Dr. Henry Brown was a charter member of AZA #2 and a pioneering chemist whose innovations helped shape modern industrial plating. According to The New York Times, he “helped make the American Dream a gleaming reality by finding new ways of keeping chromium plate bright and shiny.”

Dr. Brown earned a Rockefeller Teaching Fellowship to the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1933 while serving as an assistant professor. That same year, he joined Udylite Chemical Corp. in Detroit, launching a distinguished career that led to hundreds of patents in the United States and abroad. His work in chrome and bright nickel plating became standard across major automobile manufacturers in the United States and Europe.

During World War II, Dr. Brown contributed to the Manhattan Project at Columbia University. He also developed a plating process that served as both camouflage and corrosion protection for aircraft parts, saving the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars—compensation he declined. In 1963, he was recognized as one of Michigan’s foremost inventors.