While Australian, the late David Warren, is credited as the inventor of the black box flight recorder, a Perth, Australia, man Robert Henry Orgill actually test flew his similar device two years earlier in 1956.
A new photo recently uncovered has shed more light on the tragic life of Mr Orgill who committed suicide in 1964 – homeless and penniless and without, it would seem, anything to distinguish his 40 years.
However a 1998 investigation by The West Australian newspapers chief feature editor Norm Aisbett and the author found a very different story – a tale of a man who was an electrical genius but far too trusting.
As a young man in the early 1950s Mr Orgill opened the World-Wide Electrics shop in Perth which was a landmark because of the huge, illuminated world globe he mounted on the roof.
But he had been working on his black box since 1945, when his brother was killed in a RAAF crash in New Guinea.
By 1956 Mr Orgill’s black box was ready.
Called the Orgill Air Safety Unit, the rubber-studded alloy ball was 19cm in diameter and weighed only 4.5kg.
It was a shockproof, fireproof and waterproof sphere, designed to fit into the tail of a plane and fascinatingly – given the disappearance of MH370 – would eject itself at the moment of impact.
Inside the ball was a minute, self-operating mechanism which could record any oil failure, engine failure, fuel failure, fire, faulty pressurisation, metal fatigue, faulty radio transmitter and many other faults.
And as soon as a fault was detected a cockpit recording device would activate to get the pilot’s reactions.
On Monday, July 9, 1956, The West Australian reported under the heading “Perth Invention Passes Test” that the Orgill unit was “completely successful” in its first air test over Perth on a Saturday morning (picture below).
Four failures were simulated under flight conditions.
After that success, the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) invited Mr Orgill to test the device in a DC-3 in November 1956.
But Mr Orgill had “a severe attack of nerves” on the morning of the flight and it was cancelled.
It took three months to persuade the DCA to make another aircraft available.
Eventually, the test was held at Melbourne Airport on February 26, 1957, and Mr Orgill was thrilled.
“The test, using simulated faults in flight, was above my wildest expectations. The unit worked like a charm,” Mr Orgill told People magazine at the time.
The industry’s leading trade journal, US-based Aviation Week, also reported in March 1957 that the unit had been bench and flight tested “with satisfactory results”.
And observers from various manufacturers of flight instruments were impressed by the tests.
But in a portent of things to come, Mr Orgill told People magazine that he had been struggling to get Australian and British companies interested in his invention.
“I would rather see it taken up by a British firm but I’ve been battling against brick walls for five years and I’m in the mood to talk to the first party interested.”
Hope lay with a company set up by entertainer Bing Crosby.
In November 1958, supported by close friends, Mr Orgill left for the US confident of making sales.
He made an impact and in February 1959 a brief New York news story in The West Australian said: “An ingenious device that warns pilots of aircraft structural and mechanical failures has been rolled into a lethal-looking aluminium ball by a young Australian. He is hoping to make arrangements for the manufacture of the device here.”
Precisely what happened in the US is unclear with the story made up of newspaper snippets, letters to friends and distant recollections.
However it appears that Mr Orgill contacted the Bing Crosby Research Foundation in Los Angeles which was set up by the famous singer to encourage frustrated inventors.
It also seems that Mr Orgill was helped by then President John F Kennedy who was a close friend of Mr Crosby and often a guest at his home.
Then, in January 1960, a remarkable report in The Sunday Times said: “The United States patent office has agreed to issue a patent on a Perth man’s aircraft safety invention.”
The story said President Kennedy had, after receiving a letter from the inventor, contacted the Washington Patent Office “with successful results”.
It also quoted a letter from Mr Orgill claiming many engineers in major aircraft manufacturing companies had praised his invention.
United Airlines, American Airlines, Pan American World Airlines and Trans-World Airlines had also shown “great interest”.
But sadly Mr. Orgill’s trusting nature was to be his undoing.
When he returned to Perth in the early 1960s he told friends that the “bastards in America had taken the invention from him.”
Close friend Leon Carboni told The West Australian in 1998 that Mr Orgill was “a totally different person, in a world of his own.”
“He gave me all the drawings [for the sphere] and asked me to take them home. He said: ‘The only person in the world I can trust is you. Look after them for me.’
That was about a month before his death.”
Mr Carboni said he believed his naive friend was feted and entertained until his invention was inveigled from him and then was discarded.
In 1998 The West Australian contacted the official black box inventor Dr David Warren who did not accept that Mr Orgill’s device was the original black box.
Dr Warren, who passed away in 2010 after a distinguished scientific career, said that he was unaware the WA inventor had demonstrated a flight recorder at Melbourne airport in 1957 – the year before the Warren prototype appeared.
Yet when challenged about press reports at the time Mr Warren said that he may have met Mr Orgill.
Now a photo has emerged from the Australian National Archives that shows Mr Warren pointing at Mr Orgill and his black box before the test flight in 1957.
Also, Mr Warren in the 1998 interview asked to see any record of patents for Mr Orgill’s black box but at the time none was known to exist.
Now, a US patent (below) has been found by Australian researcher Peter Hobbins.
The patent is for a ‘Abnormal condition sequence indicating device’ and was submitted to the US Patent Office (now the US Patent and Trademark Office) on 3 October 1956 as application 613,670 and granted patent 3,074,065 on 15 January 1963.
However, Dr Warren rightly pointed out that a number of simple black box recorders preceded his and these in fact date back to the 1930s.
The Warren black box was developed while he worked at the Melbourne-based Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL), an arm of the Defence Department.
Dr Warren conceived the idea of a black box flight recorder in 1953 when he was part of the investigation team into the series of Comet jet crashes.
In the early 1960s the Warren device, which recorded both detailed flight data and cockpit conversations, was embraced by the British and production rights were given to the British firm Davall and Sons.
Australia was the first country to mandate black boxes and while some of the circumstances around the first black box remain clouded there is one indisputable fact and that is Mr Orgill was the first person in Australia to successfully test a working black box. His name deserves official recognition.
The author, Geoffrey Thomas, with Orghill’s Black Box at the home of the current owner.
