Backyard inventors - Stanley Clark

Tweet

Here in Australia, today marks the start of National Diabetes Week. Like many others, my husband has Type 2 diabetes. It is under control thanks to diet and medication. Type 1 diabetes is much more serious and involves daily injections of insulin. I always thought ‘well, that’s not so bad. Just an injection every day’ but, in reality, the condition is much more difficult to control. Regular testing is needed, and often more than the once a day that I thought was the norm. In the 1970s, children with Type 1 would normally be admitted to hospital every two to three months for periods of a week or more while doctors got their sugar levels back to more normal figures. This sort of regime would be very disruptive to a child’s life and schooling. Lisa Clark remembers those days well. Her father, Stanley Clark, took it upon himself to invent the world’s first portable battery-operated blood glucose monitor. Stanley was an electronics and mechanical engineer. After working out how the hospital machines worked, he created a miniature version which allowed him to monitor his daughter’s sugar levels without her needing to be admitted to hospital. His first monitor was quite bulky but the idea caught on and smaller, more convenient models soon came on the market. The origins of the modern monitor have largely been forgotten but what wonderful work Stan Clark did back in those early days.