Who Invented Modern Industrial Shelving?

Robust, versatile designs and strong materials are at the heart of modern industrial storage shelves, and the most popular design, constructed in tandem with the warehouse as we know it today, was the invention of an Australian engineer trapped in the wrong profession.

Born in Sydney in 1902, Demetrius Comino was a prodigious inventor, devising a toy submarine at the age of 12 and would quickly as a young adult use his electrical engineering degree and inventive mind to revitalise the printing press.

He came up with a lot of different patented inventions to this end including chutes, trolleys, interlocking frames to hold print products in place, a compositor’s chart and a duplicate book, although he quickly tired of innovating in a relatively static and stagnant industry.

To get past this, he established a company to sell his innovations to others by the name of Dexion, and in 1939 he would develop what was by far its most famous product.

Constantly frustrated by the lack of versatility that came with wooden shelving, he sought to develop a more flexible solution of shelves that could be assembled and reassembled in various different forms simply by using different screw holes and slots.

This became his profound passion, and he managed to get an initial batch of slotted angle steel fitted that had only ever previously been used up to that point by the metal construction toy Meccano.

He commissioned the Birmingham-based manufacturing firm to construct an initial batch of shelving units for his company Dexion, and it arrived at the end of August 1939.

Just a week later on 3rd September, Britain declared war on Germany, and the Second World War would disrupt basically every part of Mr Comino’s business, including his shelving passion.

Nearly a decade later, Mr Comino could finally open up a factory to construct the Slotted Angle himself on behalf of Dexion, and whilst the existence of Meccano meant that he could not get a complete patent for it, Dexion remained the market leader in slotted angle for many years.

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