Norman Selfe
Norman Selfe was an Australian engineer, naval architect, inventor, urban planner and outspoken advocate of technical education. After emigrating to Sydney with his family from England as a boy he became an apprentice engineer, following his father’s trade. Selfe designed many bridges, docks, boats, and much precision machinery for the city.
About Norman Selfe in brief
Norman Selfe was an Australian engineer, naval architect, inventor, urban planner and outspoken advocate of technical education. After emigrating to Sydney with his family from England as a boy he became an apprentice engineer, following his father’s trade. Selfe designed many bridges, docks, boats, and much precision machinery for the city. He also introduced new refrigeration, hydraulic, electrical and transport systems. Decades before the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built, the city came close to building a Selfe-designed steel cantilever bridge across the harbour after he won the second public competition for a bridge design. He was honoured during his life by the name of the Sydney suburb of Normanhurst, where his grand house Gilligaloola is a local landmark. The decades following Selfe’s arrival in Australia were watershed years in the development of refrigeration technology and he was closely involved with its evolution. In Sydney’s earliest days, refrigeration changed commercial practices and led to the eventual demise of dairies. The earliest commercial refrigeration plants in Sydney’s early days were one of the world’s first commercial ice-works in George Street, one of Australia’s earliest commercial industrial centres. In 1859, when PN Russell & Co expanded to a site in Barker Street near the head of Darling Harbour, Selfe drew up plans for the new works and the wharf, and oversaw their construction. Mr Selfe achieved international recognition in 1861 when leading journal The Engineer published illustrations of his designs for the first refrigerating machines.
In the same year, his drawing office in the Royal Hotel George Street was installed in one of Sydney’s commercial ice plants. He died in Sydney in 1913 at the age of 80. He is buried in the suburb of Waverly, in the inner-city suburb of Sydney, where he lived with his wife and two children. He had a son and a daughter, both of whom are still living in Sydney today. The family came from Kingston upon Thames in London, where one grandfather had owned a plumbing and engineering works. His father Henry was a plumber and inventor, whose high-pressure fire-fighting hose was displayed at The Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. His cousin Edward Muggeridge grew up in the same town but moved to the United States in 1855, restyled himself Eadweard Muybridge, and achieved global fame as a pioneer in the new field of photography. The brothers earned a reputation for innovation during their youth, and were the first to construct a velocipede in the country. They initially resided in the nearby Rocks district in a small house that had previously been the first Sydney home of Mary Reibey, a former convict who became Australia’s first businesswoman. One of the reasons they emigrated to the colony of New South Wales was to enable him and his brother Harry to undertake engineering apprenticeships without having to pay the heavy premium required by large firms in London. While there he prepared plans for numbers of flour mills, and for theFirst ice-making machines, designing machinery.
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This page is based on the article Norman Selfe published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
