Richard Seligman, the founder of APV Group, was a distinguished early member of SCI.
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.
Seligman founded 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. Seligman invented the plate heat exchanger, which contributed to the introduction of modern methods of milk pasteurisation and led to the 'high temperature short time' method which soon became standard
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 had a 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.