Medium rare: Columbia company started with grills, now leads in infrared technology

When veteran Columbia businessman Bill Best once was to address a graduating class at The Citadel, he planned to advise the students not to go chasing after wealth upon getting their diplomas.

“Go after something you love, something you are passionate about,” Best recalled planning to instruct the students.

The 83-year-old CEO, inventor, prolific research and developer and former University of South Carolina professor never delivered that commencement address, though his message would have been sage advice for the young graduates.

Best followed that advice himself and changed the way the world cooks on grills when he patented the first gas-powered, infrared ceramic burner in the United States in the 1980s.

As the story goes, Best said he was doing late-night research for his doctorate on something called a “flame arrester” for a guidance rocket. The flame arrester was made of ceramic. Best saw the ceramic turn a bright red and emit high levels of infrared, or radiant heat.

Decades later, consumers might know Best’s work mostly for grills his company, Thermal Engineering Corp., produces – especially as the cookout-happy Independence Day holiday approaches. TEC Infrared Grills can sell for $800 to $10,000, he said.

That popular consumer product evolved unintentionally. After the late-night radiant heat realization, the Bamberg native invented a ceramic burner that he said was first used by Goodyear to help metal belts successfully adhere to rubber in the making of radials, then in industrial-sized paint systems to make paint cure properly to metals needed for such applications as painting airplanes or large locomotives.

In the 1980s, Best decided to put the ceramic burner together with scrap sheet metal left over from the paint systems they built at TEC so that he could make himself a grill at home. Best discovered that infrared heat cooks food completely and evenly, without drying the food, he said.

“We’d have large pieces of stainless steel left over,” Best said, explaining the genesis of his TEC Infrared Grills. “It was kind of just by coincidence – it was not any massive plan. I started off building a grill for my house, with infrared burners in it. Well, it worked real well and we just started selling the (leftover) stainless steel as a scrap.

“We all got together to try to come up with a solution to how we could use that stainless, and we decided that, since I’d already been testing a grill, without really knowing that’s what I was doing, we ended up (with a product).”

From early years to today

Best opened TEC in the Columbia Industrial Park in 1961, the same year he started his $10,000-a-year professorship at USC teaching mechanical engineering.

Deemed an international leader in infrared, or radiant energy technology today, TEC was the first business to locate in the industrial park along Bluff Road south of Columbia that has become a busy hub of more than a dozen businesses.

In 1961 – just as now – TEC’s primary business was the engineering and fabrication of heat processes, including spray booths, washers and ovens.

“We’ve done all the paint systems for Boeing in Charleston,” Best said. “Prior to Boeing we were very strong in the automotive sector, supplying paint systems for General Motors, Chrysler and other automobile manufacturers.”

As with other businesses, TEC’s business slowed down drastically when General Motors and Chrysler nearly went bankrupt, requiring an $80 billion U.S. taxpayer bailout.

“Boeing’s been very good for us and for South Carolina,” Best said. “We’ve been doing business with Boeing a long time.” TEC did work for Boeing in Seattle, Wash., before the North Charleston plant was built. Then TEC deployed 60 to 70 people to work at the North Charleston plant.

“We hope to get some of the Volvo business,” Best said of the proposed $500 million Lowcountry plant that might employ as many as 4,000 workers.

Innovation continues

Best has licensed his restaurant grills through ITW, which dominates that industry and distributes the technology to other recognizable systems such Hobart. Best himself only sells infrared grills made in this country, though he licenses his technology for residential and commercial grills made by other companies outside the U.S.

Char-Broil sells TEC infrared grills for the home at such stores as Lowe’s or Home Depot, he said.

Best and his professional team hold more than 100 patents and patents pending for infrared technology innovation. When he patented his ceramic infrared technology in the 1980’s, it carried a 17-year exclusivity clause, so others could only use the technology through licenses, paying Best royalties.

Those patents bring in millions of dollars each year, he said.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to get some strong patents in that field, and what we’ve done is licensed to other people our systems,” Best said. “We’ve licensed to companies such as Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., the 3M Company, the W.C. Bradley Co., original owners of Coca-Cola – we license them with our gas grills.”

When Best’s ceramic infrared grill technology patent ended and opened up to the rest of the market, he introduced his patented radiant glass panel infrared grills, making TEC the only manufacturer of an infrared grill that cooks with 100 infrared energy, Best said.

The companies that sell TEC’s old ceramic infrared burner grills cook with 35 percent infrared energy and 65 percent hot air, which dries out food, he said.

The fully infrared grills reinforce his motto: “If you don’t obsolete yourself, then someone else will,” Best said.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 7:39 PM with the headline "Medium rare: Columbia company started with grills, now leads in infrared technology."