New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

68 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019

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GADGETS

TO THRILL,

DRILL & BILL

From jetboats to dental drills, this country

has consistently punched above its

weight in inventiveness. by PETER GRIFFIN

Land diving: a bungy

jumper plunges

from the Kawarau

Suspension Bridge.

80 YEARS

A

shoestring

budget, years of

trial and error

and a bloke with

a big idea for

doing things in a

better way. Those

are the traits that defined our

biggest innovations of the past

80 years. Here are 10 of our

greatest hits.

ELECTRIC FENCE 1937

Electrified fences were

developed for military uses

in the early 20th century and

gained a dubious reputation

when it emerged after World

War II that they’d been used

to secure Nazi death camps.

But the main use of the electric

fence was pioneered for pen-

ning in livestock by Alfred

William (Bill) Gallagher in the

mid-1930s. His horse, Joe, had

taken to scratching himself

against Bill’s car. The solution

was an electrical circuit that

delivered a small shock when

Joe rocked the car. That devel-

oped into fencing technology

that by the end of the 1930s

was the main offering of Gal-

lagher, the electric fence and

security company that today

is run by Bill’s son, Sir William

Gallagher (Bill Jr), and which

employs more than 1000

people and exports all over the

world.

AIR TURBINE DENTAL DRILL 1949

If you dread the high-pitched

whir of the dental drill, you

have New Zealand dentist

John Patrick Walsh to thank

for it. It was Walsh and col-

leagues at the Dominion

Physical Laboratory in Lower

Hutt that in the late 1940s

came up with the basic design

that underpins dental drills

today. They were seeking to

develop a drill that would

cause dental patients less

discomfort by having the drill

rotate at a higher speed than

was possible with existing

electric-powered drills. The

handpiece they developed was

driven by compressed air and

received a provisional patent

in 1949, attracting consider-

able interest around the world.

The high-pitched noise and

blast of air into the patient’s

mouth it produced meant that

Walsh’s dental drill wasn’t

widely used, but it inspired the

Borden Airotor, which was a

commercial success.

CONTINUOUS FERMENTATION

1956

At 15, Morton Coutts found

himself in control of the fam-

ily’s Palmerston North brewery

business after his father, Wil-

liam, became ill, in 1918, as a

result of the Spanish flu. But