Person

Leighton, Arthur Edgar (1873 - 1961)

CMG

Born
17 June 1873
Christchurch, Surrey, England
Died
6 November 1961
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Chemical engineer and Science administrator

Summary

Arthur Edgar Leighton came to Victoria in 1909 to be designer and manager of the Commonwealth government cordite factory, Maribyrnong. From 1921 to 1938 he was controller-general of munitions supply and was responsible for instituting the Defence Research Laboratories. He is commemorated by the Leighton Medal, the premier award of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Leighton was educated in England at Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (later Birkbeck College, University of London).

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1907
Award - Fellow, Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland
1909 - 1915
Career position - Sub-Manager of the Cordite Factory (Department of Military Supply) in Aravankadu, India
1909 - 1915
Career position - Designer and Manager of the Commonwealth Government cordite factory in Maribyrnong, Victoria
1915 - 1918
Career position - Technical Adviser of Explosive Supply for the British Ministry of Munitions
1916 - 1919
Career position - General Manager of an arsenal planned for Australia
1919 - 1921
Career position - Chairman, Board of Management of the Commonwealth Government factories
1921 -
Career position - Foundation Councillor (Chemistry), Australian National Research Council
1921
Career position - President, Victorian Branch, Australian Chemical Institute
1921 - 1939
Career position - Controller-General of munitions supply, Munitions Supply Board
1937
Award - Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG)
1950
Life event - Retired
1952 - 1953
Career position - President, Australian Chemical Institute

Related Awards

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

Private hands (Leighton, A.)

  • Arthur Edgar Leighton - Records, 1873 - 1961; Private hands (Leighton, A.). Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

Book Sections

  • Weickhardt, L. W., 'Leighton, Arthur Edgar (1873-1961), chemical engineer and administrator' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 10: 1891 - 1939 Lat-Ner, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), pp. 69-70. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100064b.htm. Details

Journal Articles

  • Leighton, A.E., 'A History of the Australian Chemical Institute, 1914-1932', The Royal Australian Chemical Institute Proceedings, 21 (1954), 127-134; 145-154; 167-184. Details

Newspaper Articles

Resources

Resource Sections

See also

McCarthy, G.J.

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 5 April 2022

EOAS ID: biogs/P000571b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000571b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260