thursday 23 April, 2009 ASHET Annual General Meeting Talk by Alan Perry Changes in Furniture Manufacture in Australia during the 20th CenturyIFurniture 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.


Fritz LeonhardtFritz 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 widely-used 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.


Fritz Leonhardt

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 widely-used 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.

Owen Peake

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 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.

Taylor gliding at Narrabeen

John Duigan at the controls of his plane, 1910


A career in cereal chemistry; Sam Marshall talks to Ian Arthur

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.

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.

Early days of cereal chemistry in Australia

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

Sam Marshall


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, long-established 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. William Arnott (1827–1901)

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 properties of the dough during

John Darling’s Albion Mill


ASHET News is the newsletter of the Australian Society for History of Engineering and Technology Incorporated ABN 47 874 656 639ISSN 1835-5943

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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

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.

Arnott’s factory at Homebush

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/.

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