In the later years of the 19th century science enthusiasts all over the world were captivated by the mysteries and possibilities of electricity and magnetism. Few imagined, I suppose, that their experiments with batteries, magnetos and other pieces of equipment were steps on a path that would soon lead humans to discover how to tear matter apart and use the unimaginable power of the energy they liberated to incinerate tens of thousands of other people.
These early experimenters pottered about in their laboratories – often in their homes – solving riddles, creating more riddles for others to solve and searching for ways to make their discoveries useful. Most of these enthusiasts were in densely populated Europe and America, close to the hubs of knowledge, money and power. But some were to be found in the more far-flung colonies, avidly reading of the advances being made overseas and trying to replicate and refine them.
In Maitland, NSW, Australia, a youngster named Walter Drowley Filmer was captivated by science in all its guises, especially the strange and expanding field of electricity. His parents were an English couple who had moved to Australia in 1849. His father, William Filmer, was noted for an expertise in botany and he ran a seed business in West Maitland. Apparently he was commissioned by Sydney’s Botanic Gardens to study suitable trees for the gardens. At least two of the couple’s 11 children – Walter and his brother Ethelbert (Bert) – were interested in science and technology from their early years. It has been reported that Walter was given his first microscope when he was 15 years old.
Born in September 1865 Walter left school at 11 to learn the trade of bootmaking. It seems that, by then, he must already have been immersed in electrical studies as a hobby. With his apprenticeship out of the way he quit bootmaking and got a job in the telephone section of the government’s postal department. By 1884 – he would have been about 19 – he was an assistant telegraph line repairer but he left this job to join the Department of Railways. The August 9, 1887 issue of The Maitland Mercury newspaper carried a very long article reporting, seemingly word-for-word, a paper read by Walter at a meeting of the Maitland Scientific Society. The topic was electricity and the talk was accompanied by demonstrations of a variety of pieces of equipment. Clearly, this was a young man who knew his subject.
In 1889 Walter was chosen by the NSW Railway Commissioner as one of three cadets to be sent to England to study the latest advancements in railway technology. His brief was to report back on the ways in which electricity was being used to enhance railway operations. Local signalmen held a send-off at Islington School of Arts in January 1890. He left for England on January 11, 1890, on the RMS Orient.
He married just before he left, on January 8, 1890, tying the knot with Mary Ann Eliza Chessel at Bethel House, Sydney. The marriage certificate is intriguing. Unusually, a lot of information is missing; no birthplace, age or parents’ names are shown for either bride or groom. Walter’s occupation is given as “commercial traveller” and his normal place of residence is listed at Sydney. Mary Ann’s occupation is listed as “private life”. The witnesses’ names suggest that they may have been her parents, W.E. and Mary A. Chessell. One wonders if Walter’s parents disapproved of the union, or whether, perhaps, there was some urgent reason for the wedding – on the very eve of his departure overseas? Bethel was, and is, a charitable religious organisation (nominally Congregational) set up to minister to sailors. The minister presiding at Walter’s wedding was Bethel Chaplain William Bradley. At any rate, the marriage was an enduring one. Over the years the pair had four children, Walter Harold, Eric, Le Roy, and daughter Dagmar Elsie.
When he arrived in London Walter was seconded to a firm of telegraph engineers, Tyer and Co, and he evidently had a busy year, inspecting rail signalling facilities around Britain, attending lectures and writing reports. Some of the products invented and made by Tyer were instruments for controlling and separating traffic on single and double lines and NSW was one of their customers. He became an associate member of the London Institute of Electrical Engineers and by the time he was due to leave had evidently made a good impression, since the Tyers firm presented him with a valuable gold watch and chain as a parting gift.
He may also have used his time in England to acquire some pieces of experimental equipment for future use, including a “ten inch spark coil” and a “Crookes tube” which were to figure later in some episodes that brought him a degree of fame in Australia.
When Walter returned to NSW he appears to have been involved in enhancements to Tyer’s instruments and other electrical devices.
At first Walter and Mary Ann lived at Summer Hill, Sydney, before moving to Church Street, Newcastle in 1893. At that time Walter was a senior electrical supervisor for the Department of Railways in Northern NSW.
Walter studied chemistry, mathematics, biology and photography at Newcastle Technical College. He evidently spent a lot of time experimenting with electricity and magnetism in his home laboratory, as well as taking a close interest in geology and zoology in his local area, often writing letters to the newspapers about his observations and theories. To cite one example, after finding some particularly marked boulders in the Lake Macquarie area he theorised that they must have been transported by glaciers, long ago. Walter is said to have been friends with one of his near neighbours in Church Street, medico William Eames, who provided services at Newcastle Hospital and who reputedly shared Walter’s interest in science.
At this time many scientists, amateur and professional alike, were captivated by the strange behaviour of electric currents in vacuums. When a high-voltage current was passed through a vacuum, it caused a mysterious glow. English scientist William Crookes had made a special study of this phenomenon and had improved markedly on previous attempts to create decent vacuums inside glass tubes. These tubes had electrical contacts at each end and when a current was applied strange glows appeared and tiny wheels could be made to spin, suggesting some kind of particles were being hurled through the vacuum.
In 1895 a German scientist, Wilhelm Roentgen, was experimenting with vacuum tubes. He was especially interested in mysterious “rays” that seemed to flow from the cathode terminals of the tubes and their evident ability to pass out of the tubes. While setting up an experiment in a darkened room he noticed that a chemically prepared screen he had put opposite the tube, several feet away, was shimmering. He realised that the “rays’ were making the screen shimmer and he also saw that the rays (he decided to call them “X-rays”) were able to pass through various kinds of material that would normally stop light, but not through other substances including – he noticed by accident – the bones of his hand. To cut the story short, he wound up getting his wife to put her hand between the rays and a photographic plate, thereby taking the world’s first X-ray photograph.
News of this event stunned the world. As the news spread, every owner of a Crookes tube went rushing to repeat Roentgen’s experiment. The first Australian newspaper reports of Roentgen’s discovery appeared on January 31, 1896, with follow-up articles in subsequent weeks adding detail and highlighting the possibilities for surgical and medical use. Walter and his brother Bert (who was apparently in charge of Newcastle’s telephone system) must have were no exceptions and the story goes that the pair wasted no time. It has been reported – without much clarity as to dates and other details – that the pair went within days to Newcastle Hospital and took an X-ray of a needle embedded in a patient’s foot.
I gather that the authority for this information was interviews years later with Walter’s sons, Roy and Walter Jnr. Roy advised that his father had helped locate the needle, which was removed by Dr Eames, within two days of news of Roentgen’s discovery being received. Walter Jnr asserted that he was, in fact, his father’s first X-ray subject, with a photo of the bones of his hand being taken at the family home .
Two other claimants for the credit of having taken Australia’s first X-ray photograph exist: Father Joseph Slattery of Bathurst and Professor Thomas Rankin Lyle, of Melbourne. Because of the difficulty of determining a precise timeline, Australia Post celebrated all three men when it produced a commemorative stamp in 1995.
At any rate, the pair was definitely demonstrating X-rays at their home laboratory in mid-1896.
A fluorescent screen was fitted into an ordinary camera, minus the lens. A Crookes tube was used, and, by placing the eye to the camera, the room being darkened, objects held behind a wooden slide and a book were clearly seen. The screen is made of cardboard, covered with a substance composed of potassium, platina, and cyanide. Among a number of interesting demonstrations, Mr. W. D. Filmer showed what he considers to be an entirely new discovery. Some tobacco was burnt in a small retort, and the smoke therefrom travelled along an ordinary wire, enclosing it in a tube of smoke when the coil was working in open circuit, the wire being connected with one of the secondary terminals. On reaching the coil the smoke ran along from one terminal to the other, and then floated away. The wire was 3ft. in length, and the smoke followed its course up as well as down.
In October 1896 Walter and Bert were appointed honorary electricians at Newcastle Hospital and did X-rays there for some years. At the same time the hospital board voted to buy its own X-ray equipment and Newcastle Council voted to allow the hospital free electricity for making X-rays.
In 1897 Walter made news around the country when he announced a method of precisely locating a foreign object inside a patient’s body. Until then, X-rays could provide the location in two dimensions but depth was unable to be perceived. Walter demonstrated way around this by shooting a sparrow with a slug gun, then X-raying it from two different angles to produce a twinned image which could be viewed in a stereoscope. Interestingly, it seems that what may be the actual stereoscopic image of the sparrow still exists, in the library of the University of Newcastle.
The Filmer brothers made other discoveries too. They found that the life of the x-ray tube could be extended by earthing its anode, for example. Walter published two papers in the Australian Technical Journal in 1897, describing a method to increase the efficiency and safety of X-ray apparatus.
In 1898 Walter and his family moved from Newcastle to the Toronto waterfront at Lake Macquarie. There was a branch railway line from Fassifem to Toronto so Walter was able to commute to work. The home at 135 Brighton Avenue, Toronto, was named “Bundee”. Walter built a museum at the front of the house and charged a penny admission to view his extraordinary collections. According to Lake Macquarie historian, the late Dulcie Hartley, locals nicknamed Walter “Battery Bill” on account of his passion for electricity.
Over the years Walter built up a remarkable collection of insect and animal specimens, stuffed animals and birds, Aboriginal artifacts and other oddments including a trimming from the dress of Mary Queen of Scots,allegedly souvenired at her execution. He also owned a collection of antique microscopes.
Below is an edited excerpt from Dulcie Hartley’s brief biography of Walter Drowley Filmer which serves as a continuation of the above:
In 1909 Walter became a temporary lecturer at Newcastle Technical College, teaching electricity in mining with classes at Newcastle, Minmi, West Wallsend, West Maitland, and Weston. He was appointed wireless engineer to the 1908 Mawson Expedition to the South Pole, but could not obtain a release from the Department of Railways. In 1913 he resigned from the department to become a full time teacher of physics and applied electricity at the technical college where he taught until his retirement in 1931. In 1919 the Institute of Engineers of Australia was founded with Walter as a foundation member.
On 22 May 1920 he read a paper before the Newcastle Division of the Institution of Engineers. The paper, ‘Notes on the Physiography of Lake Macquarie’, contained information on tides at the entrance to Lake Macquarie, the effect of atmospheric pressure on levels in Lake Macquarie and specific gravity and solid contents of lake water at Toronto. This paper was the result of several years research and was later useful when the RAAF Base was constructed at nearby Rathmines.
In 1914 W.D. Filmer purchased a block of land in Toronto of over three acres from the Excelsior Land, Investment and Building Company and Bank Ltd. This was bounded by the then Beach Street (Jarrett Street), and a plant nursery was commenced named W.D. Filmer and Son. Walter’s eldest son Harold managed the nursery until 1926 when Walter transferred the property to Harold. The expertise of William Filmer, Walter’s father, probably provided a sound background for this venture. Within one year after commencement a serpentine channel had been formed to provide permanent water and the nursery was fully established, with many plants for sale including 6000 stocks and 400 roses. Ill fortune was to befall this venture when the bushfires of January 1933 ravaged Toronto and district. The fire swept away the nursery and home of Harold Filmer. The press reported that: ‘the damage at the Filmer Nursery alone is estimated at £5000’ and the nursery which ‘housed an extremely valuable collection of palms and ferns, to the collection of which Mr Filmer had devoted 30 years of hard work’ was destroyed. This was a great loss as the property was uninsured.
Walter retired in 1930, aged 65. From then on he devoted himself to collecting insects and spiders. Over the years the museum at ‘Bundee’ created great interest. In 1933 a reporter from The Newcastle Morning Herald wrote glowingly of Walter, his career and his collection. Walter Filmer accompanied many scientific expeditions to the Barrier Reef and had a spectacular collection of coral in three large glass cases in his museum. There were also many fish specimens in bottles, with some rare fish from the Barrier Reef, including two colourful coral eels, a very predatory animal. These eels have a row of needle like teeth in the palate and once they secure a grip they rarely let go. As well there were many varieties of spiders in specimen bottles.
The collection also included snakes, lizards, Aboriginal axes and oyster openers, specimens of mineral stones, crabs, bird’s nests and bird’s eggs, and butterflies. An unusual item was a hippopotamus skull given to him by the captain of a sailing ship. There was also two pair of Aboriginal Kerditcha (Kadatchi) shoes made of emu feathers in a close network of human hair, looking like big woolly slippers. They are ‘worn by a warrior who is selected to slay a particular person, and they prevent the slayer being tracked. When the killing has been carried out the Kerditcha shoes are burned’, so possession in a private collection was very rare.
Walter was recognised for his work in entomology and marine biology. He carried out a great deal of research on parasites, the most outstanding success being the discovery of a new family of parasitic worm which was named ‘Filmeric’. His collection of insects numbered many thousands. He also studied fossils and apparently has a trilobite named after him.
In 1935 Dr Jiri Baum and Mrs Baum from the Zoological Branch Expedition of the Puaha Museum in Czechoslovakia, visited W.D. Filmer at Toronto. They were touring Australia in a caravan, collecting specimens of spiders, and came to view the extensive Filmer collection. They selected a large number of Walter’s specimens to exchange with the collection from the Puaha Museum. Dr Baum was the Assistant Curator of the Puaha Museum and a specialist in spiders, while Mrs Baum specialised in reptiles. Many unnamed species of spiders were discovered and named after Filmer. This illustrated 1938 article gives a couple of glimpses of Walter’s museum.
During World War 2 Walter spent much time at the Rathmines seaplane base teaching service personnel physics, almost up until the time of his death in 1944.
ADDENDUM
Megan Hicks, Curator of Health and Medical Instruments at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has advised that there are two X-Ray tubes held at the Museum. Both are labelled ‘First X Ray tube used in Newcastle – 1896’. It seems likely that these were part of the Walter Filmer collection.
