The man behind SCI’s
Seligman Award
From Bavaria to south London — the story of early
SCI Member Richard Seligman
 Richard
Seligman, the founder of APV Group, was a distinguished early
member of SCI who gave his name to a prestigious SCI event,
the Seligman Lecture.
Best known for his creation of the plate heat exchanger,
he pioneered the use of autogeneous welding of aluminium,
and of applying welding to vessels used in the milk industry.
Born in London in 1878 to a Bavarian banking family, Seligman
studied in London, Heidelberg and Zurich and joined the British
Aluminium Company in 1904 as a chief chemist. He joined SCI
in the same year, and belonged to the Chemical Engineering,
Corrosion, Food and Microbiology groups.
On leaving BAC four years later, he obtained the licence
to develop a Swiss patent for the welding of aluminium and
this led to the founding of the Aluminium Plant & Vessel
Company Limited, in Wandsworth, South London. While the company
was to go on to manufacture vessels for milk, in the early
days it built them for brewing beer.
At the time all such vessels were built of copper, though
it was discovered in 1908 that copper affected the yeast used
in brewing. Aluminium was a more stable alternative, lighter
and easier to clean. As the company history, From Little
Acorns by G A Dummett points out, we are now so accustomed
to the use of plant made from corrosion-resistant sheet materials
that it is hard to imagine them built of copper.
The plate heat exchanger
Despite all the hard work in the early days, it was during
some time off that the really big idea came. One of Seligman’s
great passions was skiing, which he took up in Norway (remarkably,
it was he who introduced the sport into Switzerland). During
a skiing holiday in 1922–3 he came up with his most ground-breaking
invention, the plate heat exchanger, and subsequently took
out a patent.
The plate heat exchanger, which Seligman nicknamed a ‘machine
with brains’, rapidly caught on. It contributed to the
introduction of modern methods of milk pasteurisation and
led to the ‘high temperature short time’ method
which soon became standard.
The fortunes of Seligman’s own company fluctuated with
the times. As soon as the First World War broke out, the UK
government banned the use of aluminium in breweries. The company
had to look elsewhere for business, and was soon engaged in
manufacturing explosives and aircraft parts. When this work
dried up at the end of the war, the team had to think again,
and soon focused on the dairy industry.
Eventually APV, as it became known, would become a supplier
of process engineering components for use in the dairy, food,
brewery, beverage, pharmaceutical, healthcare, chemical, marine,
district heating, and other industrial markets.
Richard Seligman continued his distinguished career, becoming
chairman of the Food Machinery Association, the British Chemical
Plant Manufacturers’ Association and the Research Fund
Committee of the Institute of Brewers. He was also president
of the Institute of Metal and received its highest honour,
the Platinum Medal, and was the first Gold Medallist of the
Society of Dairy Technology. He died aged 94, at his desk.
by Joanna Pegum
SCI web editor
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