Edward W. Rowan
Parkway Plastics
Inducted 1999
Edward Rowan (1913 – 1993) was an American businessman active in many aspects of the plastics industry. Rowan was born in New York City in 1913 and graduated from Yale University in 1935 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he joined the firm of Edgar Steiner & Company, a consulting engineering firm, where he specialized in packaging applications. Two years later, while on a consulting project, he was exposed to one of the first injection molding machines as it was being delivered and set up at the client’s plant. He quickly determined that the level of sophistication of the process would demand more from tooling suppliers than the existing die-cast industry could supply. Shortly after that, he left Edgar Steiner to start a mold designing, building, and consulting business. By 1938, he supplied injection molds to the Ideal and Dillon Beck Toy Companies and other plastics processors.
He is also known for developing and manufacturing all plastic sextants for the U.S. Navy’s use in lifeboats. This was also the first plastic instrument of any type with micrometer calibrations of this accuracy made from corrosion-resistant plastic to be used in the varying temperature conditions of the equator to the North Pole.
Rowan also founded Parkway Plastics in 1954. Parkway Plastics manufactures stock plastic jars and was the first to develop jar designs and tooling for threaded plastic jars.
Rowan helped establish the Newark Section of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) and was one of its early presidents. He was active in the Section for over 35 years. He was also a member of the Plastics Pioneers Association. In 1973, with the cooperation of the Newark SPE Section, he designed, constructed, and delivered to the State of New Jersey Department of Education the first mobile plastics processing laboratory. This was a specially built trailer containing actual processing as a “Shop Course” at the high school level. These trailers were self-contained and requisitioned by school districts as needed.
Areas of Expertise:
Plastic processing, Plastics Tooling