Norman Selfe (9 December 1839 – 15 October 1911) 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. For these achievements he received international acclaim during his lifetime. 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.
Selfe was honoured during his life by the name of the Sydney suburb of Normanhurst, where his grand house Gilligaloola is a local landmark. He was energetically involved in organisations such as the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts and the Australian Historical Society. As president of the Board of Technical Education, he fought consistently for the establishment of an independent system of technical education to serve the needs of a rapidly industrialising society. He was acknowledged upon his death as one of the best-known people in, and greatest individual influences upon, the city of Sydney.
Family background and apprenticeship Selfe came from a long line of inventors and engineers. Both sides of his 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. Selfe's 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 Selfe family landed at Sydney's Semi-circular Quay in January 1855, when Norman was 15 years old. 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. 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. Selfe's parents had high expectations of their children, particularly of Norman, whose ability in mathematics and draughtsmanship was apparent from a young age. The brothers earned a reputation for innovation during their youth, and were the first to construct a velocipede in the country.
Selfe very quickly began his career as an engineer, taking articles of apprenticeship to the ironmaster Peter Nicol Russell, at whose firm he worked in several departments and eventually became its chief draughtsman. He would remain there until 1864. 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. In an address to the Engineering Section of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1900, Selfe recalled his work for Russell's:
While there [I] prepared plans for numbers of flour mills, and for the first ice-making machines, designing machinery for the multifarious requirements of colonial industries, many of which (such as sheep-washing and boiling down) no longer exist on the old lines. Cited in Freyne (2009).
While at Russell's, Selfe made several innovations in the design and construction of dredges for "deeping our harbours and rivers" – something of crucial importance to industry in early Sydney. He later recalled the success of Pluto, one of his dredges purchased by the government:
[I]n this there were several novelties introduced, and among them, the ladder was lifted by hydraulic power instead of by a chain from a winch ... The day of the official trial ... was a proud one for [me], because during the course of the little festivities which followed their formal approval and official acceptance, [head engineer] Mr Dunlop pointedly remarked that "as she was all right, the credit must be given to his boy in the drawing office".
Inventor and engineer Selfe achieved international recognition in 1861 when leading British journal The Engineer published illustrations of his designs for one of the first refrigerating machines. One such machine was installed behind the Royal Hotel in George Street in Sydney's ice-works – one of the world's earliest commercial refrigeration plants. 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. The introduction of refrigeration to the colony revolutionised farming, allowing the expansion of settlement, and made possible the export of meat and dairy products. In Sydney itself, refrigeration changed commercial practices and led to the eventual demise of city dairies. Selfe became an international authority on refrigeration engineering; he wrote articles and eventually a definitive textbook on the subject, published in the US in 1900. pp. 3–6. Cited in Freyne (2009)
After leaving Russell's, Selfe went into partnership with his former employer James Dunlop. They designed and built major installations for the Australasian Mineral Oil Company, the Western Kerosene Oil Company and the Australian Gas Light Company. In 1869 Selfe was appointed to the senior post of "chief draftsman and scientific engineer" at Mort's Dock & Engineering Company in Balmain. In this role he oversaw the design and construction of the mail ship SS Governor Blackall, personally commissioned for the Queensland government by the Premier Charles Lilley in 1869. The Sydney-built but Queensland-owned ship was an attempt to break what was later described as the "capricious monopoly" of the Australasian Steam Navigation Company on coastal trade and mail delivery from England. However, it ultimately caused the political downfall of Lilley as he had undertaken the contract without consulting his colleagues.
Selfe left Mort's in 1877 to practise as a consulting engineer at 141 Pitt Street, gaining a reputation for versatility and originality. Upon his return from an overseas trip through America, Britain and continental Europe in 1884–85, where he visited engineering works and technical education facilities in search of new ideas to take back to Sydney, Selfe set up a new office in Lloyd's Chambers at 348 George Street. He would later move to No. 279 where he operated the consultancy until his death in 1911. In the late 1890s he employed William Dixson as an engineer, who would later make a major donation of Australiana to the State Library of New South Wales. The collection of Selfe's own papers and drawings have since been donated to the same library that his former employee greatly augmented.
Selfe designed the hulls or the machinery for some 50 steam vessels, including two torpedo boats for the New South Wales government, which he claimed were the fastest boats on the harbour for 20 years, and the SS Wallaby, Sydney Harbour's first double-ended screw ferry.Norman Selfe, Memorandum of a few of the engineering works carried out in New South Wales by Norman Selfe, State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library manuscripts SS 3864 Box No 6 Double-ended hulls remain the design of Sydney's current Freshwater-class ferries. He designed the first concrete quay wall in Sydney Harbour, and wharves for deep-sea vessels. He also designed the first ice-making machines in New South Wales, introduced the first lifts, patented an improved system of baling wool which increased capacity fourfold, and oversaw hydraulic and electric light installations in the city and the carriages on its railway network. He planned mills, waterworks and pumping stations, including the high-level pumps at the reservoir on Crown Street. He made major electric light installations at the Anthony Hordern & Sons department store and the Hotel Australia, and provided a hot-water system for the hotel. He designed machinery for factories, dairies and railways, including, in 1878, the incline of what is now the Scenic Railway attraction at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains – which claims to be the world's steepest. Its original purpose was the transportation of coalBurning Mists of Time Pells/Hammon PAGE 66 from the Jamison Valley to the cliff-top.
During his lifetime Selfe received both local and international recognition for his engineering skill. He had been president of both the Australian mechanical engineers' and naval architects' institutes as well as a member of both the British equivalent organisations. He was also elected a full member of the English Institution of Civil Engineers and, by virtue of his writings also being published in Chicago, also an honorary member of an American engineering association.
Sydney Selfe's capacity for invention was not limited to the realm of machinery – he was also an energetic civic and urban reformer. He had high hopes for Sydney:
"Every well wisher of Sydney, who sees and understands what magnificent latent possibilities there are before her must hope that she will for all time be the Queen City of the Southern Hemisphere; and that the new century will open finding old ways departed from, and a glorious new era of progress, prosperity, morality and cleanliness installed in our midst. When that day arrives, we shall look back with curiosity and wonder at the continued blindness and negligence from which our city – so highly gifted by nature – had suffered so long."
From the time of Selfe's return in 1886 from two years' travel in the United States and Europe, he campaigned for improvements to the city of Sydney. These included proposals for a city railway loop, the redevelopment of the Rocks, and a bridge to the North Shore. His obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald noted, "Mr. Selfe for over twenty years was a strenuous advocate of a circular city railway that should connect up the eastern, western, and northern suburbs of the city with the marine suburbs of the harbour, and stations adjacent to the ferries". He published plans and proposals elaborating on his ideas, and produced major articles with titles like "Sydney: past, present and possible" and "Sydney and its institutions, as they are, and might be from an engineer's point of view".
In 1887 Selfe published proposals for a city underground railway, with stations at Wynyard, the Rocks and Circular Quay, and a loop to Woolloomooloo and the eastern suburbs. The proposal included a bridge across Sydney Harbour for trains, vehicles and pedestrians. He presented these schemes to the Royal Commission on City and Suburban Railways in 1890; but nothing was to come of it, largely because the 1890s depression brought public works initiatives to a standstill.
In 1908–09 he served as one of 11 expert commissioners to the Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney and its Suburbs. Selfe's proposals included an overhead railway station at Circular Quay and major landscaping works at Belmore Park opposite Central Railway Station.Report of the Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and its Suburbs, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, vol 5, 1909. Cited in Freyne (2009). Both of these visions were later realised, but not in his lifetime.
Sydney Harbour Bridge