On this page
Shankar Abaji Bhise (Bhisey in many records) was born in Bombay on 29 April 1867 and died on 7 April 1935. His Wikipedia biography records that the New York American newspaper called him the "Edison of India". He had only a high school education. His best-known machine, the Bhisotype, made the small metal letters printers used.
Who was Shankar Abaji Bhise?
Print historian Murali Ranganathan, writing in PrintWeek India, calls him "an autodidact, tinkerer and experimenter" who did not attend any technical school. As a teenager he read Scientific American, and The Better India quotes him saying: "I owe everything to the mechanical education I received from that American magazine."
His early ideas were practical. A US patent granted on 3 May 1898 to Bhise, then living in Bombay, covers a sign lamp with a rotating inner cylinder that lit up a shop's advertisement word by word (US 603,251 on Google Patents).
What was the Bhisotype, and why did printing need it?
Before computers, every printed page was assembled from small pieces of metal type. Ranganathan explains in PrintWeek India that the Linotype cast whole lines as single slugs, mainly for newspapers, while the Monotype cast individual letters. A Linotype cost about $1,200 to make and sold for $3,200.
Bhise's design aimed to do both jobs. His UK provisional patent of 2 December 1901, for a "Type Making and Setting Machine", used matrices with flexible stems so it could cast either a full line or single letters, and PrintWeek notes it could be easily adapted to Indian scripts. Bhise claimed the machine would be compact and need less power to run. He first called it the Spasotype Composing Machine; by 1908 it was known as the Bhisotype. The nationalist leader Dadabhai Naoroji invested £2,600 in Bhise's Patent Syndicate over seven years.
In August 1908, the London correspondent of the trade journal The Inland Printer reported that the machine could cast 2,500 separate types per minute, "all completely finished and ready for use by the compositor" (PrintWeek India). That was a press report, not an independent test.
Which patents did Bhise earn in Britain and the US?
Britain, 2 December 1901: a provisional patent for a Type Making and Setting Machine (PrintWeek India).
US 1,240,168, filed 11 August 1914 and granted 18 September 1917: a type-casting machine whose mould had no internal sliding parts, assigned to Ratan Tata (Google Patents).
US 1,568,047, filed 31 August 1921 and granted 5 January 1926: a machine that cast leads, rules and slugs in one continuous run instead of one piece at a time (Google Patents).
In older moulds, parts kept sliding between fixed pieces, which left burs on the type and spoiled its accuracy. His mould, once adjusted, kept its form without that sliding. Wikipedia credits him with nearly 200 inventions, 40 of them patented.
Why was he called the Indian Edison, and why is he forgotten?
Like Edison, Bhise was a prolific inventor. He first arrived in New York in 1916, and the Bisey Ideal Type Caster went on sale in August 1921. According to PrintWeek India, the rival Thompson Type Machine Company proposed a merger in 1922, and by 1924 the two businesses were run under the Thompson name. Lanston Monotype bought Thompson in 1929 and kept selling the machine until the late 1960s; Ranganathan says the Thompson Type Caster incorporated many of Bhise's innovations. He adds that none of Bhise's inventions made him rich.
Metal type itself is far older than Bhise. Read how Bi Sheng invented clay movable type 400 years before Gutenberg. And Bhise belongs beside another self-taught Indian maker, G. D. Naidu, the dropout who built India's first electric motor.
What can a student learn from Bhise today?
Five habits from his record:
Read one serious source every week. His was a science magazine; yours might be a textbook chapter beyond the syllabus.
Build small first. He patented a shop lamp before he patented a printing machine.
Name the exact fault. His 1917 patent didn't promise better printing in general; it fixed sliding mould parts that left burs on the type.
Write it down so someone else could rebuild it. A patent has to be that clear, and so should your lab record.
Find people who will back the work. Naoroji, and later Tata, funded syndicates to develop his machines.
For step 3, say your pendulum readings in a physics practical keep jumping around. Don't write "error in experiment". Pick one suspect, such as starting the stopwatch late, then time 20 swings instead of 1 and see whether the spread shrinks.
If the physics inside a machine is where you get stuck, for example how heat flows out of molten metal, the Fermi Concept Library gives every concept in physics its own lesson. The Fermi Simulation Lab has interactive simulations for ideas that are easier to see than to read.
For another learner who taught himself far beyond his schooling, read about George Green, the miller who taught himself advanced mathematics.
