Australian inventor brothers Edward and Donald Both changed lives, but 'no-one's heard of them'
You wouldn't expect someone who made heart monitors to be your first port of call when you wanted an Olympic scoreboard.
Yet all of these inventions — and around a hundred more — once came out of the same Australian factory.
They were all the creations of a pair of brothers, Edward and Donald Both.
Across the middle of the 20th century, the Both brothers built things to meet the challenges of the times — war machinery in the Second World War, electric vans to beat post-war rationing, sports technology for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and a lifesaving polio treatment to counter the devastating epidemic.
But where their name was once emblazoned on tools around the world, it's now filtered out of sight.
Even in their home state of South Australia, the brothers' work isn't common knowledge — although their memory is preserved by a few dedicated museum curators and family members.
"Ted" and "Don" hailed from Caltowie near Port Pirie in South Australia and were the eldest and youngest, respectively, of five siblings.
Kaylene Kranz, a relative of the brothers, says their regional roots were a source of their inventiveness.
"If you're in the country, you haven't got the luxury of picking up the phone and say, 'Hey, come and help,'" she says.
Ms Kranz knew both Ted and Don as a young woman — particularly Don, who she recalls as a jolly fellow.
"Ted was the put-together man and Don had ideas and ran the business side of it. But together, they were a formidable team," Ms Kranz says.
Kellie Branson, a curator at the SA Health Museum, said the brothers' genius came from their ability to work in tandem.
"Their brains were opposites, but they still work together to come up with these amazing inventions."
The duo didn't tend to invent brand new things, so much as dramatically improve existing tools. Ted once said he didn't even like the term "inventor" – it implied their ideas had come from nowhere.
"People who imagine a person dreaming up an entire invention and making it work have the wrong idea," he said in a 1950 interview.
"It is a painstaking process, checking each step."
This reticence didn't stop people labelling Ted "Australia's Edison", particularly after his work in the 1940s.
During World War II, Ted worked on devices that measured machine gun fire, transmitted drawings and diagrams over phone lines, dried blood that could be reconstituted for field transfusions, and helped guided torpedoes.
The brothers' electric vehicles were a response to petrol rationing. The scooter never made it to market, but Ted also developed electric vans, which were used to deliver bread until the late 1940s.
The drawing-transmitting device, a kind of early fax machine dubbed the Visitel, found uses in confirming horse racing results.
There were more sporting innovations, first with tennis scoreboards for the Davis Cup, then the 14,000-light globe Olympic scoreboard at the MCG.
Ms Kranz says there's even a family story that they "had television sorted" before anyone else in the 1930s, only to have their plans disrupted by the war.
But the brothers' biggest success was in healthcare.
The iron lung worked better when it wasn't made from iron.
The respirator, first developed in the 1920s, was a lifesaver for people paralysed by polio.
"It was very heavy, cumbersome and expensive to make and produce," Ms Branson says.
At his new wife Eileen's coaxing, Ted decided to spend their honeymoon funds on making a cheaper version in 1937.
"They managed to do one made of plywood," Ms Branson says. The lighter, cheaper, "iron" lung was a twentieth of the cost of commercial iron lungs.
Ted took the invention to London, and within a few years, there were hundreds of wooden respirators being distributed across the Commonwealth, helping surging numbers of polio patients. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire for his work.
Humidicribs, similarly, already existed in the early 1950s, when Don turned his hand to one. But his portable version could more quickly and safely encase premature babies with the right temperatures and humidity.
Then, there are the electrocardiograph (ECG) machines. Doctors had known since the 19th century that placing electrodes over a patient's heart, and recording the signals it emitted, could give vital information about a patient's heart health.
By the 1930s, ECGs were accurate enough to diagnose patients — but getting the graphs required an arduous film-developing process, which could take weeks.
The Both brothers figured out how to make instant readers: first with glass discs, then with paper and ink-dipped styluses marking out tiny graphs.
"You could use the microscope on top of the machine to view the results instantly," Ms Branson says.
They could also be transported to hospital bedsides, or even over bumpy roads to the patients' homes.
The brothers also worked on electroencephalographs (EEGs) for measuring brain activity.
Ms Kranz, who worked in neurology, found herself using EEG equipment designed by the Both brothers years later — alongside a family cousin who'd stayed with the business.
From the polished wooden frames to the delicately printed labels, much of the Both equipment is aesthetically pleasing to look at. It's a world away from the bright, boxy plastic of modern medical equipment.
The ECGs fit right in to the halls of the library at the South Australia Parliament, where librarian John Weste has put some of the Both equipment on display.
"I love the design," Dr Weste says.
"It's so beautifully executed — even the carrying cases with the herring bone wood patterns."
Packed into their cases, the early ECGs look less like doctors' tools and more like vintage sewing machines. Ms Branson suspects this is deliberate.
"I think they did design it on the look of some old sewing machines," she says.
For patients who'd never seen an ECG before, a more familiar piece of equipment might be less foreboding.
Other pieces might be mistaken for old radios.
"It wouldn't seem like they were getting a procedure or a reading. It just looked like the radio was next to their beds," Ms Branson says.
Ms Kranz finds this suggestion likely, remembering the beauty of Don and his wife Yvonne's Kensington home on her visits.
"They had a lovely house, and we were always given tea out of beautiful cups in the sitting room," she says.
"So yes, I think so that it wasn't just 'OK, let's sort this', [it was] 'let's make people comfortable while we're making them well.'"
The brothers sold their company to Drug Houses of Australia in the 1960s, but they kept tinkering well into retirement. Ted died in 1987 and Don died in 2005.
Ms Branson, who's been collecting Both equipment for the health museum for years, recently travelled out to Ted's grave in Victoria.
"It's a humble little plaque. No mention of his inventions. It just says: 'Ted Both, OBE, and his dates.'"
Eventually, more company acquisitions and the pace of medical research took the Both name off equipment.
Dr Weste, who's been showing the Both equipment to visitors to the South Australia Parliament, says people are surprised to learn the inventions originated in the state.
"No-one's heard of them. And that's the great tragedy of it," he says.
This is partly why the health museum loans some of the Both equipment out.
"Otherwise, these stories will be hidden away," Ms Branson says.
"We want these people to be out in the light."
Ms Kranz has told her grandchildren about her clever cousins, and she wants them to be more widely known too — but not just them.
She says South Australia has a host of other under-recognised inventors.
Ms Kranz hopes the Both equipment on display will show people how much medicine has changed in the span of less than a lifetime.
"We have our MRIs and our CTs, and our big, whiz-bang machines that twiddle around and go ping, but they managed to diagnose without that in the early days, with very basic stuff."
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42 minutes ago
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ABC News
a day ago
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Can Trump contain China's AI boom?
Sam Hawley: For so long, the tech bros of Silicon Valley have dominated the AI race. Now there's a boom underway in China, giving them a run for their money and Donald Trump doesn't like it. Today, Kyle Chan from the global policy think tank, the Rand Corporation, on why the president is so desperate for the US to beat Beijing. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Kyle, there's a global race going on right now to be the world leader in AI. This is a race basically to make technologies that rival the human brain, right? Kyle Chan: Yeah. So there really is this global race. And in particular, you have the US and China with many of the world's best AI models. And it's quite impressive to see almost every day, it feels like a new model coming out with new advanced capabilities. So, yes,getting close, if not even beating what we can do ourselves. Sam Hawley: Yeah, it's fascinating to watch how quickly this is moving. 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Kyle Chan: Oh, yeah. So you have OpenAI, currently led by Sam Altman. You have Google, which has been coming out with a number of various sort of cutting edge models with its Gemini series. You have Claude, which is very well known from Anthropic, well known for its coding capabilities. You have Meta as well as xAI. So there's actually quite a quite a large roster of strong American AI companies. Sam Hawley: So for many, many years, America's really led the world when it comes to AI development. But as you say, China has been creeping up on it. And that has the US administration a bit worried. It even tried to stop Beijing's advancement in this space, didn't it? By banning Nvidia from selling advanced chips to China. Just remind me what happened then. Kyle Chan: Yes, that's right. So this was actually in the Biden administration. You had very strong export controls placed on especially Nvidia's more advanced chips. And so here you actually have several rounds of downgrading of what kinds of Nvidia chips could be exported in China. Sam Hawley: So the US, in part, was saying that it was deeply concerned that AI could be used by the Chinese for military purposes. Kyle Chan: That's right. Yeah. And, you know, to be sure, it was also part of this broader idea that advanced semiconductors in general can be used for a whole range of important applications. So in addition to AI, there are also more direct military implications for this ban. Sam Hawley: All right. So Biden brought in this ban to stop these really advanced chips from being exported from the United States to China. But intriguingly, Trump just recently has now removed that ban. Do we know why he did that and how significant is that decision? Kyle Chan: Yes. What's interesting is I think whereas before people expected maybe a continuous ratcheting up of these export controls, Trump has reversed the ban on the H20 chips. Interestingly, a new line of argument has gotten a lot of prominence, which is that Nvidia and other US tech companies who sort of, you know, quote, unquote, sell the picks and shovels, that is, build the infrastructure and build the sort of underlying platforms for AI development, that American companies should be the ones who are dominant in the world and that people should build on the American tech stack as it were, rather than cede, say, the Chinese market to its competitors like Huawei, which is also developing its own AI chips. So the idea here was that rather than block out the Chinese market entirely, that the US should stay engaged, at least in terms of providing some kind of sweet spot of infrastructure, but not not too advanced in order to actually accelerate China's efforts. Sam Hawley: And that's the argument that the Nvidia boss, Jensen Huang, has been making to Donald Trump. 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There really is a boom going on there right now, isn't there? Kyle Chan: Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, everyone now knows about DeepSeek and the DeepSeek moment. News report: The release of a high performing Chinese rival to chat GPT has sent shockwaves through the global tech sector and caused US tech stocks to fall. Kyle Chan: A Chinese AI model for the first time seemed to be almost on par with the US leading models. And this was done at a fraction of the cost in terms of compute. And this was done sort of in defiance of US efforts to put on export controls and to restrict Chinese compute capacity. But DeepSeek is really the tip of the iceberg. So there's a whole set of very competitive Chinese AI models. You think about Alibaba's Qwen, you think about Tencent, ByteDance. There's Moonshot, a whole host of startups as well. 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So there's a question right now within the Chinese tech community, Chinese AI policy about how hard to push for this domestic alternative versus to continue to rely on what are otherwise better performing Nvidia chips. Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Kyle, just unpack for me now. What's actually driving this AI boom in China? Because it has a lot to do with the Communist Party's backing of this, doesn't it, of the government's funding of it. Kyle Chan: That's right. So what's interesting is that Beijing is pouring resources into the entire, what I call the entire AI tech stack. So they're investing in not only chips, as we mentioned earlier, but in the rollout of data centres, often tied to renewable energy. They are investing in the development of foundation models. They have special local government AI labs. And then all the way to applications, especially in so-called hard tech areas like robotics and industrial automation. So you can see sort of this full range of support. And of course, at the very heart of this, I think is ultimately the emphasis on talent development and basic research. So a lot of the universities in China, many of them are producing really world class AI developers. Sam Hawley: And we've seen this before, haven't we? From the Chinese government when it wanted to boost the EV market. It did the same thing. It did the same thing with solar and it works. Kyle Chan: Yeah, that's right. They've tried this playbook before and they're going to try it again. But the funny thing is, yeah, AI is sort of a different beast. And so, you know, for example, just in the past year, we have this shift towards reason models. And that already has thrown a bit of a wrench into some of the industrial policy efforts that China has made in AI. So some of the data centre build out that was government backed. You know, there's a question now about whether that is fit for purpose with the shift towards this sort of new AI paradigm. And it could change again. So it's a fast moving space. Sam Hawley: All right. So, Kyle, there is this race going on between the United States and China to dominate AI development. But tell me, why is that so important? Why does it matter who wins this race in the end? Kyle Chan: So the AI race, I think, is especially important now because it has implications for economic growth, long term productivity. There's a sense both in the US and in China that AI could help boost a whole range of sectors. From education, health care, biotech, drug discovery, manufacturing services. So on the one hand, you have this sort of economic implication. On the other hand, there are military implications. So AI could be used for developing autonomous systems. You think about drones or swarms of drones that are able to navigate on the battlefield on their own. Or you think about missile defence capabilities that might use AI or satellite technology that might use AI. 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Well, it's a fascinating battle. Kyle, what do you think? What's your prediction? Who's going to come out on top in the end? Kyle Chan: In a sense, I do see that with some of the industrial policy in China, with some of the government support, as well as perhaps more importantly, different sorts of attitudes towards AI in China. There are some surveys that have shown that people in China more broadly seem to be more open to adopting AI and see it as a more positive force in society. That could play a key role in rolling out and incorporating AI into more areas of life. So that's one area that I would watch very closely. Sam Hawley: Kyle Chan is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and an adjunct researcher at the Rand Corporation. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead and Sam Dunn. Audio production by Cinnamon Nippard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.


SBS Australia
4 days ago
- SBS Australia
'Ecological catastrophe': What to know about South Australia's algal bloom
An algal bloom crisis in South Australia that has killed thousands of marine species has been described as a natural disaster by the state government, with scientists labelling the situation an "ecological catastrophe". The bloom has devastated the marine environment in South Australia, and experts have warned it could have serious ecological ramifications for years to come. Here's what you need to know about the algal bloom, its impacts, and why it has scientists and advocates so concerned. What is an algal bloom and what causes it? An algal bloom refers to a rapid increase in the population of algae. While it is a naturally occurring phenomenon, it can be exacerbated by climate change and extreme weather conditions. Nina Wootton, a marine scientist at The University of Adelaide, said a warm summer, marine heat wave, and delay in seasonal temperature dropping had contributed to the development of this algal bloom. "There's a mixture of ideas about how this first occurred, but we know that it's been lying dormant here for a while, and we've had blowups of these kind of species previously ... but not of course to this extent," Wootton said. "It's sort of this perfect storm of environmental factors that caused this to happen in the first place." Martina Doblin is a professor of oceanography at the University of Technology Sydney with expertise in harmful algae, and the director of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. She said algae play an important role in ecosystems, and algal blooms are naturally occurring events in the springtime as the temperature warms up. "But a harmful algal bloom is something that really is categorised by the impact it has on people and the environment," she said. "In this particular case, this alga produces harmful substances that are toxic to certain animals." Nina Wootton said the algal bloom is an "ecological catastrophe". Source: Supplied The bloom has now killed tens of thousands of specimens from hundreds of different marine species. Wootton said this will have devastating consequences for ecosystems, describing it as an "ecological catastrophe". "The reason that I'm really concerned is that it has the potential for these long-term consequences for the marine environment; it's not just this one-off event," she said. 'It's potentially as we go down the track that it's going to cause longer issues and we're expecting to see more and more of these sorts of things with climate change." Where is the algal bloom in South Australia? The bloom of the microalgae species Karenia mikimotoi was identified off South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula in March, and grew to more than 4,400 square kilometres, close to the size of Kangaroo Island. It has been breaking up in recent weeks, spreading north into Spencer Gulf, south into the Coorong wetlands and along Adelaide's beaches in Gulf St Vincent into the Port River. Is algal bloom harmful to humans? While algal bloom is not as toxic to humans as it is to marine life, Wootton said it is harmful. She said some people may exhibit symptoms of an allergic reaction — such as watery eyes, irritated skin, or trouble breathing. Others may experience emotional impacts. "A lot of Australians have a really close connection to the marine environment and seeing it in such a sense of despair, I think that eco grief also is starting to play a bit of a role here," Wootton said. "It's not going to hopefully kill anybody, but it's definitely causing issues psychologically and mentally as well for these communities that are right on the frontline, like fishers and the industries that are really suffering from this at the forefront as well." Doblin said the long-term impacts on human health are not yet clear, and suggested they should be monitored as the crisis continues. She said people living in coastal communities may be inhaling toxins, being affected by foam at the water's edge, and having skin reactions. "We probably have incomplete records about the direct human health impact, but certainly physicians in that area should be aware that if people are coming in with unusual symptoms, this could be a cause," Doblin said. "And they could be proactive in asking for particular blood tests that would tell them perhaps about exposure to this particular toxin that the alga produces." Is the South Australia algal bloom a natural disaster? On Monday, federal Environment Minister Murray Watt announced a $14 million federal funding package for the South Australian government. "There's no doubting whatsoever that this is a very serious environmental event facing South Australia," he told reporters. "We are in uncharted waters here." Environment Minister Murray Watt announced $14 million in federal funding in response to the South Australia algal bloom crisis. Source: AAP / Matt Turner When asked whether the bloom and its impact should be declared a natural disaster, Watt said it was not possible under the existing definition. But on Tuesday, Premier Peter Malinauskas told ABC News Breakfast he had a different view. "From the South Australian government's perspective, I want to be really clear about this. This is a natural disaster," he said. "I think politicians can do themselves a disservice when they get caught up in technicalities. This is a natural disaster and should be acknowledged as such." Wootton said she believes the algal bloom should be declared a natural disaster as this would unlock access to more federal assistance and funding streams. She compared it to extreme weather events in recent years, such as bushfires and floods. "I personally just think that if this was happening in Sydney or in beaches around a more populous area, it would've already been called a national disaster," Wootton said. "It's like a bushfire but underwater." She said she does not think the Great Southern Reef gets enough recognition across the country. "It's home to so many different species that are only found on the Great Southern Reef, and it leaves me feeling really sad at the thought that some of those species are going to be lost. "It's really, really frustrating to be honest, but it's hard when there's not really one easy solution." — With additional reporting by Australian Associated Press