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 a ubiquitous plastic 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.
Roger D. Chapman of Nova Polymers, Inc nominated Howard Irvin.