Louis Frank Rahm
Princeton University
Inducted 1973
Louis Frank Rahm (1899 – 1991) was an educator, writer, and an early authority on the fundamentals of plastics processing and plastics materials.
Rahm began his career in 1921 as a designer of plastics processing equipment. After working in the plastics industry, he began a long academic career. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Princeton University in 1930 and founded the graduate-level Plastics Engineering program at Princeton, the first academic program of its type in the United States. He taught at Princeton until his retirement in 1964.
In 1933, Rahm published “Plastic Molding: An Introduction to the Materials, Equipment, and Methods Used in the Fabrication of Plastic Products (published by McGraw-Hill), the first comprehensive textbook on plastics manufacturing.
Rahm was Chairman of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) Education Committee and was instrumental in establishing the Plastics Institute of America (PIA), then housed at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, now at UMass Lowell.
Areas of Expertise:
1933 First comprehensive textbook on plastics manufacturing
| Title: Plastic Molding: An Introduction to the Materials, Equipment, and Methods Used in the Fabrication of Plastic Products Author Louis Frank Rahm Publisher McGraw-Hill Book Company, Incorporated, 1933 Original from the University of Michigan Digitized Feb 4, 2009 Length 246 pages |
Plastics machinery, Plastics materials, Plastics education