Rosen watched the rise of thermoforming from the front row

Stanley Rosen is the thermoforming industry's historian, and for good reason: He was in on the ground floor.

“I knew all of these early guys,” he said. “Everybody knew everybody. These people were pioneers.”

A vacuum forming machine was demonstrated and sold at the 1952 National Plastics Exhibition in Philadelphia, Rosen wrote in a history of the Society of Plastics Engineers' Thermoforming Division.

Rosen, who joined the Society of Plastics Engineers in the mid-1950s, gave a talk about thermoforming to the New York Section back in 1956.

Fast-forward to 2003 or so, and a retired Rosen began writing a detailed history of the thermoforming industry for the SPE Thermoforming Division's journal. Jim Throne was the editor, and he was interested in recording the history. In his research, Rosen started in the mid-1930s and went to 1956, when the industry started to change. But when Throne left the editorship, the project was discontinued.

“There was more to say, but nobody wanted to listen, so I quit,” Rosen said.

An important early thermoformed part was forming airplane canopies from acrylic sheet. It had to be free of blemishes.

To compile the detailed history, Rosen and his wife, Barbara, visited the New York Public Library on trips to the city to see their children. They looked through the complete collection of Modern Plastics, and Modern Packaging magazines. They racked up a hefty photocopying bill.

Rosen, 89, who is retired and living in Las Vegas, does not travel much and will not attend the 2017 Antec, which SPE celebrates its anniversary. But he said SPE's Thermoforming Division, which was founded in 1970, played a big role in bringing people together in what had been an insular, secretive industry.

“The thermoformers of that early period were generally small- to medium-sized businesses,” Rosen recalled. “Even those that were in the same town, never talked to each other. What the Thermoforming Division did was bring all of these characters together, and they found that the other guy's pretty nice. So the whole complexion changed, completely.”

Rosen said he felt like a “lonely soul” at Antecs for years. He saw his thermoforming friends Jim Throne and Bill McConnell, but that's about it. Then the Thermoforming Division changed that. Formers learned how others tackled problems, helping the entire sector, he said.

Rosen went to college on the GI Bill and got a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Buffalo in 1951.

His first job after college was at Thermatron, designing mechanical presses for radio frequency and thermal heat sealers, used to seal flexible vinyl.

As chief engineer, and then president of Tromomatic Corp., Rosen had a front row seat for vacuum forming machinery to make blister packaging in the 1950s. One early part: Packaging for dental floss. Rosen also called on the toy industry.

But the company needed a machine to trim the blisters from the web. They developed a very large, inexpensive die-cutter that combined pneumatics and hydraulics to “intensify” the power. A hot plate system heated the web only in the area where the steel-rule die impinged on it.

In 1962, Rosen went to work at Phillips Petroleum Co., which was promoting HDPE as a competitor for high-impact polystyrene for thermoforming. Phillips was relying on “New Yorkers and blow molding guys,” and they hired Rosen as a thermoforming expert.

Rosen later started his own business, Hydrotherm, in West Nyack, N.Y., north of New York City. The company designed and built thermoforming machines, and provided molds to the growing industry.

He respected industry titans like Gaylord Brown, who founded Brown Machine.

“This guy was the smartest person I ever met in thermoforming,” Rosen said.