Joseph Malcolm Day held advanced patents that enhanced the automation, safety, and reliability of ovens with several becoming the industry standard. He graduated from Michigan State University and was hired by Baker Perkins (B-P) in Saginaw Michigan. B-P sent him to baking school at the Siebel Institute, forerunner to AIB. In 1938, he was hired as the Chief Engineer for AMF Oven Division in New Haven, Connecticut. At AMF, he designed and patented a “Diathermatic” tray oven that improved balanced oven heat transfer and oven thermal efficiency.
He entered WWII as a 2nd Lieutenant from ROTC at MSU and completed his service at the rank of Major. While in the Army, he was assigned to Bell Labs where he collaborated on the development of a new advanced analog computer interface to radar and anti-aircraft guns.
He returned to AMF in 1945, leaving four years later to start the Joseph M. Day Company in Saginaw, Michigan. During the first years, he produced automatic gas, oil, and combination gas/oil burner systems for use on indirect fired high speed production ovens. Soon, oven manufacturers adopted these systems as industry standard. In the mid 1970s, he began to work with solid state, spark ignition modules, and by the early 1980s, designed the first automatic oven ignition and flame safeguard system. Today, this technology is known as direct spark ignition, or DSI, and is the foundation for all oven automation and precise temperature control.
In 1959, he began to manufacture impedance electrical pipe heating systems for viscous fluids sold through his new company, Banner Engineering & Sales. The Impedance Pipe Heating (IPH) system enables carbon, galvanized or stainless-steel pipe to become its own heating element thus allowing ingredients or fluids to flow evenly and consistently through the piping system.
Today, two generations have followed in his footsteps in the company now known as Banner-Day. It provides oven design, retrofit and installation and specializes in direct spark automatic ignition systems, ignition electrodes, gas, and oil burners, as well as oven controls for direct-fired and indirect-fired ovens for bakeries internationally.