Wizards of Oz

Australian scientists played leading roles in two key inventions of the World War II era. BRETT MASON recreates their extraordinary pioneering phases.

In the summer of 1941, within a few weeks of each other, two Australian scientists – Howard Florey and Mark Oliphant – flew from a besieged Britain, across the grey Atlantic, bound for America’s hopeful shores.

Old friends from Adelaide and now world-renowned in their elds, they were unaware of each other’s top-secret mission. Each carried a small yet priceless cargo, among the most critical and consequential ever carried from the Old World to the New, the fruit of revolutionary breakthroughs crowning decades of scienti c work.

They were flying at perhaps the most desperate time in the war for Britain, hoping to persuade a neutral United States to lend its seemingly inexhaustible industrial might to the cause of freedom – to take their inspired concepts and transform them in the white heat of American technology into mass products to fight and win the war against Hitler.

These two flights changed the course of the Second World War. Thanks to the imagination and persistence of these two Australians, critical inventions were developed and deployed in time to play a decisive role.

To read the entire edited extract from: Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey helped win the war and shape the modern world, by Brett Mason, head below to Cosmos 97 | Energy. Effort. Endeavour