Guest Contributor Blaine Childress is a longtime advisory board member of the InnoVision Awards. He is a member of Sealed Air Corporation’s R&D technology scouting team. Sealed Air Corporation is the sponsor of the Sustainability Award for the InnoVision Awards.
[break]
Charles Townes award winner Schirmer continues his career in innovation
Henry “Hank” Schirmer, CEO of BBS Corporation in Spartanburg, continues to advance engineering technology though his Spartanburg polymer extrusion research laboratory.
Hank is internationally known for his creative solutions and his scientific insights into new products and new polymer extrusion systems. His distinguished career in engineering is reflected in a stunning 102 U.S. patents (and counting), the most recent three awarded to his own firm, BBS.
His technical advances were foundational to the packaging division of Sealed Air, with an estimated $1.6 billion in annual sales stemming from his inventions during his tenures in Massachusetts and Duncan, S.C. He is a member of the Sealed Air Inventor Hall of Fame, a Society of Plastics Engineers Fellow, and in 1998 was a winner of one of R&D Magazine Top 100 awards (known as “the Oscars of Innovation”).
Schirmer “retired” from Cryovac Inc. (now Sealed Air) approximately 18 years ago as the director of new technology. Instead of resting, fishing or spending more time watching stars at his home observatory, he immediately applied his zeal for invention toward building his own company, BBS Corp. in Spartanburg. Although a few years past his 80th birthday, he puts in long hours daily, advancing extrusion technologies, and continuing to invent and patent systems that are exported around the globe.
Two recent examples include research into inexpensive “disposable” (modular disk die) multilayer polymer extrusion dies and his research into nano-layered films, produced from his novel Layer Sequence Repeater equipment, providing 25 nano-layers. He continues to provide technology updates at technical conferences, such as the Society of Plastics Engineers, where he is a frequent invited speaker.
BBS has a current partnership with Jin Ming North America and Alpha Marathon (Canada), and has recently tested its technologies with Bollore (France) and the U.S. Department of Defense. Schirmer has traveled to China to demonstrate a commercial-scale line.
At his acceptance speech in November for the 2013 Charles Townes Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honor given at the InnoVision Technology Awards, Schirmer remarked that he has always liked to tinker, citing a boyhood example of making his own “cat’s whisker” radio for his room. “It was free radio, since no power source is required,” he said.
Schirmer never lost his passion for curiosity and continued his strong interest in invention and innovation throughout his careers with Johnson & Johnson, W.R. Grace and Cryovac. He said that when he took his first job at J&J, he just continued to do what he has always been driven to do, invent. “I just could not believe that I was actually going to be paid to play,” he said.
In his additional remarks at the awards banquet, Hank affirmed his intent to continue pushing technology forward, saying, “my laboratory is like a kid’s sandbox for an old man.” He joked that he will probably be inventing until he falls over; he just loves it.
