Mervyn Paterson - HPT machine records

The HPT (high-pressure, high-temperature) machine was developed by Professor Mervyn Paterson of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences. The digitisation of this material was funded by US National Science Foundation grant - EAR 1649412 and arranged by the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Paterson joined the new Department of Geophysics in the Research School of Physical Sciences as a Senior Research Fellow under Professor J C Jaeger in June 1953, having been awarded a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Adelaide in 1945 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Cambridge University in 1949. He had worked in the Division of Aeronautics at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation from 1945 to 1953. In 1956 he was appointed as a Reader in Crystal Physics and in 1987 as a Professor in the Research School of Earth Sciences, which had been separately established from the Research School of Physical Sciences in 1973.

Paterson started the design and construction of the first High Pressure, High Temperature (HPT) rock deformation apparatus in 1960 but it was not until 1988 that Paterson Instruments Pty Ltd (jointly owned by Paterson, his wife Katalin and ANUTECH) was formed to manufacture the apparatus as a commercial activity. Over the next twenty years, 13 were manufactured and sold to universities and research institutions in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Germany, Switzerland and China. Paterson retired in 1990 and worked as a consultant to Australian Scientific Instruments which took over Paterson Scientific Instruments Pty Ltd in the mid-1990s.