The extraordinary contribution to the World War II effort made by a group of Tasmanian optics specialists is a little-told story. Even less known is the secret mission by one Hobart man in 1943 to the US, Canada and the UK to brief Allied commanders on what had been achieved in Hobart and Launceston. 

Born a few years after Australia’s Federation, Eric Waterworth had an idyllic Edwardian childhood. He was a pale, pensive boy who enjoyed his own company, speaking only when required. He painted delicate watercolours of flowers, designed and built billycarts, complete with pedal brakes and car-like steering, and intricate model boats that he sailed from the banks of the River Derwent beside the family’s Lindisfarne home. Eric was a humble and calm boy, driven by things practical and useful. 

His much-admired grandfather, a builder, taught him the uses of a saw, plane, chisel and jig – and, more importantly, how to adapt and find alternatives when tools or materials were not to hand. The boy’s broader family environment fostered independent thought. Eric was encouraged to question, to be curious, to think with his hands. 

This applied and utilitarian approach to life came to define Eric Waterworth, and his hunger to create. 

His grandfather and his father, a Baptist lay-preacher, provided a structured and somewhat serious upbringing. It was, however, his mother whom he credited as his defining lifelong influence. Edith Waterworth was strong, determined and accomplished, with an active social conscience. She disapproved of homework, preferring to read to her three boys. She often argued with their teachers, and encouraged self-belief. For her sons, it was a childhood rich in ideas, social justice, music and books. 

Upon completing school, Eric Waterworth was naturally drawn to the design and intricate forms of machinery. He wanted to know how they worked and why. He was particularly interested in finding solutions to problems, and looked for new approaches and interconnections. He had a flair for solving problems with the simplest solution.

During the late 1930s, Waterworth made, at home, precision instruments for university staff in physics, geology and chemistry. When a call went out in July 1940 across the Commonwealth for university physics departments to research, design and manufacture optical munitions for the war effort, Professor Leicester McAulay (then head of the University of Tasmania’s physics department) accepted the challenge and immediately contacted Waterworth. 

Born a decade apart, one during the depression of the 1890s and the other at the turn of the century, McAulay and Waterworth shared little. But both were deep thinkers, with a passion for ideas and problem-solving. They quickly became friends, and the friendship would be lifelong. It was an unlikely pairing that would lead to a powerful contribution by Tasmania to the war effort through the formation of an innovative, tireless workforce at what became known as Optical Munitions Annexe 9/101, a hidden chapter of Tasmanian history. 

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Leicester McAulay was eccentric, well-educated with a keen intellect. From a family of high-achieving academics, he firmly believed in a sound education. He studied at Cambridge under the famed Lord Ernest Rutherford (the “father of nuclear physics”). McAulay’s booming voice trumpeted his great enthusiasm and enquiring mind. He was unconventional in manner and dress, informal and spontaneous in both research methods and lecturing style. 

His war-time students recounted physics lectures with no lecturer. In 1942 the window of the physics lecture room on the Glebe Domain Campus looked on to the newly constructed Optical Annexe (now the Waterworth Building) and into Eric Waterworth’s office. Here Leicester McAulay was often seen, gesticulating wildly to Waterworth or Bill Perkins, the annexe workshop manager, the students watching it all from their window. Racing back to the lecture room, McAulay would spend the next hour exploring calculations and new experimental methods for making lenses and prisms. 

Not surprisingly many of his students went on to work in the optical industry and continued their research alongside McAulay for the Optical Annexe.

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Early in World War II Australia was producing weapons, but they lacked optical gun sights. Australia lacked the expertise to make them. Britain and America produced sights, but in nowhere near the numbers needed.

So Eric Waterworth and Leicester McAulay started from scratch, with no designs or blueprints to hand and few materials. McAulay researched and calculated the forms and shapes; Waterworth designed and built the jigs and machinery to hold, grind and polish the lens glass to great levels of accuracy. He also tested and refined these machines to ensure the workflow and manufacture of the components continued.

Despite severely restricted access to the key raw materials and machinery, the Optical Annexe in Hobart came to design and make the highest quality war-time optical munitions – arguably the best in the Allied world. 

Basic window glass was converted to lens-quality glass blocks by a novel annealing process in a home-made furnace, for which Eric Waterworth was granted a patent in 1944. These blocks of glass, produced with no visible seams, were then cut into smaller pieces, and ground down with great precision into lenses and prisms for gun and bomb sights, binoculars, cameras and periscopes. These lenses ranged in size from a small coin to a dinner plate.

With barely a few months preparation, Eric Waterworth designed and built spindle-polishing machines, metal tri-squares, glass-cutting saws, prism-shaping grinders and custom jigs, all in his home workshop at Fern Tree. Once tested and approved, the prototypes and plans for the larger machines were shared with Gilbert Smedley, a highly skilled engineer from Launceston, and his father. The Smedley engineers had a reputation for designing unusual machine parts. And so it was that they produced the first full-scale lens grinding and polishing machine for the Optical Annexe, based on Waterworth’s designs. These Smedley machines were impressive – 3.6 metres long and more than a metre wide, with eight operators (four on each side), all able to use an electric grinding or polishing head independently to work on the lenses and prisms. 

In early 1943, Eric Waterworth flew alongside RAAF pilots in a Bristol Beaufort Bomber over Hobart city, repeatedly testing a large prototype 14-inch camera lens for high-resolution ground reconnaissance missions. These lenses, made in the Hobart Optical Annexe, were to be used in spy flights over enemy territory. Later that year, armed with prototype Optical Annexe lenses, diplomatic clearance papers and sealed documents, Waterworth travelled to Canada, the US and the UK on a covert mission to give advice to military and airforce experts in optical design and manufacturing. 

By the end of the war, the Optical Annexe team had developed entirely new methods for designing lenses and complex “roof” prisms (with surfaces ground flat to within one-millionth of an inch). Patents were granted for their ingenious tools and machines, used by about 200 highly-skilled workers, mostly women. They produced more than 17,000 lenses and prisms. These included spectacularly large lenses for aerial reconnaissance cameras and thousands of binoculars, guns and bombsights, periscopes, telescopic range finders and more. These Hobart-produced products were used in all the battles of the Pacific, European and North African campaigns. A range of these objects can be viewed at QVMAG, TMAG and the University of Tasmania.

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In May, 1981, Eric Waterworth was present at a ceremony rename the Optical Munitions Annexe 9/101 as the Waterworth Building, an initiative of the Hobart Technical College Council. The plaque can be seen on the building’s western side facing the Brooker Highway, by the original annexe entry. Thanks to Engineering Heritage Tasmania, the Waterworth Building has been formally recognised as an Engineering Heritage International Marker, highlighting the international significance of the annexe and its dedicated World War II workforce. It is the second such honour in Tasmania, after the Mount Lyell Abt Railway, and one of only seven in Australia.

Lynn Davies established and curated the University of Tasmania’s Waterworth Optical Collection. She formerly worked at the university as its principal science librarian, special collections manager, curator and researcher for more than two decades. Davies established a social history museum, consulted for local government and worked on numerous heritage projects. She continues to research the Waterworth buildings, their wartime fixtures and the story of their remarkable female workforce.