Dominick V. Rosato
Ingersoll Rand
Inducted 2003
Dominick V. Rosato (1921 – 2004) was a prolific writer of technical books and materials and a pioneer in early military applications of plastics. Rosato began his career as a tool maker with Schram Industries. He worked up to become a journeyman toolmaker while completing his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Technology in 1942. He also trained as a military reserve officer. He was commissioned into the Army Air Force and assigned to the Nonmetallic Structures and Materials Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, during World War II; later, during the Korean War, when he served as Deputy Chief of Plastics Research and Development. This experience brought a lifelong love of plastics engineering, especially in composites.
Following his military career, Rosato served as Director of Plastics Research and Development for Raybestos in Manhattan from 1954 to 1963. There, he worked on early space applications for plastics and composites. In 1954, he published his first book on industrial uses of asbestos in high-performance plastics.
From 1963 to 1974, Rosato was director of international sales and marketing for Ingersoll Rand, a major injection molding equipment supplier, while also serving as technical editor of Plastics World magazine. Rosato published 28 industry handbooks and reference texts on subjects in plastics technology, mechanical engineering, blow molding, product design, injection molding, composites design and manufacturing, filament winding, environmental effects on plastics, and extrusion processing.
He also contributed chapters to 45 other plastics technical books and prepared over 2,000 articles, papers, and presentations. He founded and developed materials for the University of Massachusetts-Lowell’s Plastics Seminars and Workshop programs. Later in his career, he developed and taught plastics materials, processing, and part design courses at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Rosato was an active member of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), serving on the Injection Molding Division Board for decades. He was named a Fellow of the society in 1984.
Areas of Expertise:
Plastic processing, Plastics machinery, Plastic materials