Fiber Materials history

In 1975, he took out a second mortgage on his house to start his own business, using $8,000 in start-up money to form Zoltek.

Beginning in 1985, carbon fibers were used to make airbrakes for jumbo jets due to the fact that, unlike steel brake pads, the material did not soften when subjected to the friction and resultant heat caused by stopping a 280-ton airplane.

After completing the acquisition, in 1990 Rumy moved Stackpole's operations to St Louis, establishing manufacturing, research, and development facilities near Zoltek's industrial process equipment business.

By 1991, Courtaulds, a UK-based manufacturer of fabric, clothing, man-made fibers, and chemicals, stopped production of carbon fiber.

1992: Zoltek completes initial public offering of stock.

A bigger cause for celebration occurred at the beginning of 1996, when the company introduced a new price point of $8 per pound for high-volume orders of carbon fiber.

In late 1997 and early 1998, the heady days when Zoltek's stock value had escalated month by month came crashing to an end. It was a plan predicated on a situation that did not exist in 1998, which meant idle plants and weak profit performance.

Due to Rumy's insistence on increasing capacity, Zoltek reported a substantial loss for the fiscal year ending in September 1999.

As one industry analyst noted in a January 31, 2000 St Louis Business Journal article, referring to the importance of the downstream acquisitions, 'they don't have to just sit there and be carbon fiber salesman.

Inventor Thomas Edison used carbon fibers as filaments for early light bulbs (Hegde, 2004). Although these fibers lacked the tensile strength of today's carbon fibers, their considerable tolerance to heat made these fibers ideal for conducting electricity.

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