Person

Pressley, Thomas Athol (1914 - 1982)

Born
1914
Died
1982

Summary

Thomas Athol Pressley joined the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in 1949 where he undertook pioneering research into flammability of textiles at the Division of Protein Chemistry. His work lead to the re-writing of Australia's previously been inaccurate and often contradictory clothing safety standards. Much of his work was carried out on FRED - the Fire Resistant Experimental Dummy.

Skip to

Details

After completing a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in New Zealand Thomas Athol Pressley joined a tannery in the United Kingdom as Works Chemist (1938). In 1943 he joined the British Leather Manufacturers Research Association in London and five years later was transferred to Sydney. The following year in 1949 he joined the Division of Industrial Chemistry at the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). Later the division was restructured and became the Division of Protein Chemistry. It was at this time that Pressley began to work on wool processing and utilisation.

He spent a lot of his time trying to solve problems in the health industry. One of his first collaborative successes was the production of a neutral detergent to be used in the blanket boiling sterilisation process used by hospitals. The product marketed as "Softly" became a household name. He also developed sheepskin underlays for hospital beds. Next Pressley moved his attention to the flammability of children's clothing. This was a collaborative project with the Burns Research Unit at the Royal Children's Hospital and the National Safety Council.

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Lennox, Gordon, F., 'Thomas Athol Pressley', Chemistry in Australia, 49 (11) (1914), 436. Details

Resources

Resource Sections

Annette Alafaci

Created: 26 September 2006, Last modified: 7 February 2011

EOAS ID: biogs/P004776b.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/P004776b.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