Background
He was born to Doctor Henry M. Rowan Senior and Margaret Frances Boyd Rowan in 1923 (coincidentally the same year the school which now carries his name was founded).
engineer entrepreneur philanthropist
He was born to Doctor Henry M. Rowan Senior and Margaret Frances Boyd Rowan in 1923 (coincidentally the same year the school which now carries his name was founded).
After serving his country as a bomber pilot in World World War II, Rowan graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with honors with a degree in electrical engineering.
Rowan University is named after him. Rowan originally worked for Ajax Electrothermic Corporation of Trenton, New Jersey. He suggested improvements to the furnaces made by Ajax—shorter power leads and heavier copper bus bar—but the company did not implement his suggestions.
Expanding from this first induction furnace Rowan created Inductotherm Industries Incorporated. which has since grown to include 80 subsidiaries throughout North America, South America, Europe, India, Asia and Australia.
Today, there are more than 27,000 Inductotherm induction melting installations worldwide and they account for more than half of the melting systems in the world today. At the time it was the largest gift to a public college in the history of higher education.
The school also has an engineering building named after him. In January 2015 they created the and Eleanor East. Rowan Endowment.
This endowment was created with a gift of $17 Million.
The Rowans, personally and through their family foundation, have donated over $30 Million to Doane Academy over the last several years. Rowan competed in the 1992 Olympic Sailing trials in Miami, but failed to qualify. He wrote an autobiography titled The Fire Within in 1995 with John Calhoun Smith.
On December 9, 2015, Rowan died at the age of 92.