Tadeusz Sendzimir

Tadeusz Sendzimir was a Polish engineer and inventor of international renown. His name has been given to revolutionary methods of processing steel and metals used in every industrialized nation of the world, and he has been called one of the greatest innovators in the steel industry since Henry Bessemer.

Sendzimir was born July 5, 1894, in Lwow, Poland, where he studied at the Polytechnic Institute. The upheavals of the First World War and the Russian Revolution displaced him to Kiev, Russia and eventually across Siberia to Shanghai, where he built the first factory in China to produce screws, nails and wire. Designing and making his own machines, he began experimenting with a new way to galvanize steel that would ultimately revolutionize the steel industry.

In 1929 Sendzimir tried to interest American industrialists in his method, but met with skepticism and distrust at the start of the Great Depression. Returning to Poland in 1930, he obtained support for the construction of the first industrial-scale galvanizing unit and put into operation several cold strip mills. By 1938 Armco Steel, an American company, was interested in his work, and they formed a partnership, the Armzen Company, to oversee the worldwide expansion of his galvanizing and mill technology.

With companies in 3 countries, 85 to 90 percent of the world's stainless steel passed through the Sendzimir process by the early 1980s. In 1974, Sendzimir received the Brinell Gold Medal from the Royal Academy of Technical Sciences in Stockholm, the engineer's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, personally presented by King Gustav of Sweden. Among other awards, he has received are the Golden Cross of Merit presented by the President of Poland in 1938, the prestigious Bessemer Gold Medal of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1965, and on the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, he was one of those prominent immigrants honored for their contributions to America.

In 1990 a further tribute was paid to him by his native land when Poland's largest steel plant (formerly the Lenin Steelworks) was renamed Tadeusz Sendzimir Steelworks in recognition of his unique contributions to the steel industry worldwide. After a long and fulfilling life, Tadeusz Sendzimir died Sept. 1, 1989 after a massive stroke.