Number 8 wire tradition continues . . . with the fence post
New Zealanders, particularly rural New Zealanders of past generations, have a well-earned international reputation for innovation and inventiveness. Our ability to respond to problems with clever, low cost solutions has been variously called the number eight wire technology, Heath Robinson or the Kiwi way.
This ability, which is simply an innovative and practical approach to problem solving, stems from the need of early settlers to make implements or adapt old ones to new uses as they did not have the money to buy news ones even if they had been available.
Today however there are at least two generations, mostly living in cities, who have never seen a length of number eight wire, never heard of Heath Robinson and are Kiwi by adoption rather than birth.
Those early farmer settlers only had a few very basic hand tools; axes and saws for felling trees.
Hammers nails and fencing wire and little else for their new farms. The early wire, imported from
England, was invented by steel maker Henry Bessemer in 1855, was heavy gauge, soft and pliable compared to modern thinner ten-gauge, high tensile wire which will spring back on the cold fingers of the unwary and unskilled.
The old wire could be bent into almost any shape and it was used for a myriad of purposes other than fencing. It was used for holding broken machinery parts together, repairing horse bridles and even temporary spark plugs leads for older cars.
Heath Robinson was an early British cartoonist who became famous for his often-hilarious drawings of imagined machinery.
Some early New Zealand inventions, particularly those which failed to operate properly were dubbed therefore Heath Robinson contraptions.
Among early and successful inventions by New Zealanders are some very basic implements which people over most of the modern world now take for granted.
They include the common egg beater by Willis Johnson in 1884, rugby referee’s whistle by William Atak also in 1884, the Jet Boat by William Hamilton in 1954, the disposable medical syringe by Colin Murdoch in 1956 and the electric fence for farming by Bill Gallagher in 1962. It is hard to imagine the modern world without some of them and these include aircraft as there is sound evidence that Timaru farmer Richard Pearse built and flew the first heavier than air machine in
March 1902 some months before the more wellknown Wright brothers took to the air at Kittyhawk in USA. Pearse built his machine with bamboo poles, fabric and number eight wire. He even built the little engine which powered it.
There were other inventions which although popular are probably not as beneficial for some of us.
They include instant coffee by David Strang in 1890, the lamington cake and the controversial pavlova dessert which the Australians also claim. There is also jogging as a superior form of fitness training by Olympian Arthur Lydiard in the early 1960s, hair clips and dozens of other every day gadgets invented out of necessity with whatever was at hand by busy innovative people. Some are protected by patent but many are not.
In keeping with that tradition, we now have fence posts made from recycled plastic which nobody wants and which is causing serious headaches for local authorities trying to find somewhere safe to dump it.
A company called Future Post has formed a partnership with Smart Environmental’s Kopu site, collecting bales of recycled plastic which they turn into new age fence posts and the innovation is expected to use about 15 tonnes of the material a month.
The process involves mixing plastic milk bottles, bleach containers, shampoo bottles and other single use containers with other soft plastics. The combined mixture is then stabilised and extruded into posts in a range of useful sizes.
This bright idea ticks all the boxes for a world faced with serious environmental problems.
Apart from finding a use for some of the toxic plastic waste which is polluting waterways and choking the oceans this invention uses no poisonous timber treatments and no trees are felled to make them. In August the company’s Waiuku-based factory was producing about 400 posts a day. That is probably only a very small proportion of the posts used on New Zealand farms each year and who knows what export potential there might be.
When it comes to handing out annual ribbons and awards for good ideas plastic fence posts should be right up there with the best of them.