Dream Big: Johan Richter An Innovative Inventor

This week’s Hot Topic is about innovative inventors of the 20^th century.

Johan Richter

Johan Christopher Fredrik Carl Richter, was born in 12 November 1901 in Lier, Buskerud Norge and died in 13 June 1997 in Oslo. Johan Richter was not only an engineer but also an industrialist and last but not least an innovative inventor in the area of pulp and paper production. A global company named Kamyr in Karlstad Sweden was created merely on his own inventions. Kamyr soon became very successful and had a head-spinning excellence, within its heart of activities. He is argued by many in the business to be “The Father of the modern pulp industry”.

In the middle of the 1930s, Kamyr launched their new process for continuous whitening that was developed and patented solely by Richter. The company managed an immediate success at the beginning in Europe and afterwards worldwide. Richter already had envisaged to introduce a process for continuous cooking of pulp. Up until then this had been done in batches, with its drawbacks in quality difference and also being a barrier to the reasonable nonstop production of paper. So far nobody had even dared to try to master, this area and it indeed proved to be way more complicated and difficult than the bleaching. It took more than 10 years from the first pilot in 1940 to be developed to a fully operational unit. And of course Richter always insisted on a full scale testing while saying; “You can fool a man, but not a machine. When the machine is willful, you have to find out why”. The first installation was able to produce 30 tons per day. On the contrary, a Richter digester of today will produce more than 2500 tons of pulp per day. In 1950, he became the CEO of Kamyr AB while he was still being directly responsible for Research and also for Development. From 1959-1997 he was the Chief Technical Advisor to the Kamyr Group both in Sweden and U.S.A. and continued the development until 1997. In the ensuing years Kamyr acquired more or less a monopoly position due to the fact that no other supplier was able of presenting something similar. With the succession of Kamyr paper mills all over the world switched to continuous nonstop production of pulp and paper which created remarkable savings and a stable quality of the end product.

This picture illustrates (in the middle) a typical Richter designed digester for pulp.

In 1958, Richter and his wife Astri moved to France where they lived for 22 years before coming back to Oslo, in Norway. By moving to France, Richter was able to work for Kamyr while staying at home but he spent a lot of time traveling to Karlstad, Sweden as well as Glens Falls, New York and U.S.A. In the early 1960s, Richter managed the development of continuous countercurrent that replaced the rotating washers in the washing systems as well as the bleach plants while having as a result huge reductions in water consumption. Richter’s strength was his extreme hunger for innovation. In other words, he did not regard innovation as one-off event, but rather a process of methodical improvement in search for new opportunities. In addition, he was also a very effective salesman. A mill manager needing technical help requested Knud Dahl of Kamyr, “whatever you do, don’t send Richter here. I will only end up buying a new machine.” With a life full of systematic innovations, Johan Richter formed a business that was – and remains – ahead of the game. His contributions transformed the pulping and bleaching processes that became the basis of the current chemical pulping and bleaching technologies.

When he was 94 years old, with 754 international patents in the field of wood pulping equipment and processes, Richter was still thinking over possible new and improved solutions. For his achievements, he received many impressive awards including:

· Honorary degree at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology 1977 (Stockholm)

· Honorary member, Papirindustrins Tekniske Forening, Oslo (The Paper and Pulp association of Norway)

· Member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences

· Knight of the Italian Order of Merit. (Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana)

· Knight of 1 class in St. Olav’s Orden. 1966. Oslo

· Kungliga Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien (Royal Achedemy of Technical Sciences, Stockholm) IVA. Gold Medal 1963. For groundbreaking development of technologies and methods for the continuous cooking of pulp

· Several other international medals and orders

· Inducted in the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame 2009. Paper Valley, Appleton USA