What is an invention and Who is the inventor? - the White Hat Guide

The popular image of an inventor is someone toiling away for months or years in a back shed and finally emerging with some wondrous gizmo that no-one else had ever thought of. Another image is of the person in a white coat running out of their laboratory shouting "I've done it!".

While these images are appropriate for some of the inventions we have listed on our Australian Inventions page, there are many others where it is harder to answer the question 'who is the inventor?'. In many cases we cannot answer that question without first answering the question 'what is the invention?'.

What is an invention?

We tend to reserve the word invention for something that is quite different from what came before or creates a big improvement in an existing system – often by doing things in a completely different way. On the other hand there are numbers of things which make our life better where we cannot specify when they were ‘invented’. Many just evolved over a period of small continuous improvements. This doesn’t make them any less important: it just means they came to be part of our lives through a different route.

The principal of a wineskin - storing and dispensing wine from an airtight animal skin - has been around for several millennia. The wine cask utilises the same principle but different materials and shape, and the use of  the plastic bag in a cardboard box has had an enormous impact on the production and distribution of wine in recent decades.

Who is the inventor?

In some cases the creation process is isolated enough for us to categorically call somebody the inventor of a particular system.

However, many cases are not so straightforward and to think of a single inventor is misleading. We list some examples below.

Sometimes an invention is the result of the work of a team of people, particularly in the case of academic research or corporate research and development. Thus Professor Graeme Clark lead the team that developed the bionic ear and David Mann's name is on the patent for the Cineon Digital Film Workstation but that doesn’t make them the sole inventor.

Sometimes people are independently working on a problem in the same period and come up with solutions around the same time. Often in this case we remember the ‘best’ solution rather than the ‘first’ solution. Thus James Morrow’s combine harvester appeared slightly before H.V.McKay’s, but McKay’s design was superior and addressed numbers of problems that Morrow’s didn’t. McKay’s design went on to be the world leader while Morrow’s was abandoned. Thus we tend to remember McKay as the inventor of the combine harvester.

Sometimes Person A discovers a substance or process while Person B later invents a way that it can be used or harnessed. Thus while penicillin was ‘discovered’ by Alexander Fleming, it was later isolated by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Cambridge and it was Florey and his team who turned it into the practical medication that was used to save millions of lives. Thus there were numbers of important people in the ‘invention’ of penicillin as we know it, and Fleming, Chain and Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize. Who you regarded to be the most important at the time may depend whether you were writing a piece of popular journalism or whether you were in danger of death in a hospital bed. For a brief video-based examination of these issues see Penecillin: The Magic Bullet below.

Sometimes studies in pure or theoretical sciences lead to discoveries that then change the way that commercial products can be made. Thus Professor David Boger's work on fluids has revolutionised ink-jet printing and has major implications in other areas, but he is not necessarily recognised as an inventor.

Sometimes the invention isn’t so much the original core product as its manufacturing process or its marketing and image or in a superficial design that captures the imagination of the public. Thus although the substance we know as Aspro was invented by George Nicholas it was his brother Alfred Nicholas who was vitally important in addressing the manufacturing and marketing issues which made the product a world leader.

Thus in our listing of Australian inventions and inventors we have often listed the significant people associated with the invention. However for a full understanding of that invention and its inventor(s) you need to go away investigate each one on a case-by-case basis. We encourage you to investigate some of these inventions and you may well decide that people other than the ones we name were more important.

References and resources

In-line References and Citations: White Hat uses in-line references, sources and notes. Wherever you see a small white hat , rest the pointer over it for a second and a note or reference will appear.

Some useful resources on inventions and inventors:

Aboriginal Inventions
Alfred Nicholas
Australian Inventors
Commercial Refrigeration
Developing Inventions
Henry Sutton
James Harrison
John Furphy
Lord Howard Florey
Pro Hart
The Deakin T2 Car
Who is the Inventor?
William Ramsay

• You will find numbers of useful resources in our free newsletter - Inventions & Innovations - the White Hat guide
• The White Hat listing of forthcoming events related to inventions and innovation
• The Australian Institute for Commercialisation (AIC) is a leading service organisation helping innovators achieve commercial success. Around Australia they help business, research organisations and governments to convert their ideas into successful outcomes.
• Scienceworks in Melbourne, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the CSIRO Discovery Centre in Canberra provide excellent resources in understanding Australian inventions and innovation.
• The ABC television series Landline regularly features Australian innovation and inventions. Unlike many gee-whiz pop science programs, Landline usually provides thorough and unhysterical coverage of Australian breakthroughs relating to country Australia together with their commercial ramifications. (You do need to watch the Sunday or Monday morning broadcast however, rather than the shortened Monday evening version.) Unfortunately, the same is not true of the current series on the ABC called The New Inventors. Made in infotainment style it chooses to present only a cursory investigation of the invention and skates over the top of the issues involved in successfully bringing an invention to market. Many of the products presented are not really inventions but design improvements, but any exposure in the media for creativity in such areas is to be welcomed and applauded.
• You will also find useful information at Intellectual Property (IP) Australia, The Inventors' Association of Australia and The Triton Foundation (founded by George Lewin, inventor of the Triton Work Bench) and Innovic, a Victorian organisation which provides advice on the bringing to market of innovations..