World-class inventions that defy convention
Kiwis have invented some iconic, delicious and downright weird things. Deborah Morris delves into the background of five of them.
We New Zealanders are known for our ingenuity, pluck and finding solutions to problems. You know, the No 8 wire mentality.
But behind those well-known inventions, like the bungy jump and the electric fence, are mistakes that led to lolly icons, out-of-the-box thinking and new ideas that, even now, are the gold standard.
Egg beater
Ernest Robert Godward is a name you probably don’t know, but this astonishing man is the mind behind one of New Zealand’s most iconic inventions.
We’ve all seen one. It was the egg beater in everyone’s kitchen. A handle at the top and a handle to turn the blades, designed to be non-slip.
Godward was born in London on April 7, 1869, to fireman Henry Robert Godward and Sarah Ann Pattison.
His parents sent him to a prep school at age 12, but Godward ran away to sea, reaching Japan where he worked on a cabling project before he was returned by the British Consul.
He ended up apprenticed to engineers, although he went back to sea in 1884.
In 1886, he came to New Zealand, arriving on the Nelson in Port Chalmers, where he jumped ship.
He was a man of many, many talents. He played a number of instruments, including the banjo, was athletic, cycling for the Invercargill Cycling Club and being one of the founders of the Invercargill Amateur Swimming Club, along with participating in rowing and boxing.
But it was for his numerous inventions that he was most noted, applying for more than 30 patents. In 1907, he designed and patented that iconic egg beater.
Among his other inventions was a new post-hole borer, a new hair curler, a burglarproof window and a hedge trimmer made from bicycle parts.
He also founded the Godward Spiral Pin and New Inventions Co Ltd – which was listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange.
He sold the American rights to his spiral hairpin and was said to have made his first million dollars that way.
His most famous invention, in 1926, was an economiser for a fuel engine which was used by public transport systems in America, allowing them to use fuel oil instead of petrol. In all, Godward created 72 different carburettors.
Even that was not his only claim to fame – he was involved with Southland’s first hot air balloon and built Rockhaven, his private residence in Invercargill — which still stands and is considered a historic building. The garage in which he did a lot of his inventing is still on the property.
He spent the final 20 years of his life in America, visiting New Zealand and his wife from time to time. However, during the stock market crash of 1929, he lost heavily, making only a partial recovery.
He died of a heart attack on December 2, 1936, on board the SS Mongolia out of Gibraltar while returning to Invercargill. True to form, he had won a skipping contest on board the day before. He was buried at sea.
Paint tin lid
This is an invention most people have seen and many have used – yet very few know it was a New Zealand design.
It’s barely remembered because the man who made it forgot to get a permanent patent.
John Eustace was born in 1855 in Helston, Cornwall, and came to New Zealand on board the Chile in 1862.
He had a quick mind despite a lack of formal education. Initially he worked on a cherry farm and then helped print and deliver some of the first issues of the Evening Star in Dunedin.
At 12 years old he became a blacksmith’s striker, then began an apprenticeship as a tinsmith – starting by making tin match boxes.
In 1896, he set up his own tinsmith business, making kettles, trays and other goods. Eustace was kept busy during the South African War, receiving huge orders.
It was during the early 1900s that he was asked to find a way to make paint-can lids that did not leak.
He said it took him a sleepless night trying to figure it out, but the next day he created an airtight lever lid for a paint tin.
That lid is still in use today.
It was so successful that orders began flooding in, not just from New Zealand but from all over the world.
He took out a patent with some help from painter Robert Fergus Smith and began the process of creating a die to mass produce the tins.
Except he did not know that the patent, an interim one, ran out after six months and was only in New Zealand. When it lapsed – Eustace never applied to make it permanent – it was a free for all, with companies all over the world producing their own lids.
Smith and Smith, the company that had asked him to make the lid in the first place, promised it would buy lids only from him and did so while he and his son ran the company.
It enabled Eustace to expand the factory and employ many men.
At one point he was called an idiot who had lost a fortune. Eustace replied: “Well, I’m happy, I’ve got a good family, I get three feeds a day, I can only wear one suit at a time. What would I want with a fortune?”
A novel light switch
We don’t think much about street lights unless something is wrong with them. They are just there when we need them.
But for Bobby Ellis it was a problem to be solved. With chickens.
Ellis was a little eccentric and was interested in emerging technologies, including electricity.
Born in England on July 24, 1862, he and his brothers came to New Zealand in the 1880s, settling in the Upper Motueka Valley at a farm.
Ellis built a water-powered flax mill and tried to supplement his income from the mill, including using the water race for wool scouring – which failed – making mud bricks for housing, and inventing new uses for flax fibre, such as hard-wearing trousers.
He did produce a high pressure turbine to provide electricity to his home.
In 1911, he bought a flour mill in Brightwater, south of Nelson, looking to harness the power of the Wairoa River to power the mill by day and provide power to nearby homes.
He had trouble getting permission, but by 1913 he had the infrastructure in place and was powering five street lights along with a few homes.
His vision continued to expand and soon he was powering a fair portion of the surrounding district.
Ellis wanted a way to turn the street lights on at night and off in the morning. His solution was chickens.
Each night, the chickens went into their coop and hopped up on a perch which sank under their weight, triggering a switch that turned on the street lights. In the morning as the chickens left, the spring-loaded perch rose and the lights switched off.
Ellis married Kate Evans in 1889. She would have been the first woman to have an electric stove and they even had an electric piano.
They had five children, one of whom, Henry, was killed during World War I. Another son was injured not long after. Ellis’ wife died in 1917.
In 1924, Bobby donated an electric street light to the Brightwater War Memorial Committee. In 1991, one of his old street lights was put up near the memorial gates.
A sweet mistake
Pineapple lumps are delicious. And a mistake. Nevertheless, they have become one of the most iconic lollies New Zealand has known.
Charles Richard Diver wasn’t actually supposed to be making pineapple lumps.
In 1952, he was told to find a way to use up the waste from the daily run of marshmallow. The most waste came from a type of chocolate fish with pineapple marshmallow. Diver used it to create chunks of the marshmallow and before long the forerunner of pineapple lumps were born.
Diver was born on November 22, 1910, in Alexandra, central Otago, to John and Elizabeth. He worked at the Regina Confectionery Factory as confectionery chef and floor production manager and it was during his time there that pineapple lumps were created.
He was also responsible for other sweets. Pineapple lumps were introduced to the public around 1952-54. Originally they were called pineapple chunks; the name was changed in the 1960s.
Cadbury later acquired the name and began selling them under its Pascall brand. A variety of other brands also sell similar-named products. The Diver family still have a copy of Charles’ original recipe. The children remember being used as guinea pigs for the lumps and other sweets.
Meanwhile, Regina has continued producing pineapple chunks and now uses a slightly modified version of Charles’ original recipe.
And to help solve the old argument of where you store your pineapple lumps – the Diver family kept theirs in the freezer.
Zealandia milking machine
Wairarapa farmer Norman John Daysh had grown up milking cows by hand and he had had quite enough. Along with the time-consuming task, farmers also had trouble keeping milking hands for any length of time.
Daysh, the son of a dairy farmer, Henry, and his wife, Ada, was born in the Lower Hutt suburb of Taita in 1881.
He served in the New Zealand military during the South African War before returning to New Zealand and to farming.
Along with a brother-in-law who was an engineer, he began looking at a machine that could do the milking for them.
He took out his first patent, for what was called a teat cup, in 1910. The device evolved over time, with future patents calling it a milking machine.
The Zealandia milking machine, as it was called, went on display in 1911 in Masterton. Demonstrations of how it worked were given.
A Longbush farmer, near Carterton, was one of the first to set up the machines in his milking shed, intending to milk 100 cows.
In 1913, Daysh travelled to New York looking for a company to help him perfect the machine.
He found farm equipment manufacturer DeLaval, which helped fine tune the machine before launching it on the international market in 1917. It formed the basis of modern milking machines.
Daysh died on June 20, 1942, right in front of his milking machine while exhibiting it in Palmerston North.
BNZ and Westpac economists believe that the Government may need to reveal a need to borrow as much as $15 billion extra in the Budget, as they and other analysts continue to digest the Budget Policy Statement issued on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, credit ratings agency S&P has appeared to voice scepticism over an assurance from Finance Minister Nicola Willis that tax relief in the Budget would be entirely funded from savings and additional revenues, describing that as “a challenge”.
Willis has three big moving parts to juggle in the Budget; tax relief, government spending and the level of borrowing.
A deterioration in the economic outlook forecast by the Treasury meant something had to give in the Budget Policy Statement.
The Treasury forecast economy activity will total nearly $43 billion less in the period up to June 2028 than it had expected in December and that tax revenues over that period would be almost $14b lower than it thought then.
Despite a last-minute flurry of calls for the Government to reconsider tax relief, Willis appeared most willing to compromise over the projected date for a return to surplus.
Westpac chief economist Kelly Eckhold said the extent to which the Government might water down or delay proposed tax relief was not yet clear.
But Willis repeated five times that its proposed tax relief would be “meaningful”.
“I want New Zealanders to have no doubt, we will keep our commitment to them; from July they will get meaningful tax relief,” she said.
She gave perhaps equal emphasis to a commitment that the Government wouldn’t prioritise getting its books back into the black over maintaining front-line services.
“We won't be chasing a surplus in one particular year at any cost, particularly if that cost would be front-line public services,” she said in what appeared her key tone-setting comment on Wednesday.
That means the increased difficulty of delivering tax relief in a deteriorating economic climate will need to come at a different cost.
Willis confirmed a return to surplus by the Treasury’s previously slated date of the year ending June 2027 had effectively been abandoned and, more surprisingly, that it was “not a given” a surplus would be achieved even the following year.
Eckhold said “one of the clearest moving parts is that it looks like we'll have more debt to issue over the next few years”.
Before the Budget Policy Statement, Westpac had been forecasting the Government would need to increase the size of its bond programme – the means through which it finances its debt – by between $7b and $10b over the next four years.
But Eckhold believed it might now need to pencil-in an extra $15b of borrowing over that period.
ANZ has forecast the Treasury will need to issue an extra $10b to $12b of bonds.
BNZ research head Stephen Toplis said history showed such forecasts weren’t very reliable, but agreed extra borrowing was likely to land in the range of $10b to $15b.
A troubling scenario would be if credit-ratings agencies took the delay in the return to surplus as a sign of a lack of fiscal discipline and it helped prompt them to downgrade the country’s sovereign debt rating later this year.
That would be the clearest objective indication that the country’s reputation for sound financial management had been wounded.
In practical terms, it would mean that as well as more debt, the Government would need to pay a higher interest rate on that debt.
The Budget Policy Statement noted that the cost of financing government debt was already expected to climb to $8.8b this financial year.
New Zealand’s credit ratings have appeared under some pressure due to the stubborn current account deficit, which saw the country spend more than $61b more than it earned in 2023 and 2024 combined.
S&P Melbourne-based sovereign analyst Martin Foo told Stuff a delay in the Government’s return to operating surplus was no surprise given weak economic data and that the Treasury had only been projecting an “extremely thin” $140m surplus in 2026-27.
“On our broader measures, which focus on residual cash – rather than the operating balance – and also consolidate the activities of local government, we still expect the fiscal deficit to narrow over the next three years,” he said.
Also on the bright side, net government debt should stabilise at a level that “compares favourably to those of most highly rated peers”, Foo said.
“However, it will be a challenge to fund promised tax cuts entirely through reprioritisations, savings, and new revenue measures and we await further details in Budget 2024,” he cautioned.
“The total fiscal deficit has been quite elevated over the past three years and contributed to pressures on inflation and external accounts.”
Bank economists don’t appear to believe the threatened delay to the Government’s return to surplus will be enough to tip ratings agencies to pull the trigger on a downgrade.
Eckhold said they would likely see the deterioration in the fiscal outlook as reflecting a cyclical downturn, rather than anything more permanent.
Nor did he believe the delay in the return to surplus pointed to any fundamental reduction in the Government’s appetite for spending cuts.
Rather, it had come to recognise “they're pushing pretty hard already and pushing much harder comes with risks”, he said.
Kiwibank chief economist Jarrod Kerr said that although there had been some warnings from S&P, “it's highly unlikely that we get downgraded”.
It would help if ratings agencies bought the argument that the Government was borrowing to invest, and cutting spending to pay for tax cuts, he suggested.
Kerr said it took him 20 minutes to cycle to work from Mission Bay in Auckland but the commute could take him 45 minutes by car and he would be “more than happy for the Government to significantly increase debt in order to tackle infrastructure problems”.
“If we tackle infrastructure problems, which are the bugbear of many people like myself, there's a stronger, faster, healthier, more efficient economy at the end of it.”
But he agreed that what the Government was borrowing for was “subjective”.
Anyone could choose to argue that it was cutting operating spending to invest and borrowing to pay for tax cuts, after all.
“I listened to an S&P analyst say we could effectively double our debt,” Kerr said.
But he described concerns about what might then happen in the wake of a major natural disaster as “bang on”.
“We can definitely increase our debt quite a lot, but it is nice to keep some headroom in case we have an earthquake.”