Corporate Body

CSIRO Engineering Section (1955 - 1963)

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

From
1955
Australia
To
1963
Functions
Industrial or scientific research and Engineering Industry

Summary

In 1955 the CSIRO Engineering Section was founded, replacing the former Central Experimental Workshops. After almost a decade of operations, the Section was succeeded by the Division of Mechanical Engineering.

Skip to

Details

From "CSIRO research for Australia" (1962) pdf page 61:
"In 1945, an engineer was appointed to the C.S.I.R. staff to help the Head Office and the Divisions with their engineering problems. Some of these problems were concerned with the engineering services of laboratories, and some involved the design of new research equipment. The engineer, Mr. R. N. Morse, soon found it necessary to have the assistance of two more professional engineers, and the small team became involved in a large number of projects, ranging from the installation of gas turbine testing equipment for the Division of Aeronautics to the development of flow metering devices for irrigation research.

In the immediate post-war era, manufacturing facilities in the engineering industry were in heavy demand, and in 1949 C.S.I.R.O. was obliged to set up its own manufacturing establishment, known as the C.S.I.R.0. Central Experimental Workshops. The Workshops, situated at Maribyrnong, Victoria, undertook the design and construction of all kinds of novel apparatus and experimental plant.

The group soon began to develop research interests of its own, and in 1955 its name was changed to the Engineering Section. By J 957, when it moved to Highett, Victoria, it had an established programme of research into solar energy utilization, air conditioning and artificial climate control. The work on climate control has found application in the Division of Plant Industry's phytotron, for which the Section carried out the engineering development and general design. Although the Section still assists other C.S.I.R.O. groups with their engineering problems, it is now mainly preoccupied with its own research programme, which has been extended to such fields as agricultural machinery, electronics, refrigeration and solar distillation."

Timeline

 1949 - 1955 CSIRO Central Experimental Workshops
       1955 - 1963 CSIRO Engineering Section
             1963 - 1981 CSIRO Division of Mechanical Engineering
                   1981 - 1990 CSIRO Division of Energy Technology
                         1990 - c. 1995 CSIRO Division of Coal and Energy Technology
                               c. 1995 - CSIRO Energy Technology

Related People

Published resources

Books

Resources

Ailie Smith

Created: 20 September 2000, Last modified: 2 May 2025

EOAS ID: biogs/A000762b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2025 May (Gwangal moronn - Gariwerd calendar - Autumn: late March to end of May - season of honey bees)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#gwangal-moronn
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/A000762b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260