... invented the Michell Thrust Bearing, a tilting-pad device which made possible much of the modern development of steam and water turbines and of propeller drives for large fast ships.

... in the handling of which he had extraordinary facility.

Michell put all his energy into his training for these contests, doubtless feeling that he owed it to his parents to qualify himself for obtaining some remunerative employment without delay, and that securing a high place in the lists was the only means available to him, compatible with his temperament, for securing that end. It is probable that the strain which he imposed on himself caused permanent injury to his health and spirits. at any rate, it is certain that, both at the time and later, he deplored the effort spent in acquiring the arts of 'problem-solving' in the manner of the Cambridge examinations of those days and that he put them aside as soon as the examinations were over in order to plunge into the reading of such authors as Cauchy, Clebsch, Riemann, Weierstrass and Poincaré. For Riemann especially he had an admiration which was profound and lifelong.

... by a new mathematical transformation, a complete solution was obtained, in forms readily available for detailed application to concrete cases, of the two-dimensional flow of non-viscous fluid. Earlier attacks on the problem, even by Helmholtz and Kirchhoff, had yielded only the solutions of a few special cases not of the highest importance.

On returning to Melbourne the household, reduced shortly afterwards to the four unmarried children and their mother, built a solid house, where with mutual support and in orderly Victorian comfort they lived until, in the fullness of time, their sands ran out. Few families can have been more closely knit. Round the house the brothers established a most remarkable garden reminiscent of a tropical forest. The upper storey consisted mainly of palms of many species and the middle storey of exotic shrubs, mostly South African and Australian (at this time any non-European shrubs in Melbourne gardens would have been called 'exotic'). The visitor never saw a leaf on the paths or otherwise out of place. It was said that this was the only foreign site on which the Lord Howe Island palm (much used for indoor civic greenery) had ever set seed; but the brothers explained that there was no magic in this - it was simply that their specimens were the only ones outside the Island that had achieved the requisite age. In contrast to the palms there were fruit trees again exotic - cumquat, guava, feijoa, and a 30-foot mulberry tree - this last completely enclosed in a cage to foil the blackbirds ...

Michell took his work as a teacher very seriously and gave to it almost the whole of his time and mental energy. His notes for his class lectures were recast repeated, in fact almost every year, with immediate regard to the character of the prospective classes as indicated by the intending students themselves in their entrance examinations and subsequently. He was always most solicitous that his students should get an accurate record of his lectures, and, to ensure this, his rule was to writ every word on the blackboard. The pace therefore appeared to be slow, but this was deceptive; he achieved economy of words by omitting unessentials, and his judgement in this matter was so sure that he covered more than the normal extent of ground rather than less. He also took a great deal of trouble in setting his examination papers. Nearly all the problems were original, and it was rare for him to set anything that could be recognised as a repetition.

The paper is concise and to the point, occupying 17 small pages in total, the main formula being derived within the first 8 pages. The paper reads like a modern research article, apart from the lack of partial derivative notation, which Michell wanted but did not get from the printers. The problem is simply to obtain that portion of the drag force on a steadily moving ship which is due to the loss of energy into its wave pattern. Hence viscosity is neglected, this being justified by arguments pioneered by Froude for separating wave and viscous drag, but in Michell's own introductory words by boundary-layer-like arguments that could be said to anticipate Prandtl's by a decade or more. Once viscosity is neglected, classical inviscid-fluid theory indicates that the flow is irrotational almost everywhere, and a velocity potential exists. The task of determining the velocity potential is then a boundary-value problem for Laplace's equation ...

However, a little-known feature of the ship paper is that, almost as an afterthought, Michell also includes on its last two pages a mini-study of the shallow water case, i.e. of the limit as the water depth vanishes ... This shallow-water analysis is itself of remarkable historical interest, since it uses what we would now identify as an analogy between sub- or super-critical hydraulics, and sub- or super-sonic aerodynamics. Since manned flight was still a decade away, and supersonic flight a half century away, this is truly remarkable work, that would make these two pages significant even if the infinite-depth portion were discounted. However, it must be said that quite similar and now better known aerodynamic work was being done by Joukowski at about that time (though published later ...). Michell gives no indication that he has seen any of Joukowski's work, and it hardly seems likely in view of his geographical isolation that he had done so. At the very least, Michell's application of the hydraulic analogy to the ship context is original, and personally I believe that (based on nothing more than these two pages) he should be given at least equal credit with Joukowski for this whole research area.

Michell never showed concern for recognition of his work, but the absence of any response to such a paper as the 'Ship Waves' inevitably discouraged the making, or at least the publication, of investigations involving, for him, so much anxious labour.

In writing the present book we have tried to make it conform to three main conditions. ... (i) The book should assume as known only those elements of Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry which are taught in the secondary schools to all those preparing to attend any lectures in Mathematics at a university. ... (ii) The second main condition is that the book should form a practical or working text provided with an abundance of illustrative examples treated at length and of other examples to be solved by the student. ... (iii) The third condition is that the subject should be expounded on the basis of the theory of real numbers, geometrical notions being employed only illustratively and not as replacing abstract discussions ....

The authors have succeeded admirably in meeting their aims.

We have here a course in Calculus written by authors with a mathematical conscience and an ability to teach. Every attempt is made not only to be rigorous and clear but also to explain at some length what is being done. It is a great pleasure to find such a work on calculus.

He found relaxation in classical music - he was a capable performer on the organ - in wide reading and in gardening; he was a learned connoisseur and lover of plant life, especially Australian trees and shrubs.