Corporate Body

Army Inventions Directorate (1942 - 1946)

Commonwealth of Australia

From
19 March 1942
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
To
31 December 1946
Victoria, Australia
Website
https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/AgencyDetail.aspx?reg_no=CA%20537&singleRecord=T
Reference No
CA 537
Legal Status
National Archives of Australia agency registration number. Legislation administered Creation: National Security (Army Inventions) Regulations Statutory Rule 19 March 1942, No. 178
Location
Historical agency address (circa March 1942) Kurrajong House, 177 Collins Street, Melbourne (by April, 1942) 31 Spring Street, Melbourne, Vic

Summary

On 29 January 1942, the Minister for the Army, Mr F M Forde, announced that an Army Inventions Directorate had been created but it was not until 19 March 1942 that Regulations were made under the National Security Act (1939-1940) to give it a legislative basis. The Directorate replaced the Central Inventions Board (CA 153), which has been established in 1940 to accommodate the growing number of submissions to it, and the District Inventions Boards.

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Details

In August 1942 the Directorate comprised the following members:

Dr Rvd R Woolley (Chief Executive Officer)
L J Hartnett (Director of Ordnance Production)
Sir George Julius (Chairman of CSIR)
Professor Eric Ashby
Flight Lieutenant S R Bell (Inventions Officer, Department of Air)
R W Hill (Amalgamated Engineering Union)
Brigadier J W A O'Brien (Director of Artillery)
Major-General O F Phillips (temporarily representing Army General Staff)
F R Sinclair (Secretary, Department of the Army)
C S Teece
Air Commodore E C Wackett

Timeline

 1932 - 1940 Army Headquarters Inventions Board
       1940 - 1941 Central Inventions Board [Department of Defence]
             1942 - 1946 Army Inventions Directorate

Related People

Published resources

Books

  • Hartnett, Laurence, Big wheels and little wheels (Hawthorn (Vic.): Gold Star Publications, 1973), 278 pp. Details
  • Mellor, D. P., The Role of Science and Industry, Australia in the War of 1939-1945, Volime 5 of Series 4 (Civil) (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1958). Details

Resources

Gavan McCarthy

Created: 12 September 2025

EOAS ID: biogs/P007852b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

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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/P007852b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

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