George
Fumio Tsuetaki (1922-1989) was
born in the town of
Loomns
in the Sierra foothills of California.His early interest led him to attend the Chicago School of Optometry.
After graduation in 1952, he had many jobs including working in a Chicago
jewellery store, fruit picking on his brother's fruit ranch where he was
called 'The Doctor who picks pears', and tool and die work before becoming a
contact lens technician.He established a practice and laboratory in New Orleans
in the late 1950s, working with fusing plastic materials to make bifocal
contact lenses; the first of these was the Invisible Gradient Bi-Focal.He returned to Chicago
to establish a basement laboratory in the late sixties on the city's north
side. There he continued to work with fused bifocals, creating the
Platinum Oriented Fused Bi-Focal and the Pan-O-Site Bi-Focal and the Double
Fused Internal Crescent Bi-Focal.He held over 17 patents worldwide which included the 'no jump'
Tangent Streak bifocal, introduced in 1987.Later developments were a trifocal and Fluorex materials. Tsuetaki owned
Fused Kontacts
of Chicago for manufacturing lenses, G.T. Laboratories for making polymers and
Luxicon Products for solutions.Tsuetaki
received the Creative Design and Process Award from the CLMA and the DaVinci
award from the National Eye Research Foundation.
