I thought this was cool.
William Bland was surgeon on HMS Hesper until he killed the ship's purser in a duel and got transported for 7 years. On arriving in Sydney though, he was soon pardoned and he set up a private practice. He gets involved in various medical & political affairs, including turning down a medical appointment at Port Dalrymple offered "on condition that he passed an examination to be conducted by Drs D'Arcy Wentworth, William Redfern and West, but he refused as he considered himself better qualified than his examiners"
1 and being sentenced to twelve months imprisonment for publishing & writing "some anonymous lines in 1818 on Macquarie's habit of attaching his name to geographical features and monuments"
2. (Macquarie overdoing the naming thing? Who'd've thought)
Anyway, he has a couple of inventions to his name. One being the "Suppression of Spontaneous Combustion in Wool Ships", a working model of which was shown at the International Exhibition in London in 1851. The second was his
Atmotic Ship -- a gas-filled balloon that supported an iron undercarriage for carrying pages & freights. Some references say it was intended to travel between Sydney & London in less than a week.
Drawings of the Atmotic Ship were sent back to England to be patented, and lithographs of these can be viewed on the
State Library of NSW website.
And now here is the
animated version of the lithographs!