Fed: TV program to rocket inventors out of obscurity

AAP General News (Australia)
04-26-2001
Fed: TV program to rocket inventors out of obscurity

By Barbara Adam

BRISBANE, April 26 AAP - Australia's backyard inventors may soon be able to rocket
out of obscurity on a national television program.

George Lewin, who 26 years ago invented the Triton Workcentre which revolutionised
home carpentry, is in negotiations with the ABC, hoping to produce a television program
to showcase Australian inventions.

Mr Lewin, who sold his multi-million dollar business in 1999, said his show was based
on the defunct Quantum, Towards 2000 and The Inventors' programs.

The Queensland government today matched the Victorian government's $600,000 contribution
to Mr Lewin's TV show project and his plan for a national innovation centre.

The Triton Foundation Innovation Centre, to be based in Melbourne, will have a branch
office in the Brisbane Technology Park.

The innovation centre will recruit, screen and mentor inventors and help them prepare
for the television show, tentatively titled The Clever Country.

Mr Lewin said the thousands of inventors at work in Australian sheds currently had
only a one-in-600 chance of gaining long-term commercial success, as he did.

The innovation centre and the TV show, backed by $3 million of Mr Lewin's own money
as well as the government contributions, should change those odds.

It was The Inventors program that gave Mr Lewin his lucky break.

Before appearing on the ABC show, Mr Lewin was a young Melbourne journalist trying
to build a dining table.

It was his first carpentry project, one he found increasingly frustrating, especially
trying to cut the wood straight.

"That's when I started thinking there's got to be a better way and I came up with an
ingenious way of actually mounting that power saw so I could finish this wretched table
that I was building," he said.

After developing the workbench, it took Mr Lewin another frustrating 18 months before
there was any commercial interest in his invention.

Turned down by every business and retail outlet he approached, Mr Lewin's workbench
was featured on The Inventors in 1976.

The response was overwhelming and a makeshift factory in his home was barely able to meet demand.

"I had sackloads of mail come through from woodworkers all over the country saying
'I want one, I want one'.

"A lot of them sent in cheques - I had cash coming out of my ears.

"A lot of retailers begged me - the same ones that only a few weeks ago had been telling
me to 'Bugger off, we don't deal with backyard inventors' - these same retailers were
on the phone saying 'Please, please, when can we have 100 units; we've got desperate customers
queuing up outside our store'."

The rest, as they say is history.

Mr Lewin finally completed the "wretched" table in 1983, eight years after he began the project.

His company generated $250 million in sales of the Triton workbench and accessories
from 1976 to 1999, when he sold his company (to another Australian-owned entity) and went
to live in Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales.

He's now got 700 inventors on his books who want to feature their inventions on his TV show.

Stay tuned.

AAP bja/jhm/jnb

KEYWORD: TRITON

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