Mice in the pantry! Mice in the kitchen! Since early after European settlement, mouse plagues have been a major problem in Australia.

One day an inventor named AW Standfield from Kyogle, NSW decided to make mousetraps to solve the problem. Although Standfield had no formal training in construction, he did have a great imagination.

He built an amazing machine to assemble traps at his company, AW Standfield & Co.

Standfield spent 2 years collecting scraps of second-hand machinery to make his Supreme Mousetrap Machine. It was WW2 afterall and materials and machine parts were in demand for war-related manufacturing.

Built almost entirely from scrap metal, the machine is a wonderful piece of Australian ingenuity and improvisation and a good example of making do with what you have.

With such a colourful collection of components, he was able to make traps that do just about everything, except provide the bait to tempt then mouse into the trap and to dispose of the body when the mouse is dead.

The Supreme Mousetrap Machine put together each trap in just 1.5 seconds.

During the production process, long pieces of wire were fixed to a wooden base plate to hold the spring and the wire forming the trap's trigger was stapled to the plate. Then the metal bait holder was cut, punched and stapled in place. Another wire was turned 23 times to form the spring and attached in the correct position. The base plate was then branded with the company name, Supreme.

Mousetrap production began in Jan 1944 and continued until 2000, when AW Standfield & Co ceased trading.

In full production mode, 1000 mousetraps rolled off the conveyor belt each hour, a figure that didn't vary much throughout the 56 years that the machine was in use.

Standfield rarely altered his production target of 1000 traps per hour despite varying demand. Instead, he stockpiled traps to meet the predictable surges in demand as rodent populations boomed in favourable conditions. He strongly believed that the Australian way of doing business meant manufacturing well-made products that you could be proud of.

The company produced about 95 million mousetraps at the Mascot factory between 1943 and 2000. By 1943 Standfield was the only manufacturer of rodent traps in the southern hemisphere and exported them to the US (where the US Army used them during WW2), South America, some Pacific Islands and New Guinea.

Listen to the full lesson with Richard Glover.

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