Christian Schiel was born on May 11, 1932 in Busteni, Romania. He came from a family of papermakers. His grandfather manufactured the first paper produced in Romania in 1882 (Fabrica de Hartie Busteni, C. & S. Schiel). His father was the technical director of the company. He spent the first 12 years of his life in Busteni, surrounded by the Carpathian Mountains, where he developed a passion for mountaineering. In 1944, his family left Romania as refugees from the advancing Russian army. During the chaotic
post-war years in Germany, young Christian Schiel built his own career serving a three-year apprenticeship as a millwright, and ultimately earning a degree in mechanical engineering at the Oskar von Miller Polytechnikum in Munich in 1954.
He joined J.M. Voith G.m.b.H. in Heidenheim as a Design and Planning Engineer. Within two and a half years, he was entrusted with the full development of a fiber board mill for a South American customer. To complete his training with some international experience, he spent 5 years in North America: at The Powell River Company (BC/Canada) and Mead Corporation in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had the good fortune to work with Peter Wrist (Hall of Fame 1998) on the development of the Fabric Press.
In 1962 he returned to Heidenheim, where he was employed for most of his career, until his retirement in 1997, as the Chief Development Engineer with a mandate for continual innovation to ensure the company’s leadership in papermaking technology. Christian Schiel and his team were exceptionally creative and productive, developing technologies that led to dramatic increases in paper machine productivity and improvements in paper quality. Their developments include a series of forming devices based on the roll-forming concepts for the manufacture of a broad range of paper grades, the technology to manufacture fabric sleeves creating a vastly simplified method of introducing fabrics into press nips, and most notably the development of the fully-enclosed flexible-nip presses, as well as the technologies for the manufacture of their flexible roll sleeves that have fundamentally changed the design of all paper machine press sections to this day. His work is documented in more than 40 publications, 149 US patents and a commensurate number of patents in other jurisdictions and is still applied in most modern paper machines around the world.
In 1994, Christian Schiel was awarded The Walter Brecht Medal by ZELLCHEMING for outstanding achievements in the pulp and paper industry.
In 1997 Christian Schiel retired in Murnau, Germany where he and his wife Regine, often accompanied by their children and grandchildren, enjoyed long walks and outings on skis in the nearby Bavarian Alps. His life-long passion for mountaineering was established during his childhood in Busteni. One noteworthy accomplishment that was not directly related to papermaking that Christian was particularly proud of was the successful climb on August 15, 1958, to the summit of Mount Waddington, considered the most challenging climb in the Canadian Coast Mountains.
Christian Schiel died in Murnau on September 30, 2021.
