Safes, stove and signs make A. Simpson & Son Australia's biggest metal manufacturer

Safes and stoves were taken to new innovative levels as 19th Century products from A. Simpson and Son.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia

 Alfred Muller Simpson, apprenticed in his father’s Adelaide business in 1857 and a partner in Alfred Simpson & Son metal manufacturers from 1864, took the company to new levels of innovation. He introduced products such as fire-proof safes, bedsteads, japanned ware, colonial ovens and gas stoves.

Fire- and thief-resistant Simpson safes became an early speciality, used in offices and banks throughout South Australia and interstate. In 1878, Alfred Muller Simpson visited the Paris Universal Exhibition and brought an American double-action press back to Adelaide along with ideas for new products.

In 1885, Alfred Muller Simpson became South Australia’s first maker of munitions, including submarine mines – a response to Russian invasion fears.

A new Simpson plant in Wakefield Street, Adelaide, in 1894, included electroplating and furnaces for hollowware and porcelain enamelling – a first for Australia. Enamelled street and advertising signs from Simpson’s soon appeared in most Australian capitals, making the firm’s name known throughout the country.

The remarkable Simpson dynasty began with Alfred Simpson, born in 1805 in London and apprenticed, in 1820, as a tin-plate worker who also studied science and chemistry. He was admitted to the Worshipful Company of Tinplate Workers and in 1829 became a Freeman of the City of London. Twenty years later, Simpson and his family were forced to migrate. They sailed for Melbourne but got off at Port Adelaide in 1849.

Simpson started tin smithing in Adelaide, making pots and pans, and cans for Glen Ewin jam factory. His son Alfred Muller Simpson built the business into the largest metal manufacturer in the country, with three factories and 500 employees. A next generation made Simpsons a major whitegoods maker from its Dudley Park factory in the 20th Century.