In the early 1950s, our founder, Mr K. K. Nag, was a Director and minority shareholder in R. A. Cole Ltd, a company that had been started by Mr Rudolf Arthur Cole, a German Jew who had come to India as a refugee and had settled in Mumbai. The company soon became the largest painting contractor in Mumbai with prestigious accounts like the Taj Mahal Hotel. They rapidly diversified into related fields like waterproofing and insulation for which they used cork as a raw material. They heard that BASF in Germany had invented a synthetic alternative to cork and approached BASF to form a joint venture to produce the product in India but, sadly, BASF refused as they were not in the least bit interested in India; their entire focus was on Brazil and the vast opportunities it presented at the time.
Fortunately, Mr Cole and Mr Nag were not ones to give up easily. Mr Cole was a chemist by training and Mr Nag was a metallurgist and they started researching the best ways in which they could make the product themselves. They reverse engineered the entire process and finally made Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) beads in India for the first time in a kettle in Mr Cole’s kitchen on Peddar Road in Mumbai!
They realised that there could be IP issues with EPS as BASF were the original inventors of the product so they went to the patent office to get a hold of BASF’s patents to see if they had infringed upon them in any way. And lo and behold, they found that BASF was so uninterested in India at the time that they had not even bothered to patent the product in India (they had registered patents in various Western countries and Japan but not in any developing countries)!
So, Mr Cole and Mr Nag proceeded to patent the product themselves! As a result, the first Indian patents for EPS (there were 3 in all) were in the joint names of Rudolf Arthur Cole and Kalyan Kumar Nag.
And, to honour his senior partner, Mr Nag proposed that their brand name for the product would be “Thermocole” – “Thermo” for heat and “Cole” for Mr R. A. Cole. As we all know, Thermocole continues to be the generic name for EPS in India even to this day, 70 years later!
