Sutton
Manufactured by Suttons, Bourke St Melbourne, c1897
Henry Sutton made many in improvements to bicycles and designed and built a number of motocycles, one of which made the first long distance journey in Australia. The motorized tricycle travelled from Melbourne to Ballarat and took approximately thirteen hours. People lined the road all the way to Ballarat, cheering, and hundreds of bicycles escorted him on various stages of the journey.
Despite atrocious road conditions the trip was completed in eleven and a half hours, and the vehicle arrived in Ballarat to be greeted by a crowd of thousands. "A near riot occurred as the police frantically held back the crowd and the tricycle was driven straight through the front doors of Suttons Music Store in Sturt St."
The 70 mile journey was the first long distance journey in Australia by a motor vehicle.
Based on a De Dion motor tricycle which Henry imported, the machine was fitted with an engine and carburettor of his own design.
Henry took out a number of patents based around the construction of powered vehicles and in 1900 was intending to manufacture automobiles with the Austral Otis Engineering Company. This did not come to fruition due to the high costs involved, making the machines uncompetitive with imported vehicles.
Sutton was a founding member of the Automobile Club of Victoria, and his proposal which in part read "to co-operate in securing rational legislation and the formation of proper rules and regulations governing the use of motor cars and motor cycles in cities, towns and country districts" was unanimously accepted.
Born in a tent on the Ballarat Goldfields on 4th September 1855, he first attended school at the age of 10, and four years later had read every book on science in the Ballarat Mechanics’ lnstitute. That year, 1869, he invented a continuous current (D.C.) dynamo - 3 years before that of the Belgian credited with having done so.
Sutton was a renowned inventor whose associates included Nikola Tesla and Alexander Grahame Bell. Among his works are a television with which he planned to watch the Melbourne Cup from Ballarat. That was 1885, two years before Ferdinand Braun. In the 1880s he devised a colour photography process, and photographed a cholera germ.
Telephone
A year after Bell invented the telephone, Sutton designed 20 of them. "As Geoffrey Blainey commented, Henry would have been a world figure at the age of 25 had he possessed an able business manager and a publicity consultant. As it happened, others later patented 16 of his telephones." [1] He installed the first phone line in Australia.
Light Globe
He demonstrated a light globe 16 days after Edison's demonstration in 1879.
"...he had invented a vacuum pump operated by a column of mercury that made possible that ubiquitous domestic device, the electric light globe. This was described in an article in the English Mechanic and World of Science of 21 July 1882, and the Swan Edison Company, newly formed in England, used the principle for creating vacuums in electric light bulbs." [1]
In 1870 Henry Sutton became the first person in Australia to experiment with flight when he built a clockwork helicopter, and in 1878 presented two papers to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain. He had been developing these ideas since he was ten years old. [5]
Television
When just 15, Sutton developed a method of transmitting images over the telegraph. In 1871 he wrote to R. L. J. Ellery, the Victorian government astronomer, detailing the invention. In 1885, Ellery witnessed to the transmission of single images of the Melbourne Cup via the "Telephane", as Sutton had named it, to Ballarat. It reportedly worked quite well, and in 1890 Sutton demonstrated the Telephane to the scientific communities in England and France. He published a paper on the device in England, France, and the USA. The Scientific American published it again in 1910.
Sutton did not patent the Telephane. John Logie Baird (1888-1946) used elements of the paper for his invention of television in 1926, almost five decades later.
Batteries
His inventions included rechargeable batteries, one of which was described as "impossible" by a learned publication. If you open the bonnet of your car you will see the latest version of the Sutton battery.
For his work on batteries Sutton was offered membership of electrical societies in Great Britain, France, America, Belgium and Russia.
He patented a galena detector, and built the world's first portable radio. He patented a process for printing photographs in 1887.
The Herald, Fri 25 Nov 1898, Page 3 (Trove NLA)
The Age Fri 29 Apr 1898 (Trove NLA)
Sources:
