Ronald L. Daggett

A Madison native, Professor Ronald L. Daggett graduated from the UW-Madison in mechanical engineering with a BS in 1938 and an MS in 1939. After motorcycling from Madison to the West Coast and back with a friend, Daggett went to work in plastics manufacturing at RCA in Camden, NJ, later moving to Blessing Associates in New York City. He returned to the Midwest after the war in 1945 as a design engineer for Ideal Industries in Sycamore, IL. In 1946, he returned to the UW-Madison as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. What made this appointment so significant is that, in addition to his regular teaching duties, he started offering an elective course titled “Plastics and Plastic Processes.” He did not know at the time that this was the first engineering plastics course taught in the world, and that he was alone in his quest for plastics engineering education. He did not have a textbook, notes or a mentor.

This course has been offered every semester for the past six decades. In 1990 the course was split into two courses: plastics design and plastics processes. Today, they are the most popular electives for mechanical engineering undergraduate and graduate students. Meanwhile, the Polymer Engineering Center, featuring one of the nation’s strongest research groups, and membership in the Center for Applied Polymer and Composites Engineering, a multi-University Industry/University Cooperative Research Center which aims at bridging faculty research with business and industry needs, stands as a testament to Daggett’s pioneering foresight.

As the years passed, Professor Daggett not only taught, but became a researcher. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, with Dr. Vincent L. Gott of the UW Medical School he co-developed a prosthetic bileaflet/butterfly heart valve. The project provides interesting lessons. Initially, bileaflet valves fabricated with polymer housings routinely thrombosed within a few hours after implantation in the canine heart. In a serendipitous series of events, the co-developers found a way to bond heparin to these bileaflet valves using a coating of graphite-carbon and benzalkonium chloride. Over the ensuing 30 years, improved heparin coatings have been developed by other investigators for bonding to various biomedical devices; currently, about 25% of oxygenators used in this country utilize heparin coatings to minimize surface activation of clotting factors. Also, and somewhat serendipitously, a pyrolytic carbon material developed in the 1960s as a coating for nuclear fuel rods was submitted to the co-developers for possible coating with benzalkonium and heparin. This carbon coating, developed at Gulf General Atomic, Inc, would not bond heparin, but it proved to be the best rigid material available for prosthetic valve construction; by 2000, more than one million pyrolytic carbon valves had been clinically implanted. After this he did extensive work on developing an insulin pump for diabetics and an artificial bladder.

In the early1950s Daggett himself with a friend built his Madison home. When asked if he could make or repair something he would always say, “You bet! I can repair anything but broken hearts and the crack of dawn.” And then he would plunge into the project. Some of these projects are local legends. He built a dishwasher for his house with the first run noted for discovery of a lack of several crucial gaskets. He was proud that the house was the first (and only) on his block with 440v power — all the better for operating his metal working, wood working, and ceramic shops. For Bethany United Methodist Church he built their first organ. He was never able to fully explain the correlation between the disappearance of his home vacuum cleaner and the organ’s unique power system. The Professor spent countless hours in the basement machine shop, machining intricate molds and features for plastic parts that others had deemed impossible to make. The basement became legendary as a place where former students and young entrepreneurs built prototypes, molds and parts before going on to found some of the most successful companies in the State of Wisconsin. In 1961 Daggett founded Engineering Industries in the basement of an abandoned auto repair shop in nearby Fitchburg. After a thorough cleaning, there he engineered and developed injection molding techniques for small precision plastic parts, the first being hearing aid battery liners for Ray-O-Vac. From the beginning the company remains focused on his engineering philosophy: solve problems no-one else wants to tackle and pursue solutions in the form of finished products.

This scholarship fund was established in January 2005 with memorial gifts from multiple donors to honor Professor Emeritus Ronald L. Daggett (’38 BS, ’39 MS, Mechanical Engineering).This Fund will provide undergraduate scholarships to students within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The Donors prefer that the scholarship be awarded to mechanical engineering students who are interested in plastics.