Inventions & innovations: Australian ideas changing the world by Stuart Bremer

Trocadero Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9780864271440.
Inventions & innovations is from the They made Australia collection and provides a timeline of significant Australian inventions that have changed the world focusing on how the ideas were conceived and the struggle to make them reality. With the current focus on finding the black box of Malaysian Airlines MH-370, it would be very timely to know that this device is an Australian invention, as was the inflatable escape slide. What is remarkable about the selection of items in the book, is the contribution their invention and development has made to the wellbeing of people everywhere such as spray-on skin for burns patients and the programmable turning bed for critically injured patients. On the other hand, are items that we take for granted without thinking that their origins began here with Australian thinking and research such as the work in developing much of the technology underpinning wifi networks.
Barbara Braxton.