Howard Irvin
Marbon Chemical, the Plastics Division of Borg-Warner Chemical
Inducted 2020
Howard Irwin (1919 – 2017) emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in 1938 at 19. He worked a night job in a shoe factory and then went to work repairing farm equipment. In 1939, he was awarded a four-year scholarship to Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, earning a degree in chemical engineering.
After graduating, Irvin began a forty-year career in chemical engineering with Marbon Chemical (now a division of Borg-Warner), where he worked on replacing natural rubber with synthetics for sheets and wire coating to compensate for the war-related rubber shortage. He made copolymers of butadiene and styrene, which were branded Marbon S.
From there, he progressed to working on an elastomeric styrene product, which would eventually become ubiquitous, utilized in everything from telephone and business machine housing to Lego toy bricks. The plastic’s name is acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS), and it was branded CycolacTM.
Irwin received an honorary doctorate from Rose Hulman and a degree from the prestigious Harvard School of Business. He became Executive Vice President and Technical Director of Marbon Chemical, the Plastics Division of Borg-Warner Chemical. Today, CycolacTM ABS (now produced by SABIC) is still one of the industry-standard brands in ABS resins.