AUSSIE'S ROLE IN SPACE REVEALED

10 Oct 1996
Source: AAP
By Trevor Marshallsea of AAP

BEIJING, AAP - Australia's most famous inventions have been pretty down to earth fare - lawnmowers, Hills hoists and the stump jump plough to name a few.

But few would realise that decades ago, one brilliant Australian developed a device which would play a vital role in humankind's ventures into the most fanciful frontier of all - space.

Professor Frank Cotton, a slightly eccentric physiologist from Sydney, would be mostly remembered as a great innovator in the field of sports medicine and training, his work leading him to accompany the Australian swimming team to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.

But years earlier, he had helped solve a problem which was weighing heavily in the battle to control the skies during the Second World War, by inventing a flying suit which worked against pilots "blacking out" because of aerobatic manoeuvres.

The suit proved to be the forerunner to outfits worn not only by United States and Australian military pilots, but also by American astronauts.

The work of the late Prof Cotton, who died in 1955, went largely unrecognised and unheralded because of its top secret nature.

But it came to light for a select few when workers at Sydney University two years ago dug up a hessian bag containing the prototype of the world's first air-filled anti-gravity suit beneath his old chambers.

And Prof Cotton's role in man venturing into space was finally revealed to experts in the unlikely locale of Beijing recently in a paper delivered to the International Astronautical Congress by Kerrie Dougherty, space technology curator at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum.

"This is a totally forgotten area in which Australia has made a sizeable contribution to space research," Ms Doughtery said.

It was 1940, and as the Second World War raged, the race was on to find a way to allow pilots to fly harder and faster without suffering the effects of strong gravitational or "G" forces.

As pilots dived and soared at unprecedented speeds, blood would rush from their heads, causing temporary blindness and often fatal unconsciousness.

The Axis forces had taken an early lead in anti-G research.

Germany had by the mid-1930s built the first large human centrifuge in which pilots were tested under extreme accelerations.

The Japanese were using a system, later discredited, of binding and taping their legs and abdomen to keep blood in the top half of the body.

Prof Cotton was a reader in physiology at Sydney University when he read a small item from London in his evening newspaper late in 1940 saying blackouts were proving a "crucial element" in aerial combat.

"Inside one minute I could see the solution," he wrote in his notes.

"It was simply a matter of combining applied dynamics ... and physiology."

More literally, this would translate to designing a suit which would keep enough blood around the heart, enabling the heart to keep the supply up to the brain.

Prof Cotton had long had an interest in blood flow.

One of his more unusual theories was that perceived unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings were an optical illusion caused by blood pressure on the eyeballs of those who claimed to see them.

Another theory, incidentally, was that because of the physiological make up which had earlier helped make him a state swimming champion, he would live past 100.

He had accordingly scheduled long-term research projects for after his retirement, including more work on anti-G suits, but was unfortunately proved wrong when he died of a heart attack aged 65.

But few could doubt his genius in terms of anti-G research.

Soon after hitting on the general solution, he linked with the RAAF, and within a few months had come up with a suit containing a series of inflatable air sacs which helped blood flow to the head by applying pressure to a pilot's lower limbs and torso.

The pressure graduated from high at the feet to low around the torso.

The first prototype was built from two women's rubber bathing suits.

A more hardy Mark 1 suit, which gave pilots a 30 per cent higher tolerance to G-forces than when unprotected, was made with the help of Dunlop Australia.

By mid-1941 Prof Cotton had only the second centrifuge in the allied world built into the floor at Sydney University.

He not only tested his laboratory assistants and volunteer RAAF pilots, but also himself, under great accelerations in the facility as he refined the suit.

Canada had already come up with a centrifuge and a pressure suit, but one which used water and thus did not allow as much mobility as Prof Cotton's.

American officials took this into account when they met Prof Cotton in Washington in December 1941.

The RAAF had suggested Prof Cotton travel to Toronto where he learned from his by now friendly rivals that the US was also interested in the suit.

The US officials picked up Prof Cotton's design and worked with it and Prof Cotton himself and by 1944, US Navy pilots had been issued with a gradient-pressure pneumatic anti-G suit.

Axis forces still had not come up with their own satisfactory version.

History now shows the Cotton Aerodynamic Anti-G Suit later formed the basis for spacesuits worn by US astronauts.

For all his work, Prof Cotton went largely unrewarded.

The first Australian pilot to test his anti-G suit received an award, but the designer did not.

Athletes, not astronauts, would be the best known beneficiaries of Prof Cotton's work since he later developed Australia's first ergometers for measuring the performances of swimmers and cyclists.

Many credit Prof Cotton as having introduced science to sport in the country.

At least he himself was able to forecast the long range effect of his work - more accurately than he could his own lifespan - by chirping to an assistant in 1942: "As a result of my work, man's now going to go to the moon!"

AAP tm/jd/de

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