![]() ''Eyewitnesses said it travelled from outside the meatworks, where the 19-year-old Himler was employed as a part-time bone stripper, to the front gate about 300 metres away, in less time than it took the camera shutter to open. ''Furthermore, it improved on the German automobiles of the same year, 1885, by having low-profile tyres and a sports exhaust. ![]() ![]() ''Despite the fact his gasoline buggy had to be observed from a hot-air balloon 1000 metres above, for safety reasons, it had every attribute necessary to count as a full working motor car. Indeed, as Walter White says in the introduction to his excellent book on overlooked Australian inventors: ''Stig Himler was always bitter about Eurocentric automotive history, which completely left out his contribution. His gasoline buggy of 1885 exploded, largely destroying the nearby Palmerston abattoir, but experts believe he built and demonstrated a working automobile up to 45 minutes earlier than either Daimler or Benz (eight hours and 45 minutes, if you count the international time difference). It's just a matter of quoting wholesale then winding up with a phrase such as ''Makes you think, doesn't it!'' I mention this merely in passing.Īnyway, today's column is about Stig Himler, the Darwin-based inventor who some historians believe was the real inventor of the motor car.Īlthough forgotten today, the self-taught Norwegian immigrant was responsible for a string of prescient innovations. In the most deft uses of this technique, the journalist doesn't even have to add value. It's a serving of notice that said journalist is about to lift a large amount of said book, often to save doing his or her own research. When a journalist uses a phrase such as ''as Josephine Brown says in her excellent book'', it usually isn't literary praise. ![]()
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