History of Nascent Iodine

#1. Discovery of Nascent Iodine 1926 Sunkar A. Bisey

#2. 1930 Nascent Iodine Info

Discovery of Nascent Iodine 1926 Sunkar A. Bisey

9/29/29 (Sunday) Brooklyn Eagle Magazine article:

INDIA'S FIRST NATIVE INVENTOR

Sunkar A. Bisey, Hindu Scientist, Developed Malaria Remedy Which Cured Him

By Fletcher Pratt

Sunkar A. Bisey is a variant.

German professors of immense erudition write works in twenty volumes with quotations from classical authors and many mathematical formulae to prove that the future of civilization depends upon such people as he. A variant (take it on our word or that of the German professors) is a man for whose remarkable ability nothing in his ancestry or associations accounts; an Abraham Lincoln brought up in the backwoods who becomes a great lawyer and statesman in spite of poverty and lack of educational facilities; an Edgar Allan Poe brought up in the military atmosphere of West Point, who becomes the greatest poet of the age.

Bisey's case is not less remarkable than these. Born in Bombay the son of a high-caste Hindu district judge, of a race which has for ages considered manual labor menial and mechanics unworthy the thought of a serious man, of a family so bound by tradition that its head refused him all pecuniary aid unless he took up the traditional career of a bureaucrat, he became - a great inventor!

The Orient has never before produced a great inventor. One might expect that an inventor would some day rise from the mechanical and ingenious race of Japan, the progressive Turks or the skilled Burmese architects, but that India should produce an inventor and that he should come from the old Hindu aristocracy is as amazing as it would be for an Eskimo to establish a reputation as an abstract mathematician.

Bisey, however, was always of a mechanical and inventive turn of mind. At fifteen and while still in school he shocked and delighted his family by making with his own hands an ingenious device for producing water-gas to light the house.

(It is important to realize that such work should have been done by servants according to a pattern brought out from England.) A copy of the Scientific American fell into his hands about this time and fed the growing flame of his scientific curiosity. He subscribed to it, and today he is able to say: "I owe everything to the mechanical education I received from that American magazine. I simply had no facilities for studying what I wanted to in Bombay. My family was opposed to it, and there were no technical schools. I had to learn everything for myself and from this magazine."

His father was bitterly opposed to this course. Why couldn't the boy settle down to a government job for the rest of his life, as a good boy should? The boy took the government job (a minor clerkship) but with no strings attached. He refused to ask his father for money, lived on his own income and openly avowed his intention of going in for mechanics at the
first opportunity. It was due to this independent spirit that he was never able to go to college. His father tempted him with money and position - Bisey refused both and went on studying the Scientific American.

One night, on the way home from work, he dropped in at the public library in Bombay. A new magazine had just come in from England - the Inventors' Review and Scientific Record. In it was offered a prize for the best machine for automatically weighing and delivering from a hopper small quantities of bulk powdered substances, such as sugar, flour, coffee, etc. A nice idea, thought Bisey, and I'd like to try it; but the time is short. The distance of India from England placed the closing of the competition at so early a date that if he were to submit anything it would have to be mailed by the next morning. As he walked home from the library the idea suddenly struck him of how it could be accomplished. "I wonder," he thought again, and then - "no, it's no use. My idea is probably no good anyway, and they wouldn't consider a plan from an unknown Hindu boy."

But the idea stuck in his mind, tormenting him. He couldn't sleep - and finally, at three o'clock in the morning, he crawled out of bed and began to make a rough sketch of his machine. At seven o'clock in the morning he mailed it, with a note saying that if they thought well enough of the idea he would send detailed drawings. Several months later he received a courteous note from the editor of the magazine asking for the detailed drawings.

He sent them. By this time the machine was complete in his mind - with its big hopper above into which two hundred or more pounds of sugar could be poured; with a wheel one set at the right point to make it deliver one pound (or more or less); with a lever that one pressed, whereupon the intelligent machine delivered one pound of sugar, correctly weighed and neatly wrapped. It won the prize - which was the more remarkable since eighteen inventors, some of them of more than passing note, had entered the competition. And his machine was so good that in addition to the 25 Pound Sterling prize he received a 7 Pound Sterling bonus.

The news made an immense sensation in Bombay. Dr. Yone Noguchi was as yet unheard of, and it was the first time any Oriental had accomplished anything in the sciences. A committee of Hindu leaders, including the sheriff of Bombay, the chief justice of the province and others, was formed.

They waited on this unknown Hindu boy, these great dignitaries, and begged him to resign his government post and go to England, there to study science and make inventions to raise the name and fame of the Hindu race from the low estate in which it was held there. A national fund was established to finance him.

And so in May, 1899, he sailed for England to take up his new work and new life.

The first problem that came to his attention was that of the typecasting machine. The machines then used would cast about 150 types a minute. A faster machine was desired. Bisey undertook the problem and his first effort was a machine that by casting several types at once would produce 1,200 types a minute. The heads of the famous Caslon type foundry
looked over his drawing and dared him to prove the process practicable. Their laboratory men had been working on that very problem for many years, with no success whatever. Bisey accepted the challenge, got financial backing, and began to build a model. While he was building it, another idea struck him and he changed the model in the making. When the heads of the Caslon factory came for the demonstration he showed them, amid dropping jaws of amazement, a machine that would cast 3,000 types a minute.

This was good, but the machine, thanks to its enormous output, was suitable only for type-founders. A London typefounder, in the friendliest spirit, told him what he should have done was to produce a machine that printers could use. "Very well, I'll do it," said Bisey, and set to work.

He came out with the marvelous Universal type casting machine - a machine that will cast any size or style of type, and so simple that it has only 250 operating parts against the 1,500 in the older type of machine; a machine, moreover, which eliminates the changing of molds necessary to all other machines.

Then, at the height of his achievement, fate dealt him a couple of nasty digs. Sir Tata, the Hindu millionaire who had been backing his inventions, died; and England went to war. He was no longer able to obtain workmen for his factory, and the printers and type-founders were no longer interested in new equipment. What could he do?

What he did do was to come to America and start all over again. And he started in an entirely new field. On a visit to Southern France he had contracted malaria. When he returned to England he still had it - of the chronic, relapsing type. His condition became more and more serious, and as it did so, the news went to India. Now in India Bisey was by this time a famous man, and the whole peninsula was concerned over his condition. The ordinary European remedies of quinine didn't seem to do him any good. His life was despaired of, and a Hindu doctor, hoping to save the life of India's first and greatest inventor, sent on a few doses of a Burmese preparation, made from seaweed, that had proved useful in treating chronic malaria there.

Bisey tried it. The effect was electrical. He began to improve at once and in a month was a well man. "This gave me the idea," he says, "that God had preserved my life to be of some use to the world and I determined that the use must be to give to the world the preparation the Hindu doctor had sent to me." It was about this time that he came to America, and his first work was to analyze the medicine that had been sent to him. The analysts could not make it out. He sent for the formula, and when the Hindu doctor had parted with it, with some reluctance, began to work its possibilities on a commercial scale.

Now up to this time Bisey knew nothing of chemistry. He had to teach himself the whole science as he went along. But he persisted and, after some time had passed, produced the compound now known as Beslin or atomic iodine. When he had completed it it proved a specific not merely for chronic malaria but for dozens of diseases and infections. Today it is used in over nine hundred hospitals by the gallon, and without any exaggeration may be said to have saved the lives of thousands, even as Bisey's own was saved by it.

So there he is today, with his Beslin, his type-casting machines, and his many minor inventions - a pleasant-faced man with hair just turning gray, a home in Mt. Vernon, and an office in New York; in fact, a modern American business man and inventor. He has two sons and a daughter in his American home, and his chief amusement, aside from the inventions which are at once his life work and greatest interest, is studying the Yogi philosophy.

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