The Australian Women's Register

Myra Taylor-Farrell was born in Ireland, migrated to Australia as a child and was educated in Broken Hill at St Peter’s School, founded by her parents, Marcus and Harriett Welsh. Marcus was an Irish Protestant clergyman and Harriett, born in Australia, was the daughter of an engineer. They had married in New Zealand before returning to Ireland, and then emigrating to Australia in 1880.

From a young age Myra was able to come up with practical inventions as solutions to problems she identified: her first invention at the age of 10 was for a self-locking safety pin. In a newspaper article in 1915, she described her process of identifying a problem and thinking about it, then ‘sleeping on it’. On waking, she would write down, from right to left, the details of how to construct a device to solve the problem, then use a mirror to copy those details from left to right so they could be read.

Among her many inventions were: a device to copy and adjust for size sewing patterns from print directly to fabric, a ‘truss for rectifying slackness in facial muscles’, a corset without hard stays, a ‘stitchless button’ (press-stud), a baby sling, an automated fruit picker and packer, a folding pram hood, a collapsible washing line for limited spaces, and a ‘rifle, shell and machine-gun proof’ barricade and a long-range ‘rayless’ light (both of these were acquired by the Defence Department in World War 1). She applied for patents for many of her inventions from 1905 and these applications with their detailed drawings are held by the National Archives of Australia, some of which have been digitised.

She married William Taylor in 1906 who was suffering from tuberculosis and she treated him with another of her inventions, an inhaler. After his death in 1912 in Adelaide, she married William George Farrell in 1919 in Sydney and lived in Mosman until her death in 1957.