JAMES HARRISON ~ PIONEERING GENIUS W.R.(ROY) LANG
JAMES HARRISON - PIONEERING GENIUS W.R. (ROY) LANG Some said he was talented. Others said he was a genius. One man declared he was an epochmaker. All three were right. James Harrison (1816–93), a printer’s devil out of Scotland, became an epochmaker in world refrigeration, a field which ranks with the invention of the steam engine, as one of the forces, which have shaped our civilisation. Harrison’s genius took him from Geelong in far away colonial Victoria, where he had conceived and built a refrigerator, to London’s sophisticated steam engineering in 1856. In 1857, he gave industry its first successful large-scale commercial ice-making machines and by 1861, there were units bearing his name from Europe to Peru, and from Argentina to Australia. As a colleague of John Pascoe Fawkner, he was witness to early Victorian history, he was foundation editor of the Geelong Advertiser in 1840. His energy and talents combined made him a spirited citizen-sometime postmaster, racing club secretary, parliamentarian, town councillor, and board member of industrial and charitable institutions. His greatest talent led to his 53 years of highly competent journalism in Victoria and England, which included 27 years with David Syme’s newspapers, the Age and the Leader, during which he developed a flair for popular science, meeting as he did with John Tyndall, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and others. In 1892 he returned to Geelong, and at Point Henry experimented with solar salt evaporation rates, considering the possibilities of sodium carbonate manufacture. This man of rare excellence died in harness when writing a column for the Age. He was then 77. W.R. Lang B.A., D.Sc., is also a Fellow of the Textile Institute (UK), of the Australian College of Education, of the Australian Institute of Physics, and the Institute of Physics (U.K.). He was awarded the Warner Memorial medal of the British Textile Institute in 1966 for research in textile science and was Chairman of the Victorian Chapter of the Australian College of Education in 1969–71. He was foundation head of the Textile College, and later Head of the School of Applied Sciences and Deputy Principal of the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong. In retirement he is Honorary Archivist of The Geelong Hospital and a Committee Member of the Geelong Historical Society. He is Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary and was President of the Rotary Club of Geelong (1966– 67); was President of the YMCA of Geelong (1955–59); and was a member of the Colombo Plan Mission to the Union of Burma on Textile Education in 1956.
Cover by courtesy of Robert Ingpen.
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