Following the end of the war that was to end all wars, Germany found itself mired in rival and bitter politics.  With extremes on the left and the right, a vacuum formed in the center and many frustrated Germans were open to new ideologies.  Paul von Hindenburg was elected president of Germany in 1925, the same year the Nazi SS was formed.  Several years later Hindenburg would name Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany.

            Amidst all of this political turmoil and what would become the single most influential factor in his life, responsible for his accomplishments, and where he came to live, was born Frank Nissel on July 2, 1926.  Frank was born to parents of comfortable financial means, not wealthy, for sure, but his father Hans Nissel was an electrical engineer and vice president of the Berlin Power Company that was engaged in building Germany’s electrical power grid.  Hans even wrote a book on the “Power Factor,” which allowed him to gain the experience and stature that gained him international renown and the opportunity to travel to America and meeting Thomas Edison on one such visit.  Frank has a photograph of his father with Thomas Edison taken in 1928.

            By the early 1930s, Berlin already had a separate city gate for visiting Jews, the same one used for cattle, and the winds of war were beginning to blow while Frank was a young boy. 

Four years after he was born, his mother Gertrude gave birth to Peter, Frank’s brother.  Meanwhile, Frank began attending elementary school in Berlin.  He has fond memories of his early school years in Germany, but as time went on there were problems with being a Jew in the German public school and he was harassed.  His parents enrolled him into a private school where he thrived as a young boy, but by the time Frank was seven years old they were becoming very nervous about living in Germany.  His father learned of a job opening in Egypt working on the Aswan Dam project and before Frank turned eight years old the family moved first to Alexandria and then later to Cairo.  There were no German-speaking schools in these cities so in Alexandria, Frank, now eight-years old went to an English speaking school.  And later in suburban Cairo, Frank attended a French-speaking school.  Never mind that Frank had never been formally taught English or French, he studied hard and even liked the strict Lycée Francais du Caire Cairo where he later attended high school.  During this time Frank has fond memories of extended summer vacations in the Dolomites or the Pale Mountains of Italy. 

Frank acknowledges that the language challenges were difficult but believes that they motivated him to work hard.  In high school he became very interested in chemistry and his curiosity led him to spending many extra hours in the laboratory conducting experiments.  All of this paid off when in the summer of 1942 he took his college exams.  Out of 200 students that took the exams, Frank scored number one, this despite the frequent moves and having to learn two new languages in addition to his native German. 

            His father was now actively involved in the Aswan Dam electricity project and wearing a red tarbush daily to work.  While Egypt had already gained its sovereignty from England in 1922, the two signed an Anglo-Egyptian treaty in 1936 that provided for the gradual withdrawal of British troops except for those needed to protect the Suez Canal.  At the outbreak of the war, Great Britain had 36,000 troops in Egypt.  They were needed, of course, in 1941 when German General Erwin Rommel invaded North Africa and in March of 1941 attacked the port city of Tobruk. 

            With Rommel knocking at the back door, Frank and brother Peter were sent to live in Israel with an uncle.  As Rommel approached, British friends of the Nissel family warned that they could be in danger and suggested they leave the country.  With business affairs to wrap up, Hans and Gertrude arranged for Frank and brother Peter to leave Cairo and travel to Jerusalem where there were relatives and friends with whom they could stay.  The event led to a family anecdote that perhaps shows another side of the studious and reserved Frank Nissel.  Both Frank and Peter were told to pack a small suitcase for the trip across Egypt, Suez and to Palestine.  Upon their arrival, each opened their suitcase to find that while his brother heeded his parents and packed clothing and other necessities, Frank packed only one item – a Steiff teddy bear that he’d had since he was young boy.  The bear remains in the Nissel family today.

Their stay in Jerusalem was short – lasting about the six months it took British and American armies to expel Rommel from Egypt – and when they returned to Cairo Frank enrolled in the American University of Cairo where he received an American style education majoring in Science as there was no specialty curriculum for Chemistry. 

The war, however, still stood in Frank’s path as he had scored so highly in his college entrance exams – first out of 200 men and women who took the exam – that he had been accepted to attend the ETH (Eidenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich, often regarded as the Swiss MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).  Continued fighting in Europe prevented Frank from returning and led to his enrollment at the American University of Cairo.

            During this time, with Frank in his mid-teenage years, he began working for the U.S. Army on a part time basis and in time was assigned management of the Army’s movie theatre in Cairo.  This was an exciting time for Frank, being given new responsibilities, eventually being placed in charge of the U.S. Army’s movie distribution system in the Middle East with the opportunity to meet senior- and high-ranking officials, requesting movies for entertaining guests.

            One of the people Frank was to meet was Sir Arthur Tedder, a Scot and the son of a civil servant who studied at Magdalene College at Cambridge and later won the Prince Consort Prize for History.  Sir Tedder, also joined the Royal Flying Corps and saw action during World War II.  In 1940 Sir Tedder was named Air Commander for the Middle East and is credited with playing an important role in defeating Rommel in the Desert War.  He also became an important role model for Frank and certainly had all of the qualifications for giving Frank flight lessons, which he crammed in between college classes and distributing movies.

            With greater exposure to U.S. Army officers, and a long-term plan for the entire family to immigrate to the United States, Frank accepted an invitation from the U.S. Army to attend Virginia Tech, a U.S. Army training school.  Frank reveled in the opportunity, seemingly for two reasons.  First of all, he was already a competitive swimmer and at Virginia Tech he would have the opportunity to compete at the college level.  Secondly, Frank had already found an appreciation for his life-long interest in Jazz music.  Jazz was not the favored music in Egypt, but it was very popular in the U.S. and Frank would have an opportunity to play an important role in its growth and support, arriving in New York on a troop ship on March 7, 1946.  His parents would follow him to the U.S. in 1948, while Peter went on to study in England in the same year. 

            After a short stay in New York, Frank took up residence in Blacksburg, Virginia, where U.S. military officials arranged for him to complete his Masters Degree with a major in Chemistry at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.  This was an honor and a favor only granted because of Frank’s dedication and service to the military in Egypt, but because he had never actually been in the military, he was forced to live off campus, a situation he didn’t mind, but one that nearly led to his dismissal from VPI. 

            Frank’s interest in music, particularly Jazz, escalated immensely when he came to America, and he looked immediately for opportunities to continue developing this interest.  He found one quickly at VPI, which as Frank had noticed, had very poor radio reception.  Stations even less than 100 miles away could not be received, so Frank sought to fill a void.  In his apartment he built a one-kilowatt transmitter and placed an antenna on the top of a building near the campus.  After school and in the evenings when Frank wasn’t studying, he was a disk jockey playing records for everyone on campus.  The radio station, with Frank’s call letters WTEK became very popular among students and faculty and the radio station at VPI today still uses the call letters WTEK.

            Had Frank stuck to playing music, he may have ended up with a career in radio.  But he began to use the radio waves to bring attention to certain corrupt activities and issues of malfeasance, which suddenly placed him in disfavor with, especially with the accused.  Frank also used his radio station to play special requests.  One such request came only weeks before he was to graduate when several veterans in Barracks Five called Frank and asked him to play the famous title from the Vaughn Monroe Orchestra entitled “And to Bed.”  The request was for the song to be played for and dedicated to a young lady with a reputation for being somewhat promiscuous, never mind that she was also the police chief’s daughter.  Frank played the song and the next day encountered the angry police chief who physically accosted him and told him to leave town.  He even filed charges and a lawsuit against Frank, who realized that perhaps the better side of valor here was to leave town.  Frank acknowledges that he has not returned to Blacksburg many times since then and believes there may still be a warrant for his arrest.

            While he missed graduation at VPI, he did graduate in Spring 1947, earning a Masters Degree in Chemistry.  Upon graduation, Frank had two job offers, one to join Esso Corporation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a second offer to join Union Carbide Corporation in Bound Brook, New Jersey.  There really wasn’t much of a contest as to which job he would take with the decision being made primarily on consideration of the distance from New York City.  Bound Brook was, of course, a stone’s throw from New York and so he went to work for Carbide, initially assigned with the task of developing a report on how the firm could improve its distribution system.

            More importantly, however, working at Union Carbide went a long way toward building Frank’s professional character.  In less than two years after arriving on U.S. shores Frank was working for what would become one of America’s largest and most successful chemicals and plastics manufacturers.  He, from the time he was born, and his family too, of course, had endured religious persecution that forced them to move and adapt to new and different cultures, required them to learn new languages, make new friends and find new opportunities.  They did it like it was destined, which of course, it wasn’t, but it developed almost flawlessly through their hard work, dedication, courage and commitment.  Now Frank was on his own, a newcomer to America and one of its finest corporations where new challenges and opportunities would catapult his career even further. 

            As a chemistry graduate Frank knew what plastic was and even understood some basic polymer properties.  Now he was working with a firm interested in advancing polymer chemistry to its highest level, and for Frank that meant going beyond chemistry and into the mechanics that made chemistry work. 

            It was at this point, in 1950, that Frank met and married his wife Betty at a haberdasher he used to frequent.  She would come to play an important role in Frank’s career beyond the family support she provided. 

            Soon after joining Union Carbide Frank was assigned to work on developing compounding techniques and later calendaring of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).  He was challenged once again and over the course of a few years was awarded several patents, the most significant of which concerned the development of a high-speed test that simulated the properties of a material when compounded in a 5,000-pound batch. 

            Frank’s ambition and early success, however, was creating some issues at Carbide.  The young man who worked long hours and was already looking at innovative compounding techniques, extruder designs and how they could be improved, was alienating some of the firm’s older employees.  However, among senior level management, Frank was earning respect as he reported regularly on his activities in the laboratory.  This led to one of the most preposterous arrangements of Frank’s career.

            After one of the routine management meetings at which Frank presented a report on his activities, he received a phone call from Union Carbide’s president who invited Frank to come and meet with him at the headquarters office in New York City.  At that meeting he told Frank, “You know. Frank, we can’t advance you as fast as we want to because we have all of these people who have been here a long time.  We can’t jump you.  But you’re going to get extra compensation from headquarters here which nobody knows about – (no one) not your boss, nobody knows about that.”

            “I was eventually named technical manager focusing mainly on vinyl calendaring, which was a new and growing area in those days.”  Carbide had a calendaring plant in Bound Brook and a second plant in Ottawa, Illinois.  We only had one major competitor then, B.F. Goodrich.  While the emphasis was on developing quality products, the calendaring process was a big part of it, as well as the formulation and thus in time Frank became the company’s chief vinyl formulator.

            “I developed several stabilizer systems in those days, some of which are still being used today,” notes Frank.  “I also developed all kinds of acceleration tests of formulations for heat stability and more importantly, I developed the density column, a test that has become essential in any extrusion calendaring operation.”  Frank regrets that he didn’t put his name on the density column, which allowed him to quickly calculate the density of the vinyl compound, despite the number of additives that were included in the formulation. 

            “In those days everything was weighed manually.  We just had to scale up.  We had all these bags and boxes and things and people would weigh them in.  These were 5,000-pound batches.  They were making ribbon blenders, and if somebody left out one ingredient it could do some hellish damage if they left out some stabilizer or lubricant.  If that got on the calendar it just stuck up and everything shook.  It would cause thousands of dollars worth of damage and shut the line down for days.  So I wanted some quick quality control test.  And I figured if I could measure density accurately that would be a good way to quality control the formula.  I check, and normal density measurements, which you might do with a picnometer, is vary laborious.  It’s not a good factory floor test. 

            “I was reading up on the literature, and I found that at the Philadelphia Textile Institute somebody had come up with a test to measure the density of individual fibers.  He did that with a column of two liquids which were of two small differences in density, mixed slightly, and then had a gradient through there because they were slightly mixed.  If you dropped the fiber in, it would sink to a level because fiber sank so slowly.  They just determined the final velocity and from that they extrapolated where it might sink to.  Otherwise, we’d wait for two days, you see, for the fiber to sink to the level.

            “I took that and I got to work.  All we had to do is make one pellet and put it in a wetting agent and then we dropped it in.  We needed densities for the vinyls.  They were in the 1.5 to 1.3 range.  We made two solutions with a density difference of 0.05, which was easy to do.  And then we made calibration pellets, which, of course, went through careful measurement, and we floated those in there.  We had six or eight or ten calibration pellets in the thing.  And then you just had to take a pellet and drop it in there.  Within ten seconds you’d have the density down to four points. 

            “Carbide felt that that was such an important tool that they would not let me publish it.  They would never show that they locked this up at a special temperature controlled test room, which was secret.  Nobody was allowed in there except a few technicians and me.  They kept it all to themselves.  They wouldn’t allow anyone to publish (it). 

            “They gave it to Western Electric (Westrex Corporation) because they were our big customer in polyethylene.  Then, after a while, they gave it away to some company.  I think it was a company called Tech in Princeton who builds them now.  But they don’t even know who I was.  It’s actually called a Nissel column.  I would be famous now like many other test methods with people’s names.”

            At this point Frank had been with Carbide about five years and now he was receiving two paychecks, one from his business unit and a secret one from the headquarters office.  His career at Carbide also began to change and he was spending more and more time with customers, often demonstrating and explaining advances that were being made in Carbide’s laboratories.  Frank recollects, “I received several job offers from these customers while on these visits because we were doing state-of-the-art things with compounding and calendaring.”

            While Frank’s career at Carbide was about to end after ten years, it wasn’t as a result of one of those customer visits.  Instead, it was his wife Betty, who on a skiing trip in Pennsylvania introduced Frank to Albert (Al) Kaufman, who was an early pioneer in rubber extrusion and owned a company called Supplex.  “Kaufman was known as the ‘garden hose king,’” recalls Frank, and the two of them became good friends as well as skiing companions. 

            By this time Frank began to tire of Union Carbide.  While he was challenged, he objected to the idea of being paid two salaries, one that his supervisors didn’t even know about, and when he began looking for opportunities for promotion, they offered him a job in New York heading up their Extrusion Materials business.  “I said to them at that point, Look, I’m now the world’s foremost expert on calendaring.  Why do you want me to move to New York to do something I know nothing about?” 

            Sometimes, timing is everything, and just while Frank was wrangling with Carbide over these issues, Al Kaufman sold Supplex.  As his close friend, Frank had learned that Al Kaufman was doing things with extrusion that no one knew about.  Kaufman knew that too, and he decided that rather than make a material by extruding it, he wanted to design and build extruders.  From his hose manufacturing experience he had also learned about knitting machines as they were used to weave the fiber reinforcement around the hose and he had ideas on how to make higher speed knitting machines that, along with his ideas on extruder design, would allow hose manufacturers to significantly increase production. 

            Frank was invited to join Kaufman’s new firm called Prodex as a junior partner.  They set up shop in a airplane hanger at Hadley Airport in South Plainfield, New Jersey.  One of their first successes was in working with a customer of Hercules Chemical Co., which operated a polypropylene plant nearby.  Hercules’ customer wanted to extrude screwdriver handles and Hercules wanted them to succeed because in the end it would account for a lot of polypropylene.  But the handles were difficult to extrude and they were having little success in working with Welding Engineers.  Frank designed and build a two-inch extruder and they loved it.  Hercules subsequently bought three six-inch compounding extruders from Prodex and they were very happy.  Esso Corp. was also located nearby, as was Shell Chemical and Prodex built compounding machines for all of these firms, as Frank recollects, within a period of five years from starting the business they sold more than 100 compounding machines. 

            They also maintained an active laboratory at Hadley Field with large production size machines capable of demonstrating the features of their machines.  “We had up to eight-inch diameter machines there and we could run two, three thousand pounds an hour.  That way, when people wanted to run compounding tests, those people would come in, they’d have some new polymer and they’d want to see what you could get out of a machine.  And we had a railcar siding, and people would come and we’d run a full production-size compounding machine.  Nobody else in the whole world had that size machine setup.  So there was never any question of (a) scale-up performance guarantee.  “Gentlemen, here it is.  You ought to take this machine with you if you don’t think we can build another one.’  We actually had people who did that.  They would want the machine.”

            While all of this was going on, however, something else was gaining Frank’s attention.  Dow Chemical Co., and then later Union Carbide began developing sheet extrusion using polystyrene resin.  The early process involved extruding the sheet and then reheat it again to thermoform things like cups.  The problem was that the polystyrene had to be dried before extruding it.

            Frank’s calendering experience came into play here as he had experience with designing and building vented extruders and he began building machines that would process the sheet and required no pre-drying of the high-moisture polystyrene resin.  He then began buying Brown roll stacks and Robinson dies for the machines.  In 1957, Prodex sold 10 sheet lines to a Japanese customer.  Frank recalls the sale and chuckles, “At the time those ten machines exceeded the entire polystyrene sheet capacity of Japan.”  Another important customer in the early days was Sweetheart Cup.

            Frank’s foray into sheet extrusion led the company into a different direction and within a few years Prodex had become the leader in sheet extrusion machinery in the world.  Within a short period of time, the company no longer sold extruders for garden hose or pipe production and concentrated its efforts on building sheet extruders and selling sheet lines.  Beyond the extruders, Prodex had an agreement with a company in Michigan that was building sheet lines and dies and with Frank’s direction produced downstream equipment for Prodex.  The company, unfortunately, went under when as Frank recalls, “The guy that owned the company crashed his plane into Lake Michigan one night when it iced up flying from Elkhart, Illinois to Chicago.  We hired some of the people that worked for him and began making the entire sheet line ourselves. 

            All of this success was going to Al’s head and as Frank describes him, “a capital gainer,” Al was ready to sell the company.  Frank was not.  Nevertheless, Al went looking for buyers and found several, but it was Koehring Corporation that acquired Prodex in 1955.  Koehring was a manufacturer of excavating equipment but they were interested in diversifying and plastics looked like a positive investment to them.  They had already acquired HPM, then the largest injection molding machinery company in the U.S. and they subsequently bought Brown Machine Co. as well.  Franks recollects, “This was the first company to put together a plastics machinery company conglomerate.”

            Now Frank had a boss, a real boss, and it wasn’t too long after the acquisition that he, and his former partner Al saw this wasn’t going to work.  “When you own a company or maybe manage and then somebody else takes over and tries to tell you how to run it, you can’t do that.  It doesn’t work.  So I got out.  In fact, Al Kaufman and I both got out because they promised us big bonuses.  They said, “we have this wonderful bonus plan.  If you make your objectives, you get up to 30 percent or 40 percent bonus at the end of the year.’  “And I said, ‘that’s wonderful.’

            “I’d never done any forecasting, you know.  I still don’t do any forecasting because there’s no way in the machinery business that you can forecast.  It depends upon the economy.  You tell me when the economy is going to pick up again, I’ll tell you when my machinery sales are will pick up again.  But they asked me when.  I said, ‘Well okay, if you want me to forecast , next year we’ll have a 10 percent increase in sales and 10 percent increase in profits.’  ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘That’s wonderful Frank, very good.’ 

            “But instead, that happened to be a very good time.  We went up about 25 percent, or something like that. 

            So at the next board meeting in Milwaukee after the first of the year I said, ‘Where’s our bonus check?’  And they said, ‘You don’t get one.’  I said, ‘Why?’  They said, ‘If every division did that we’d have a cash flow problem.’ 

            “So we walked out.  We literally got the company secretary and dictated our resignations, and walked out.  That was the end of that.”

            This was an important point in Frank’s career.  For the first time in his career, he was unemployed.  He actually walked home that day contemplating how his life would suddenly change.  He had been working 12-hour days, traveling all over the world and spending far too much time on business and too little time with his family.  It was 1967.  He had been in America just over 20 years and had been very successful working for two companies.  Now it was time to move on.  The question was, move on to where?

            Bette was delighted and on that first evening Frank recalls, “We opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated together.”  Frank went on to do what most unemployed professionals do, he became a consultant.  “This wasn’t what I wanted to do but people would call me up and ask me to help them out.  I would charge them a thousand dollars a day plus expenses and they were usually glad to pay me.”

            Frank tired of consulting very quickly.  As he explains it: “When you’re a consultant, you can’t guide people in the direction you want them to go.  All you can do is sell them the information and then it is up to them as to how they use it.  Even when you see there are flaws in their process and you tell them how to fix it, and if they make a change and it still doesn’t work, then it was your fault and you sold them bad advice.  But if the changes you recommended worked and the problem was solved, then they go off and pat themselves on the back muttering ‘oh what a good boy am I?’”

            Sometime in the course of the first year after Frank left Koehring Corporation he received a call from Jack Hendrickson.  Jack was vice president of Welding Engineers and they had a plant in Norristown, Pennsylvania.  Frank knew Welding Engineers and Jack Hendrickson from his Prodex days.  “In those days,” recalls Frank, “high density polyethylene was hard to compound on a single-screw machine because it was a light, flaky material.  It was fluffy and you just couldn’t get the stuff to feed well so most people went to twin-screw machines for compounding high density polyethylene. 

            “We did some work on this for Hercules and developed a single screw extruder that processed high density with no problem.  This extruder became a big hit with compounders because it was only a fraction of the cost of a twin-screw.  We began to take business away from Welding Engineers and they were not to happy with us, but what could I do.  A single screw machine is just a fraction of the cost of a twin screw.

            “One advantage that Welding Engineers had was a patented die face pelletizer that chopped the material into pellets as it exited the die.  We were running strands out of a die, through a water bath to cool it and then pelletizing it.  That worked fine for most people.  But we had one customer, an Italian company called Novamont that wanted to build a polypropylene compounding plant here and they wanted single screw extruders with a die face pelletizer.  Before they would give us the order we had to prove to them that we could cut the stuff hot right out of the die.

            “I went to Hendrickson and I said, look you can have a part of this business and I can have a part.  Otherwise, neither of us may get any of it.  So Jack brought in his cutter and we began mounting it on one of our extruders.  It was no simple matter and it took weeks to get the thing working on our machine so we could demonstrate it to Novamont.  Jack was a technical guy so we hit it off together.  He was the son of the owner of Welding Engineers and we got this thing going and we sold an extruder and he sold a die face pelletizer. 

            “Now here it is some years later and Jack calls me up and says I would like to get together with you Frank because the mixer we have here is really bad.  Would you help us market it.  So I started to drive back and forth to Norristown, first one day a week, then two days a week, then three days a week; that’s a two-hour drive from Plainfield.  They were selling a line of German high intensity mixers and we competed with them at Prodex, although they weren’t much competition.  They knew nothing about marketing it properly.  At Prodex we sold dry blenders that we imported from Henschel and we did very good with those.  At the time, Welding Engineers didn’t know what they were doing.  They were expensive and they sold one here and there.” 

           The phone call was key because Jack hired Frank to consult on the mixer business. 
“After a short time, I said, Jack your company is not organized right to handle this business.  It’s all screwed up.  Papenmeier was overcharging them for the mixers, their people didn’t know what they were doing.  They had a 13-page form for every order, each page with a different color and carbon paper between each.  They had a separate typewriter for typing these forms.  And I said to Jack after doing this for a few weeks, ‘Jack, the only way to straighten this out is if you and I get together and start a new company outside of this one.  I’ll be your partner in this.  And besides, I told Jack I had some new ideas for extruders and would like to begin building them again.’  Jack said, okay, let’s do it.  He was interested in building single screw extruders because they had tried to build one several years before but they screwed up and made the cylinders so thing they burst apart.”

The two started a company named Welex – “wel” from welding and “ex” for extruders – and began selling the Papenmeier line of mixers.  Frank negotiated better prices and delivery from Papenmeier and the business took off.  Soon afterwards they rented a plant in King of Prussia that was dedicated to their mixers business and as Frank recalls, “It lasted for eight or ten years and Welex became a leader in the U.S. market for mixers. 

That ended suddenly when Papenmeier crashed his Mercedes on the Autobahn and the company fell into financial difficulty.  “He smashed himself to pieces.  He had a 500 model Mercedes and I hated driving with him because he would do 160 – 180 kilometers per hour, he only had one speed, crazy!  After that the whole company went broke, there was no management.”  So anyway, we lost the mixers, but then we got big in extruders.  We specialized right from the start with sheet extrusion.

During this period Jack Hendricks’ father died and Jack took over as president of Welding Engineers.  “Jack Hendricks was a wonderful guy, recalls Frank.  He died just a few years ago.  He was a great golfer and his whole life was golfing but he had no idea of business.  He was a silent partner in Welex and he left us alone.  He was so impressed that he just stayed out of our affairs.”

Welding Engineers was not so lucky and its machine rebuilding business began to falter.  At one point Jack asked Frank to take it over and run the business, but Frank didn’t have good feelings about Welding Engineers.  “They were arrogant and had no customer relations.  I told Jack, “I don’t want to do that because I would have to fire all of these old people, I would have to get rid of them because they are useless.  I’m not a hatchet man.  Maybe the business is going to die by itself or you can do it, but I’m not going to fire all of these people.  I told him, the product is so far down the hill now and while in the beginning the product was unique, now there were ten other companies doing the same thing, and better. 

The product was welding and fabrication that started out with welding ship panels as opposed to riveting them.  Welding was faster than riveting and Welding Engineers built a successful business of fabricating ship panels and later doing work for Philadelphia gear and then fabricating housings for transformers.  “But, they lost one customer after the other.  I could see it from here but I couldn’t do anything about it.  I was glad that we were completely separate.”

In 1969 Welex purchased 15 acres of land that contained an old farm house adjacent to what was then Univac’s headquarters in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania.  Univac today trades as Unisys and is still headquartered there.  Welex designed a purpose built building for manufacturing extruders and that is where the company is located today.

During this time Frank became a bit of a patent buster as well.  While Frank was never that anxious to patent many of his ideas but he was involved in some important technological advances in co-extruded sheet.  Just about the time when Welex was organized and while Frank was still consulting, he did some work for a German company operating as Bellaplast.  Frank recalls, “Bellaplast was the largest cup makers in Germany.  We had sold them sheet lines at Prodex.  They were building their own advanced thermoforming sheet lines.  I was hired as a consultant to help them with two things.  First, was to help them with technology and second was to be their ear here in America and to let them know if anyone came up with something new.

 “One of their goals was to develop a glossy, high impact polystyrene cup.  Now high impact polystyrene, when you extrude it and polish it and it is glossy but when you reheat it for thermoforming, it goes dull.  The moment that you reheat it, it goes dull.  That’s because it has rubber in it.  That’s the nature of the beast.

People like glossy cups.  Bellaplast was making glossy cups by having two dies on the line.  One was a regular sheet die and the second was coating the sheet with crystal polystyrene.  Crystal polystyrene has no rubber in it and it stays glossy.  They were making this sheet and laying on a one mil or something layer to get the gloss.

I said, I think I have an idea.  I think we can try to inject the crystal polystyrene into an adapter in the die and I bet you it will flow right through there.  We just took out the melt thermocouple and tightened up the die and my God, it worked.  The distribution wasn’t perfect but we got the glossy sheet.  From there on we refined this  but I never did anything about patenting it because I didn’t think there was anything that was patentable.  For years Bellaplast said they would make us the agency for their machines but they turned around and went to our competitor Brown Machine.  They were not nice.  They immediately went to the patent office and tried to patent the ideas that I gave them. 

Fortunately, I caught them because in those days the Germans published patents for public review and I caught them and I stopped them. 

In the meantime, Dow (Dow Chemical Co.) was mucking around with co-
extrusion, but they were going after totally different things.  They were trying to extrude Saran, a beautiful barrier material but it is a bear of a material because it is so corrosive.  It’s very acidic and all of the extruder screws, cylinders, dies, everything has to be made out of nickel. 

            So what Dow was trying to do in co-extrusion was to co-extrude a very thin layer of polyethylene so the Saran wouldn’t touch the die and then peel it off.  This would prevent the Saran from mucking up the tooling.  Saran is a hellishly good barrier material, it’s the best there is but then they would glue polystyrene or whatever you want on the outside and then they patented that.  That was several months after I did my work.  In the meantime I brought co-extrusion back here and I allied myself with a friend at Fina, who had a Welex sheet line in their lab and believed this was something we could really do something with and we exploited this whole sheet coating with polystyrene to extend gloss but we also developed the two-color cup concept that actually takes three or four layers in order to get one color on the inside and a second color on the outside.  If you make a red and white cup, the scrap is neither red or white so you need to bury that pink scrap in the middle someplace.  So it’s actually white, scrap, red and then a gloss layer on the outside.  It takes four layers to do that. 

            We sold a lot of lines with this technology and we gave it to people, while Dow in the meantime was trying to license their technology for a royalty and Dow kept threatening us but because I was aligned with a competitor, we kept selling lines. 

We went a step further.  DuPont had a patent on making extruded layers that they were using to make a tinted plastic visor and they only wanted to tint the surface layer.  Their patent preceded Dow’s patent and when I ran across it I called Ernie Burnhart and asked him what do you think DuPont would want for exclusive rights to that patent as long as I leave them alone on their end.  We bought it for $50,000 with exclusive right and allowing DuPont to use the technology.  Well, now we had something against Dow. 

Dow had licensed all of our competitors and every other sheet extrusion company.  Not only did it cost these companies money up front but they were paying five percent royalties.  This went on for about four or five years and they sued us and I went to Dow and I said, you know, you’re not going to win this case because I’m going to wreck your whole company.  What you did was to subjugate prior art and if you press this some of your people are going to go to jail.  So, we settled out of court and cross-licensed the technology, showed each other what we were doing, shook hands and we got to be good friends after that.”

Perhaps one of the most important legacy that Frank leaves is his frustration with raw material suppliers who ignore the knowledge, experience and technology that machine builders have for processing their materials.  Frank explains: “I’m having a hassle right now with the running of PET (polyester terephthalate) on vented machines.  And it runs great.  But Eastman, who is a major producer of PET resins says it can’t work, it destroys our polymer, don’t do it, and don’t buy from Welex.  Well we just keep selling these machines and I said to Eastman, have you ever tried it.  No they said, it can’t work, but I said, have you ever tried it.  No they said, it can’t work.  I said , how come most of your customers are using our method and a vented machines.  You get some hydrolysis and some degradation, but it is not enough to affect your product.  This has been going on for ten years and I haven’t given up yet but this fight is still going on. 

“It’s interesting how raw materials people get themselves…you know, its almost as if you ask the gasoline station attendant how to build the engine in your car.  You’re not asking the gasoline supplier how to build the engine.”

Frank estimates that Welex currently has 80 percent of the U.S. market for  sheet extrusion machines and 50 percent of the European market.

He says, “I have always tried to find a niche some place where somebody needs something and you’ve got to be at the right place at the right time.  A lot of it has been luck.”

Has Frank ever gone home?  It’s hard for Frank to define home.  Berlin, perhaps?  Or Cairo?  He says he went to India in 1961 and stopped in Cairo to see his old home there.  It was different in many respects and the same.  He has enjoyed traveling his entire life and talking and learning about other people. 

Throughout his career his family has always been important.  James (Jim) Nissel, Frank’s son, was the first member of IKV.  While trying to find a vocation for himself, he became a substitute in a golf outing with Dr. Menges of IKV, and Jim was enticed into attending IKV in Aachen, Germany.  On his return he joined his father in running Welex and today is sales manager of the company. 
Nancy (Nissel) Lewis is marketing manager and she is married to Wayne Lewis, the vice president and general manager. 
Frank has no plans to sell the company, despite numerous offers, and plans to hand the company over to his family and a trusted group of employees who have been loyal and become family to Welex. 

Frank, at age 77, reports to his office every day.  Bette passed away in 2000 and he has filled his time with one of his favorite pastimes, jazz.  Frank is a regular visitor to New York jazz concerts and he is a member of no less than three jazz societies: The New Jersey Jazz Society, the Pennsylvania Jazz Society and the Tri-State Jazz Society located in South Jersey.  Frank is not sure how he became so interested in music.  He has never played an instrument of any kind, although his father was a professional cello player and his mother played the piano.  While living near Chicago, they both played for the Chicago Symphony. 

“When we lived in Cairo my parents tried to get me to take piano lessons.  They knew concert pianists and hired them to teach me but I didn’t have the patience for that.  They didn’t have the patience to teach me either.  I’ve followed jazz for so long that I have gotten to know quite a few musicians and they even invite me to recording sessions in New York and I go to concerts.  I have another life in the jazz area.”

Frank also spends time in the Pocono Mountains during the winter months skiing.  He and daughter Nancy and son-in-law Wayne generally take ski vacations during the winter and they sail together during the summer months.  Frank also skies with friends and keeps a condominium at one of the Pocono ski resorts.

What is amazing is that Frank has always remained a family oriented person.  He works with his family.  He plays with his family.  Prior to Bette’s death, they were married for 51 years and traveled all over the world together.  He has another daughter, Laura, who is a chemist and works for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey.

Frank had every reason not to succeed.  Moving constantly as a youngster into new environments, countries with new languages, different schools where his education was interrupted.  But these events built character in Frank Nissel, who today at age 78 is as vibrant as a business manager, a patriarch for his family, a leader and an advocate for the plastics industry as he was as a young man working for the U.S. forces in Cairo. 

Frank has a passion for things, not many things, but his passion for his career and his business, his passionate respect for customers and business associates, his loving and caring passion for family, his concern for employees and, of course, his passion for jazz, are all driven by a man that knew what he wanted to do and then went out and did it.
Frank says proudly, “My whole philosophy of running my business, of running anything, even my life, has been by the Golden Rule.  I am not a religious person, but I do believe in ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’  That’s how I run my whole business.  I treat people well and that usually comes back to me.  That’s how I am.”

            If you know Frank, that’s how he is.