CHAPTER SIX
N E TA
George Alexander (centre) with Lou Murray (left) and Percy Green (right) at Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane in 1957. The occasion was a meeting of the hardware trade to farewell Percy Green and welcome Lou Murray as Neta’s Queensland agent. Murray represented Neta for 25 years and George recalled that it was a very happy relationship.
WITH THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN SIGHT, THE MUNITIONS ANNEXE BEGAN to diversify into civilian production. Nuts and bolts were in short supply, so they began producing them, as well as other repetitive engineering work. There was plenty of work, George was a director of the company
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and on a good salary so he might well have stayed at the firm indefinitely, but for a bright idea. Soon after the end of the war, Flexible Plastics Pty Ltd (a subsidiary of Moulded Products Ltd, later known as Nylex) released a plastic garden hose. Since the 1920s Pope’s had had a virtual monopoly in Australia on rubber garden hoses, and they believed that plastic garden hoses would never be a commercial success, largely because there were no suitable fittings for them. George had the perception to see the need, the inventiveness to imagine the solution and the technical skill to design and make the new product. Essentially, George Alexander designed a complete system of brass hose fittings suitable for plastic hoses, from the fitting to connect the hose to the tap to the nozzle to control the spray. He took out numerous patents to protec the key elements of the system.14 George regarded the nozzle he invented as a major step forward. Previously nozzles were cross-drilled and made in three pieces or more pieces, but George’s nozzle was much simpler, being made in two pieces and not cross-drilled. The nozzle allowed a more powerful and more uniform water flow than earlier nozzles and was also more readily adjustable.15
The hose nozzle designed by George Alexander
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The patent application was lodged on 24 August 1948 and the complete specification was accepted on 1 June 1951, being patent no. 141,400. My thanks to Samantha Hoy for locating the patent documents. The patent for the nozzle was lodged on 12 March 1954, patent no. P 25735.