Henry Sutton (inventor)

Henry Sutton was an Australian designer, engineer and inventor, born in a tent on the Ballarat goldfields in 1855 and credited with early work in electricity, aviation, wireless communication, photography and telephony. In transport terms he matters as an early Australian automobile inventor and designer: the article quotes an assessment that he produced somewhere between six and eight cars of his own design, that a tricycle fitted with an engine he built was driven from Melbourne to Ballarat in 1897 in eleven and a half hours, that from 1898 he held patents for improvements to combustion engine carburettors, and that by 1899 he had built and driven the Sutton Autocar, one of the first motor cars in Australia. Earlier, in 1878, he presented two papers on the flight of birds and aerial navigation to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain and built a clockwork ornithopter. He was a founding member of the Automobile Club of Victoria in 1903 and died in Melbourne in 1912, aged 56.