Speaker after speaker made the connection between Dr Warren's device and the light it may eventually shed on the disappearance of flight MH370, which disappeared from the face of the earth just over a fortnight ago with 239 souls aboard.

The decision to give the previously nameless structure an identity of its own followed an online petition by Sydney school girl Eve Cogan, who wanted the entire Canberra airport named after the Australian inventor.

Eve told Gang Gang while the outcome was not quite what she expected she was ''really impressed something as cool as this'' had happened.

Chief Defence Scientist Dr Alex Zelinsky is the head of the DSTO. He noted Dr Warren's idea, first mooted in a succinct two-page memo to his superiors 60 years ago, was a response to the first great tragedy of the jet age, the loss of a De Havilland DH 196 Comet.

The sad fact is that by the time Dr Warren had submitted his idea three, not just one, Comets had fallen from the sky at a total cost of 99 lives. Two others had crashed on take-off, with one of these incidents, at Karachi in Pakistan, claiming the lives of five crew and six passengers.

With 105 deaths involving the world's first jetliner in less than two years, air safety was on everybody's lips.

While investigators were eventually able to track down metal fatigue as the Comet's Achilles' heel, Dr Warren was way ahead of them. He realised if basic flight data, as well as conversations in the cockpit, could be recorded in an indestructible ''black box'' working out what had gone wrong would be much simpler.

Advances in recording technology were crucial. Fuelling his vision was an exquisitely crafted miniaturised wire recorder that was on display. The Protona Minifon 51, released in 1951 by Protona, of West Germany, originally had a darker purpose. A very expensive device (it cost $US300 new), the recorder was intended for Cold War covert surveillance work.

It remained one of Dr Warren's most prized gadgets for the rest of his life and was often used as a prop when he had to ''show and tell'' sceptics about the potential of his black box.

At only 170 millimetres long by 110mm wide and 35mm deep, the Minifon 51 was almost an order of magnitude smaller than any previous recorder. Given valves were used, this was a remarkable achievement.

Unlike later recorders, which used a magnetised tape, the Minifon relied on a magnetised wire the thickness of a human hair.

Dr Warren favoured this over the new fangled magnetic tape on the basis it was more likely to resist heat and the impact of a crash and had a much longer recording time (four hours) for its volume.

While, like many other breakthroughs, the invention was made possible by the expert and intuitive application of emerging technologies, it is the elegant simplicity of the concept and its execution that still has the power to impress and astound.

The invention was vindicated when, after a crash near Mackay in 1960, the coroner investigating recommended black boxes be fitted to all Australian airliners.

Australia became the first country in the world to make them mandatory.

Further to my recent request for ''good Samaritan'' stories, Diana Davidson sent me the following letter:

''As a pensioner I do not often buy a new dress. However, my daughter recently bought me a very expensive ticket to a special fund-raising event for Dr Charlie Teo, the Sydney brain surgeon.

''Sarah Mammalai, her friend who organised this, is a miracle patient of his, diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour over six years ago and now going well.

''It was a dinner for 500 people with a charity auction and entertainment including Timomatic. It deserved a dress-up, I felt.

''After collecting my new dress and grocery shopping, imagine my upset at arriving home and finding I had left the parcel in a trolley in the Jamison car park! I rang Cassidys, the store where I had purchased the dress, and was told a lovely young woman had found it and returned it to the shop.

''Unfortunately, I do not know who she was but would love her to know how grateful I am. We all had a wonderful night and raised $110,000 for Brainstorm.''

As you can see, Diana looked smashing on the night.