Inventor of the modern plastic straw flexible tube
Surely there is no any person who has never used or seen plastic, bendy, spoon straws or never drank Coke from a coca-cola bottle. Here is the thing, an Armenian Genocide survivor born in America, Ardashes Aykanian stands behind all that inventions. Besides being an outstanding scientist this man was also a great person and philanthropist.
Biography
Born in Whitinsville , Massachusetts in 1923, he was the son of Armenian genocide survivors Avedis Haykanian and Gadar Mangasarian, who were originally from Sevastia , Ottoman Empire.
Artashes and his family spent his early years in Whitinsville, attending school there and spending time with his uncle Krikor, who took him under his wing and taught him the shoe repair trade. It was in his uncle’s workshop that Artashes received one of his first jobs, where his curiosity about creating and making tools and machines developed.
Artashes Haykanyan graduated from Springfield Technical High School in 1941. While in high school, he worked at Perkins Machine and Gear and then continued to work as a machinist after graduation.
In 1944, Aykanian was drafted into the Army and chose the United States Navy Air Corps . He served as a Navy aircraft machinist from 1944 to 1946, training in New York , Oklahoma , and North Carolina . He was later stationed at Quonset Point, Rhode Island , for service in the carrier maintenance division. It was his job in the Navy and his love of airplanes that led him to get his private pilot’s license in the early 1980s.
After military service, Aykanian studied and received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1950 and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1951. While attending MIT, he was hired to do uranium research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , Tennessee .
During his 58 years in Springfield , Aykanian was a member of various organizations, including the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and others, and was also a church choir director.
Beginning in 1951, Aykanian began working for Monsanto Chemical Corporation as a research engineer. At Monsanto, he was responsible for developing the foam production process. The matrix used in the foam manufacturing process is still called the Aikanian matrix. During his time there, he registered several patents.
In 1967, he co-founded the Flexible Plastic Straw Corporation in Ludlow, Massachusetts, after designing and building equipment to produce the first flexible plastic straw. In 1968, he also invented a spoon, which is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Aikanian also had a US patent and trademark for his Stay-bent flexible plastic straw. In 1975, he received the University of Massachusetts Engineering Alumni Association Award , where he was called the « Engineer of Engineers. »
After moving to California in 1981, Aikanian continued his work as an engineer, particularly consulting for various companies. He also continued his involvement in the local Armenian community as a member of the church, the ARF , the Armenian Educational Foundation, the Orange County Armenian Festival and other organizations.
In 1990, he began working as a consultant for Western Waste Industries to develop new designs for their trucks and compactor systems.
Since 2006, Aikanian has worked as chief engineer for Bio-Energy in Hawaii. Together with his brother-in-law, he was developing a large-scale waste-to-energy process using algae as a biofuel.
Ardashes’ accomplishments are many. He has over 40 patents, but was most proud of working with his childhood friend and dermatologist Setrag Zacarian in the 60’s when they completed early work on developing a cryosurgical spray for the treatment of skin cancer. He was also proud to serve as Armenian Educational Foundation president when the UCLA Chair of Modern Armenian History (later the Richard Hovanissian Chair) was established in 1986. His hobbies included playing the violin, amateur radio, golf, tennis, sailing, camping, fishing, crosswords, and especially reading. Over the years, as an expert woodworker, he created pieces such as rocking horses, chairs, door handles, desks, tavloo boards, high chairs, cradles which were lovingly made for friends and relatives.
Inventions
The pipe invented by Haykanyan has not yet undergone significant changes. It consists of a flexible zone containing a series of annular grooves having an annular bottom from which two opposite sides of the grooves converge.
Aykanyan also has patents for a number of other inventions: a straw spoon (1968), jewelry box, a method for making laminated foam structures, a method for laminating paper and textile materials into forms of foamed thermoplastic polymer, an apparatus for foaming plastic products and others, the number of which is more than 40.
His Straw Spoon (Spoon Straw, 1968) is on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art . Aykanyan also developed a special tool for cryosurgical treatment of skin cancer.
