Person

Gillies, James Hynds (1861 - 1942)

Born
11 November 1861
Millers Forest, New South Wales, Australlia
Died
28 September 1942
South Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Industrialist and Inventor

Summary

James Gillies invented and patented an electrolytic process for treating refractory zinc rich ores in 1907. After establishing a Complex Ores Syndicate, and proving the processes in Melbourne, he was eventually able to establish Complex Ores Ltd, and a small plant in Tasmania. He was given a franchise to generate hydro-electric power, and constructed a carbine plant, however, his company, Hydro-electric Power and Metallurgical Company Ltd, was unable to raise the funds to complete the works. The state acquired the hydro power works in 1914 that eventually led to the Hydro-Electric Department, the completion of the Waddamana A Power Station, and the successful further development of Tasmania's hydro-electric schemes.

Gillies established and operated Carbide and Electro Products Limited and its calcium carbide works at Electrona, but the electrolytic zinc smelting and refining works at Risdon were established by Amalgamated Zinc (de Bavay's) Ltd.

In 1924 Gillies's company went into receivership and was taken over by the Hydro-Electric Department. Gillies moved to Sydney, and continued inventing and taking out patents. In 1935 he was granted an annual pension of £350 from Tasmania for services rendered to the State.

Skip to

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Book Sections

  • Knight, Allan; and Smith, Ann G., 'Gillies, James Hynds (1861 - 1942), inventor and industrialist' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 9: 1891 - 1939 Gil-Las, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), pp. 9-10, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gillies-james-hyndes-6386. Details

Ken McInnes

Created: 29 January 2025

EOAS ID: biogs/P007586b.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: 2025 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - late summer - season of eels)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
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/P007586b.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