Sonti Kamesam

Sonti Kamesam (1890–1954) was an timber engineer and scientist of India.

He was born in Narsapur in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. After primary education at Visakhapatnam, he graduated from Presidency College, Chennai and obtained his B.E. from Guindy Engineering College.

He joined in Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun and later promoted as an Expert-in-charge of Wood Preservation. He was sent to Germany for research and worked with Falk. They developed the 'Falkamesam arsenic-copper mixture'. Till that time Wolman’s formulation – famously known as Wolman Salts – contained dinitrophenol, a chemical manufactured by Hicksons, UK. No copper was used in Wolman Salts.

In India, Kamesam had been busy conducting extensive tests which showed that the performance of his CCA mixture (which he actually called 'ASCU' from the chemical symbols for copper and arsenic) was far superior to that of Wolman Salts and other preservatives. Laboratories in the US, UK, Germany and France soon came to the same conclusion – that CCA was a highly effective treatment and that the chemicals would ‘fix’ in the timber to give long-lasting protection against decay.

Kamesam sold the patent rights for CCA in the US to The Bell Telephone Company. They called the product ‘Greensalts’ and used it for the treatment of telegraph poles.

In 1953 Hicksons took out the remains of the ASCU patent against payment of royalties for the British Empire and Dominions and in 1964 Hicksons bought an equity share in ASCU and traded in India as ASCU/Hicksons Limited.

Kamesam his development of CCA made him a rich man but he continued to work hard and was known in India as an outstanding timber engineer and did much to promote the use of bamboo for construction purposes. In 1936 he designed a highway bridge with a 60-foot span. In order to prove the strength of the bridge, he made two adult elephants, each weighing in at around ten tons, walk across.

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