SIEMENS

Surrounded by a collection of pictures of trains, horses, and boats, Michael Shore is sitting in his office at Siemens VAI in Worcester, Massachusetts, a world leader in the field of rolling mill technology and a Siemens business since its acquisition of Morgan in 2008. VAI has branches in China, Brazil, India, and Great Britain. An electric pencil sharpener sits on the desk next to the Shore. “A remnant of the past. Today I mostly use mechanical pencils, and all design happens on the computer. But that doesn’t prevent me from sketching ideas with a pencil,” he says. On the wall is a poster illustrating two drums in a wire rolling mill, the so-called “Morshor system,” Shore’s latest invention, which was named in his honor. It is being tested in a plant in Brazil.

Shore was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1937 and has been familiar with steel mills since boyhood, as his father worked in one. As he approached his graduation from a trade school, he had a choice between coal mining and steel rolling mills, his home region’s two dominant industries at the time. He opted for the steel mills and became a mechanical engineer for metallurgy at the British Iron & Steel Research Association (BISRA).

Curious and ambitious by nature, Shore began to study mechanical engineering while working for BISRA. His focus was on rolling mills. After receiving his diploma, he published a report on rolling mill technology that wound up on the desks of managers at American rolling mill manufacturer Morgan, which had an office in Manchester. The company, a global supplier of wire rod rolling mill equipment, approached him about a job.

At Morgan, Shore began study the weaknesses of new mills on site during setup and operation. This launched him into helping to install rolling mills in many countries — he spent a year in Germany, then in Spain, and later worked in Brazil, India, Japan, and Korea. He was, so to speak, on a roll worldwide. Today he speaks Spanish and German fluently. It didn’t take long for the Shore to offer numerous suggestions for improvements. In one instance, he reduced the number of wrenches needed for maintenance from 20 to three. In 1967 he recommended that the company build a Stelmor conveyor with steps to regulate its speed. “It was such a good idea that it went into every mill,” he says. Shore calls 61 inventions his own, and today more than 600 patents bear his name worldwide. In 2010, along with 11 other innovators from Siemens, he was named an “Inventor of the Year.”

But it was not always easy for Shore to make major changes in the company. “I was close to the bottom of the hierarchy, far from headquarters in Massachusetts — and even if I sent an idea to the U.S. it might take three weeks until it was approved. But we often didn’t have that much time on site. Things had to happen faster,” he says.

One day in the early 1960s he faced exactly this problem at a steel mill in Germany. “There were a lot of roll breakages in the early No- Twist mills,” he explains. “Together with the customer, we developed a hydraulic roll mounting device that prevented roll breakages.” The customer went on to patent the device, and the idea was so successful that Morgan purchased the patent shortly thereafter.