You might say Len Hierath’s whole life has been an exercise in living the old adage “necessity is the mother of invention.”
Born on a small grain farm in the northwestern reaches of North Dakota, he grew up tinkering with machinery at his family’s repair shop. “We had to learn how to repair machinery because the parts stores were fifty to one hundred miles away,” he says. “We actually come from a long line of Austrian blacksmiths dating back to 1776. It was an ideal environment for a young kid.” Especially for a young kid who later excelled in math and science in school and became fascinated with 3-D design while earning a Boy Scout merit badge in drafting.
Hierath credits a couple of high school teachers with helping him navigate the college application process. “One of them spent summers in Minneapolis-Saint Paul with his wife and they arranged a college campus tour for me,” he says. “I ended up at Saint Thomas University in Saint Paul. They had a five-year program where you spent three years at Saint Thomas and two at Notre Dame, so I ended up with a BA in Liberal Arts and an MS in engineering. It was excellent because coming from such a small high school, I really needed to ease into college life and Saint Thomas was a small school.”
Following graduation, Hierath attracted the attention of several companies on the East Coast before landing a job with Hamilton Standard, a division of United Technologies. He worked at Bradley Field north of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1956. “There is a major airport there and I worked in a group designing fuel controls for jet engines,” he says. “It was a marvelous job for a young mechanical engineer. I also learned that you should look for a good mentor and I found a couple there.”
But Hierath found the damp climate in Connecticut challenging, and after six years he began searching for a place with lower humidity in which to live and work. “I liked the spring and fall back east but the summers were bad and the winters weren’t very good either with a lot of freezing rain,” he explains. “I searched in my air conditioning textbook for a place where the dew point was favorable and ended up in Denver at Sundstrand Corporation in 1962. They had a contract with the aerospace division of the government to develop a boost-glide vehicle that would orbit the earth. It was the predecessor of the Shuttle. In those days batteries and solar were not reliable enough for power so they wanted a hydrogen and oxygen-fueled turbine to drive the alternator. We came up with a concept but never got to build it because the whole project was cancelled.”
Hierath later worked at Sundstrand to develop a heart-pump system in conjunction with then Denver General Hospital. But when subsequently offered a position in the company’s headquarters in Rockford, Illinois, he ended up taking a job with Honeywell in Denver. There he worked in medical research and design—initially developing miniature blood-pressure transfusers and, later, a variety of projects including a reel-to-reel tape recorder for use on aircraft for anti-submarine warfare—before deciding to launch his own business.
“All of this was well before computers,” he says. “When I started L. Hierath Engineering Consultants in 1971, I was still running calculations with a slide rule. It wasn’t until 1972 that I could buy a ten-key calculator and c-cell batteries.”
He ran the company, later adding a partner but retaining majority ownership, for the next 14 years, developing a line of systems for weighing out powders and granules that served some 20 different industries. “We did pyrotechnics for entertainment, military target simulation and work for growers of flower seeds,” he says. “Any place where weighing accuracy would affect performance, dosage or where a product was very expensive and needed to be weighed with extreme precision. We also did industrial diamond dispensing for segmented saws, a lot of work for the auto airbag industry and dispensing units for asthma inhalers. At one time I was reading twenty-seven different trade magazines to keep up with the industries that we served.”
At age 65, “I was no longer interested in managing the company,” Hierath says. “We had a hundred people on staff and probably twenty on contract. So I retired to my passion, which was designing products.”
He already had created his first product, an on-court tennis scorekeeper called Scor-Post. “My wife and I were playing a lot of tennis and tournaments, and I first developed and tested it at the Wash Park Tennis Club in 1992,” he says. “I went home from a tournament and quickly took some plastic drain pipe, cut notches in it and taped it to the net post to see if you could move the balls to keep the score and then advanced from there. People liked the idea of displaying the score for spectators and it became popular in high schools so parents could see what their kids were doing and coaches could monitor results on three or four courts.”
Eventually Hierath began selling Scor-Post to colleges and private tennis clubs. With help from his wife, who operated the drill press, he made nearly 10,000 of them. In 2001 he sold the product to his first and biggest dealer, Gamma Sports in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
His latest invention is Soapbar Lounge (soapbarlounge.com), “a modern ceramic soap dish” created by Hierath last year at age 81 which solves the problem of gooey soap and soap dishes. “For years I’d been fussing with that idea,” he says. “I’m on the industrial advisory board of DU’s School of Engineering and they invited me to one of their meetings where companies explain what they do to students as potential employees. I had a table where I presented five ideas that described in detail why an invention was needed and the idea for a dish that would keep soap dry and lasting longer was one of those. I liked it so well I decided to just do it myself.”
After making a clay model, Hierath purchased expensive, 3-D modeling software and taught himself how to use it, a daunting task at any age. “It took me five weeks to learn,” he says, laughing. But his patience paid off. “I had a plastic soap dish model 3-D printed twelve percent larger than I wanted because when you fire ceramics they shrink twelve percent.” He has already sold the stylish, colorful, glazed ceramic soap dishes to a variety of customers, including a hotel owner at LAX who purchased 32 dozen.
Hierath holds eight patents and, with the soap dish, is headed for nine. “Most are not held just by me alone,” he says. “I insisted that anyone who contributed had their name on the patent.” And he’s not done yet. “It has always been my practice to observe problems and create solutions,” he says. “One of the problems in need of a solution on the list I gave to DU students was a better flagpole. So when the flag snags and the wind picks it up again, it will unfurl. I’ve done a second generation of that product and I’m eager to get back to it.”
Hierath shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon and keeps busy on the side by volunteering for A Little Help, a nonprofit organization that connects neighbors to “help seniors thrive” and stay in their homes. “My wife Carrie and I read about the organization in the Washington Park Profile and we liked the concept,” he says. “We became volunteers and members. My wife drives people to appointments and I mount grip bars in bathrooms and do some minor home repairs.”
Hopefully Hierath will continue to live and work in his own home, designing solutions to observed problems in the physical world, for years to come.
