page_title: Timeline of Australian inventions
section_title: Colonial era – 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of Australian inventions / Colonial era – 19th century
caption_attribution_description: Statue by Louis Laumen at the Melbourne Cricket Ground of en:Tom Wills umpiring the first recorded match of Australian rules football between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College on 7 August 1858.
context_page_description: This is a timeline of Australian inventions consisting of products and technology invented in Australia from pre-European-settlement in 1788 to the present. The inventions are listed in chronological order based on the date of their introduction.
  Australian inventions include the very old, such as woomera, and the very new, such as the scramjet, first fired at the Woomera rocket range. The Australian government has suggested that Australian inventiveness springs from the nation's geography and isolation. Perhaps due to its status as an island continent connected to the rest of the world only via air and sea, Australians have been leaders in inventions relating to both maritime and aeronautical matters, including powered flight, the black box flight recorder, the inflatable escape slide, the surf ski and the wave-piercing catamaran winged keel. Since the earliest days of European settlement, Australia's main industries have been agriculture and mining.
context_section_description: 1843 – Grain stripper – John Wrathall Bull invented and John Ridley manufactured in South Australia the world's first mechanised grain stripper. It utilised a comb to lift the ears of the crop to where revolving beaters deposited the grain into a bin.
  1856 – Refrigerator – Using the principle of vapour compression, James Harrison produced the world's first practical ice making machine and refrigerator.
  1858 – Australian rules football – began its development when Tom Wills wrote a letter published in Bell's Life in Victoria & Sporting Chronicle on 10 July 1858, calling for a "foot-ball club, a rifle club, or other athletic pursuits" to keep cricketers fit during winter. An experimental match was played by Wills and others at the Richmond Paddock, later known as Yarra Park next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 31 July 1858.
  The Melbourne Football Club rules of 1859 are the oldest surviving set of laws for Australian football. They were drawn up at the Parade Hotel, East Melbourne, on 17 May, by Wills, W. J. Hammersley, J. B. Thompson and Thomas Smith.
  The Melbourne club's game was not immediately adopted by neighbouring clubs. Before each match the rules had to be agreed by the two teams involved. By 1866, several other clubs had agreed to play by an updated version of Melbourne's rules.
  1859 – Photolithography – developed by John Walter Osborne at the Victorian government's Crown Lands Office. During a land boom the Office had trouble producing the many maps and documents required to keep land records updated. Instead of having to copy surveyor's originals, or having to store stone originals, master copies saved were glass slides of around 6 inches (150 mm) square.
  1874 – Underwater torpedo – Invented by Louis Brennan, the torpedo had two propellers, rotated by wires which were attached to winding engines on the shore station. By varying the speed at which the two wires were extracted, the torpedo could be steered to the left or right by an operator on the shore.
  1876 – Stump jump plough – Richard and Clarence Bowyer Smith developed a plough which could jump over stumps and stones, enabling newly cleared land to be cultivated.
  1877 – Mechanical clippers – Various mechanical shearing patents were registered in Australia before Frederick York Wolseley finally succeeded in developing a practical hand piece with a comb and reciprocating cutter driven by power transmitted from a stationary engine.
  1889 – Electric drill – Arthur James Arnot patented the world's first electric drill on 20 August 1889 while working for the Union Electric Company in Melbourne. He designed it primarily to drill rock and to dig coal.
  1892 – Coolgardie safe – Arthur Patrick McCormick noticed that a wet bag placed over a bottle cooled its contents, and the cooling was more pronounced in a breeze. The Coolgardie safe was a box made of wire and hessian sitting in water, which was placed on a verandah so that any breeze would evaporate the water in the hessian and via the principle of evaporation, cool the air inside the box. The Coolgardie safe was used into the middle of the 20th century as a means of preserving food.
caption: Statue next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the approximate site of the 1858 "foot-ball" match between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College. Tom Wills is depicted umpiring behind two young players contesting the ball.
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