We continually strive to be a great company. QS Fibre Inc is committed to business integrity and providing high-quality products and services to our customers. 

QS Fibre traces its origins to Elijah Cowan who in the 1930’s was among that first generation to apply a professional engineering approach to the production of pulp and paper. In this period he formed the ideas that would lead to the venerable Cowan Screen and other patented technologies. During the Second World war, he served as Chairman of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association Machine Shop Board. In that position, he contributed to the war effort by coordinating the surplus capacity of mill machine shops across Canada in the production of parts for gun mounts that were assembled in Montreal and installed on the warships that escorted convoys across the Atlantic. After the war, Eli and his younger brother Ben, who had fought with the Canadian Army in Italy as a combat engineer, founded Pulmac Inc and E&B Cowan Ltd. Pulmac Inc held patent rights for the two brothers' several inventions. Attracting engineering talent from all over the world, E&B Cowan, a Montreal company, designed and oversaw construction of 40 pulp and paper mills in Canada and the United States as well as overseas in Thailand, Rumania, Hungary, Finland, Brazil, and Australia. E&B Cowan organized the installation of 32 paper machines, 40 steam plants, and oversaw the modernization of 29 pulp and paper mills. E&B Cowan Ltd. was later absorbed into SNC-Lavalin, founded in 1911 by Eli Cowan's longtime friend and colleague, Arthur Surveyor and now Canada’s largest engineering firm.

Pulmac, a derivation of ‘pulp machine’, was first established in 1950 to book royalty income generated from Eli and Ben's various patents. In 1963 Eli's son, Wavell, acquired the name from the by then inactive holding company and started up Pulmac Research Limited, a Montreal-based consulting engineering firm. The company eventually evolved into Pulmac Ventures Inc of Moretown, Vermont before being dissolved in 2004 when Pulmac Inc, also of Montreal and wholly owned by Eli Cowan’s grandson Brent, took on the mantle. Following an agreement with his brother Joff Cowan, their two companies, Pulmac Inc and Cowan Technologies, reunited in 2012 and partnered in the jointly-held company, Pulmac Systems International Inc. This experiment formally came to an end in mid-2015 when Cowan Technologies purchased Brent’s interest in Pulmac Systems. Then, in early 2016, to avoid market confusion with Pulmac Systems, Pulmac Inc changed its business name to QS Fibre.

The name QS Fibre has its origins with the QualScan, an optical fibre measuring instrument developed for the MDF industry by McCarthy Products of Seattle, WA. In 2007, Brent had purchased QualScan intellectual property rights from Earl McCarthy, entrepreneur, chemist, and a sixty year veteran of the forest products industry. Following its departure from its association with Cowan Technologies, Pulmac Inc had another look at the QualScan II that had been withdrawn from the market pending required technological upgrades. Throughout the summer of 2015 it undertook the necessary research and development to reinvent the QualScan’s imaging and illumination systems together with the human-machine interface. Re-designated AutoScan, this instrument is now well-positioned for on and off-line measurement and classification of fines, fibres, and shives in mechanical, chemical, and recycle pulps as well as stock drawn from the MDF process.

And so QS Fibre Inc is proud to continue serving world industry with its mission to help the world continue to make pulp, paper, and board …BETTER!

Early 20th Century Fourdrinier - We've come a long way since then!